By Elizabeth Jacobsen ’16
It’s an exciting time to be a biology major.
This year the Biology Majors Advising Committee (BMAC) is redefining what it means to be a Biology major or prospective Biology major at Williams. BMAC hopes to build a unique sense of community among those interested in biology through an academic year of biology-related social events.
Continue reading Student Committee Builds Community Spirit Among Biology Majors
By Meagan Goldman ’16
This article was inspired by Art of Science, an initiative to gather and exhibit scientific images from students, faculty, and staff. For more information, visit the Art of Science site.
“It’s endlessly fun looking at these things,” says Nancy Piatczyc while enlarging a black and white image on her computer. As the image focuses, striations appear. Without context, it might be difficult to identify what it shows: a tiny fragment of wood magnified thousands of times by a scanning electron microscope (SEM). The wood is from a ship, likely British, that sank near the New York harbor around the time of the Revolutionary War. The SEM images will help biology professor Hank Art identify the wood from which the ship was built.
By Meagan Goldman ‘16
Matt Carter’s contagious enthusiasm makes it easy to wake up for his 9 a.m. physiology class. Passionate about biology – and more specifically, neuroscience – Matt can make any lecture or discussion exciting. Last week, I sat down with him to learn about his personal experiences in the world of science. Here he divulges what he thought about neuroscience grad school and what it’s like to write a real scientific paper. Finally, he gives his opinion on the Williams myth of effortless perfection.
Continue reading Q&A: Matt Carter talks Grad School, Papers, and Effortless Perfection
This post concludes the “Ask a Science Student” series. For previous responses, see chemistry, physics, and astronomy.
Ask a Science Student, Part 4: Biology
By Meagan Goldman ’16
Biology deals with energy on both a macro level – the cycling of energy through ecosystems – and a micro level – the energy required for biological processes. Energy in an ecosystem comes initially from the sun. Primary producers, plants and cyanobacteria, convert the sun’s electromagnetic energy into chemical energy, stored in the bonds of compounds like glucose and ATP. Energy is then passed to consumers and eventually, when organisms die, to decomposers.
This is the third installment in our “Ask A Science Student” series. For the previous responses, see chemistry and physics.
Ask a Science Student, Part 3: Astronomy
By Marcus Hughes ’18
Astronomy deals with a tremendous scale of energy, from the Cosmic Microwave Background – the 2.7 kelvin echo left from the Big Bang – to hyper-luminous quasars – compact centers of galaxies related to black holes that release 4 trillion times as much energy as our Sun. Astronomy even has not yet understood types of energy like dark energy, a repulsive energy causing the universe to expand faster, literally changing the fate of the universe. When most people think of energy in astronomy, they think of stars, but dark energy makes up 70% of the total mass-energy in the universe. At its simplest, energy is just the capacity to do work; i.e. the capacity for a force to displace an object.
Today we continue our “Ask A Science Student” series. For the previous response, click here.
Ask a Science Student, Part 2: Physics
By Matt Radford ’16
Energy has many different forms. Electrical, thermal, and mechanical kinetic energy are all forms associated with moving objects. Potential energy is dependent on an object’s position in a field, such as apples hanging in a tree, or an object’s position relative to its parts, such as a drawn longbow. An apple also has digestible energy, usually measured in calories. Other units of energy commonly found in day-to-day life include the watt-hour, which probably shows up on your electricity bill, and the British Thermal Unit, which is likely mentioned on any air conditioning unit.
An alum from the class of 2010 emailed us about a month ago and told us he ran a Williams science publication (coincidentally also called the ScientEphic!) when he was a student here. We took a look at some of their old publications and enjoyed their section called “Ask A Science Major.” So The ScientEphic is beginning a series based on that section. We asked students from four departments – chemistry, physics, biology, and astronomy – to explain the concept of energy. We’ll publish their responses over the next four days.
By Marcus Hughes ’18
Don’t underestimate college students, especially if they study astronomy at the top northeastern liberal arts colleges, because they might just be re-defining what we know about the universe.
Last weekend, Williams professors Karen Kwitter and Steven Souza traveled with seven students to Swarthmore College to participate in the Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium’s 2014 Undergraduate Symposium on Research in Astronomy. There they learned about the cutting-edge summer research conducted by students from Williams, Wesleyan, Wellesley, Vassar, Swarthmore, Middlebury, Haverford, and Colgate, which together form the Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium. Members of the consortium send students to partner schools every summer to conduct paid research, which is later presented at the annual symposium.
Continue reading Williams Students Shine at Astronomy Symposium
By Marcus Hughes ’18
New to Williams last year, Professor Julie Blackwood works at the intersection of math and biology. Read on to learn about her background, her opinion about liberal arts, and her research on bats.
Continue reading Where Math and Biology Meet: Q&A with Julie Blackwood
By Kar Yern Chin ’18
When Dr. Grace Augustine from James Cameron’s Avatar explains that trees on the planet Pandora are sharing information with each other, using roots like natural fiber-optic cables, she is not far from reality. In 2010, a year after the science fiction movie was released, a review by ecologists Dr. Heil Martin and Richard Karban re-defined the common understanding of plants, disproving the misconception that they are uncommunicative beings. Continue reading The Social Life of Plants
