Comedy is a way to show our humanity. Comedy makes people listen. Have you ever tried to get a physicist to talk about their academic research at a stand-up night? Jessamyn uses comedy to communicate difficult topics, and humanize things which can be hard to talk about. She tells us how comedy has influenced her […]

HIV-positive individuals continue to face stigma and discrimination. For the 2 million people who are infected with HIV every year, this means a lifetime of treatment without a final cure, although methods for keeping the disease at bay do exist. The key to curing HIV is to kill the dormant virus in healthy cells. The […]

What do the fashion designer Tom Ford, the singer Adele, the country of Romania and a lawyer have in common? The use of ethnic designs in the fashion industry raises issues of plagiarism and cultural misappropriation. Can big fashion houses simply copy traditional clothing designs, trademark these designs, and therefore legally protect the copied design? […]

When stars collapse in a supernova, what is left is either a black hole or a neutron star. We don’t know what’s inside a neutron star, and so far, we have no way of looking inside one. Physics shows that curious things like strange quarks, which make up hyperons and are energetically unfavorable, and neutron […]

Steffen and Daniel have complementary perspectives on disability and disease: Steffen has a disease called Myasthenia gravis, which forces him to sit in a wheelchair, while Daniel is a member of the Austrian Mountain Rescue Service and a former member of the Red Cross. They both know how important it is to actively interact with […]

Imagine you’re on your way to work and stuck in traffic. You look to your left, you look to your right: everyone’s traveling in the same direction, but each car only has one occupant. Tommaso Gecchelin understands people’s desires to be autonomous and ubiquitous while commuting, but it’s hard to deny there’s lots of room […]

Why aren’t the objects we manufacture made to be beautiful, on top of being optimized for functionality? Turns out, the way we manufacture things hasn’t really changed since the time of the Roman empire. With the introduction of 3D printing, that paradigm is finally starting to change. Lin Kayser steps into the future and shows […]

Global urbanization has lead to new challenges for urban planners aiming to reduce poverty and ensure sustainability. To overcome these challenges, we need sufficient data on a global scale. Xiaoxiang Zhu combines satellite and social media data with machine learning to generate a global model of all urban areas. Her models depict 3D shapes and […]