Millennium Café

Charlie Anderson | Biology

Using solar energy to drive photosynthesis, plants absorb over 100 gigatons of CO₂ globally per year, sequestering a portion of the greenhouse gas pollution emitted by human activity in the durable cell walls that make up their bodies. These cell walls can serve as food for animals and people, renewable materials, and sources of bioenergy. I will explore how plants could be optimized for efficient CO₂ uptake and carbon sequestration to enhance the health of natural ecosystems and human economies, using Pennsylvania as a test case for the smart application of science, policy, and economics to build the verdant and restorative fields and forests of the future. 

Every object at a finite temperature emits thermal radiation, ranging from sunlight, incandescent lighting, to blackbody radiation from human bodies which can be detected in thermal cameras. Nanostructured materials allow new kinds of light-matter interaction, allowing for tailoring various properties of thermal radiation. Controlling thermal radiation holds the key to new energy applications. This talk will briefly introduce our group’s passion on tailoring thermal radiation for energy applications, ranging from heat-to-electricity conversion across a nanoscale gap, utilization of the coldness of the outer space for passive cooling, to active refrigeration using light, enabled by nanocalorimetry, nano devices, and photonic design.

The germicidal properties of certain wavelengths of light were first reported in the late 19^th century. Ultraviolet C (UVC), is particularly effective at damaging the DNA and RNA of microorganisms of all types, preventing them from replicating. Technologies based on UVC have been used for nearly a century to help control airborne infectious disease outbreaks, but interest in them has spiked as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This presentation will briefly summarize our studies of ultraviolet germicidal irradiation systems for buildings, including recent studies focused on COVID-19 risk mitigation, and identify areas of need for further multidisciplinary research.

Tom Lauerman | School of Visual Arts

Five years ago, I started building custom clay 3d printers in collaboration with a team of students from the College of Engineering's Learning Factory program. Countless iterations later the process has evolved to become my primary tool in the creation of sculpture that combine ancient craft techniques and contemporary design tools. Presently at a crossroads with my research, I am exploring clay printing in a multidiciplinary classroom and research environment. 

Josh Lambert | Food Science

Cocoa is a popular food ingredient most commonly used to make chocolate. Chocolate is viewed as indulgence food that contains high amounts of fat and sugar, and is likely to adversely affect your health. In short, it tastes too good to be good for you. If you look at the nutrition label on cocoa, however, it looks like a health food. My talk will give a brief overview of how cocoa and chocolate are made, some highlights from the available human data on chocolate and chronic disease risk, and a short synopsis of research activities on cocoa in the Lambert Lab.

During the last decades, biomimetics has attracted increasing attention from basic and applied researchers from various disciplines and industries to include building construction. Novel methods for analyzing and simulating the form-structure-function-relation on various hierarchical levels allow fascination insights in multi-scale mechanics of biological materials systems, and new production methods enable for the first time the transfer of many outstanding properties of the biological role models into innovative biomimetic products for reasonable costs. This is shown for three examples based on plant motion, including bio-inspired self-repairing materials and façade shading systems.