On May 19, our talk was given by Prof. Ruth Tringham, and was entitled "Reconciling Science and the Imagination in the Construction of the Deep Prehistoric Past".

Traditionally, archaeologists when writing about the past, favor expository narratives in which the persona of the archaeologist-writer as well as his or her prehistoric people-subjects remain anonymous or – at best – in the far distant bird’s eye view. And how else, you might ask, can you write about the deep past where all that remains are fragmentary remnants of their lives. Writers and film-makers who create fictional narratives about the intimate dramas of prehistoric and early historic people and give them voices are regarded as seductive and engaging for the public, but are not respected as expressions of scientific knowledge or legitimate interpretations of archaeological data. I will introduce some of the ways in which, as an archaeologist-writer, I am exploring an alternative way of writing about prehistory in which the imagination that conjures up sentient prehistoric actors is entangled with the empirical scientific data of archaeological excavations. I draw especially on my current research in the challenging world of pre-literate Europe and Anatolia. For inspiration I draw upon the concepts of database narratives (Lev Manovich), recombinant histories (Steve Anderson), and Microhistories (Carlo Ginzburg).

Ruth is a Professor in the Graduate School (Anthropology) at UC Berkeley and received her Ph.D. in Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. She is a founder and director of the UC Berkeley Multimedia Authoring Center for Teaching in Anthropology (MACTiA). Currently she is the creative director and president of the Center for Digital Archaeology (CoDA), a recently established non-profit organization. Her research has focused on the transformation of early agricultural (Neolithic) societies and she has directed and published archaeological excavations in Southeast Europe and Turkey (Çatalhöyük). The Last House on the Hill – the first project of CoDA – is the digital publication of the BACH (Berkeley Archaeologists @ Çatalhöyük) project, which she directed from 1997 to 2005. Her current research focuses on creating database narratives and recombinant histories about the life-histories of people, places and things and the multisensorial construction of place. Her interest in multimedia grows out of a lifelong passion for music, puppets and cultivating illusions of reality.

You can watch the video of her talk by clicking below.

Images - http://www.flickr.com/photos/catalhoyuk/ (excavation images) and Bonnie Powell (photo of Prof. Tringham)

On March 17, our talk was given by Dr. Hazel Bain, and was entitled "The Sun: A Star in Our Own Backyard".

The stars in the night sky have always been a source of intrigue and wonder. With our very own star at the center of our solar system, the Sun offers us a unique opportunity to study the inner workings of these giant balls of plasma. Starting at the core, I will discuss the processes occurring at the different layers of the Sun: From sunspots observed in the photosphere, which vary characteristically with the solar cycle, to explosive flares and coronal mass ejections, which release huge amounts of energy into the corona. Finally I will talk about the effect these eruptive events have on the Earth's atmosphere, and how the particles accelerated at the Sun produce the displays of lights known as the Aurora Borealis and the Aurora Australis.

Dr. Bain is originally from Scotland, where she obtained her undergraduate degree in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Glasgow. She stayed on in Glasgow to do a PhD in solar physics working with Dr. Lyndsay Fletcher. Upon completing her PhD she moved across "the pond" to start a postdoc with the RHESSI solar physics group at the Space Sciences Laboratory here at UC Berkeley. Her main area of research involves studying solar eruptive events such as flares, jets and coronal mass ejections, using both space and ground based instruments such as NASA's Reuven Ramaty High Energy Spectroscopic Solar Imager (RHESSI) and the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spacecraft, and the Nancay and Nobeyama Radioheliograph radio interferometers.

You can watch the video of her talk by clicking below.

Images - nasa.gov

Although glacial ice is the purest naturally occurring solid on Earth, it does contain dust particles and micron-size bacterial cells transported by winds from desert soils and oceans. Glacial ice contains a network of liquid veins within which microbes live, metabolize, and die, but do not grow. Using scanning fluorescence spectrometry, fluorescence microscopy, and flow cytometry, we have mapped the distribution and concentration of picocyanobacteria – cells less than 1 micron in size that contain chlorophyll and other naturally fluorescing pigments. They account for half of the photosynthetic biomass in the oceans, half of the primary production, and half of the oxygen in our atmosphere. Theire presence in ice at all depths in both Greenland and Antarctica provides an opportunity to study microbial evolution over about 100 million generations, using recent improvements in sensitivity to analyze the DNA of the cyanobacteria that are trapped in the ice.

Buford Price received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1958, was a Fulbright Fellow at Bristol University (England), an NSF Post-doctoral Fellow at Cambridge University, did research at General Electric Research Laboratory from 1960 to 1969, was Professor of Physics at Berkeley 1969 to 2001, Chair of Physics 1987-92, Dean of Physical Sciences 1992-2001, and Professor of the Graduate School at Berkeley since 2001. He was a co-founder of what grew into the 1-cubic-kilometer IceCube High-Energy Neutrino Observatory located in clear ice at depths 1.45 to 2.45 kilometers below the South Pole. He leads research on the optical properties of deep glacial ice, the understanding of which make it possible to track neutrinos from distant parts of the universe through the Earth into IceCube with an angular resolution better than 1 degree. In 1999 he realized that micron-size bacterial cells could live in glacial ice and might limit the angular resolution of neutrinos passing through IceCube. Since then his research has focused on how bacterial cells survive while frozen into deep glacial ice in the polar regions and what they can tell us about microbial evolution.

You can watch the video of his talk by clicking on the image below.

Aurora over IceCube - Keith Vanderlinde, NSF
IceCube photo - www.icecube.wisc.edu 

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was built in the past decade near Geneva at the border of Switzerland and France, and is now operating since last year at the world's highest energy. A primary objective of the LHC is to either discover or dispute the so-called Higgs boson. The Higgs boson was first hypothesized nearly 50 years ago in 1964 in order to find a mechanism by which all particles that make up the matter in our Universe acquire mass. Just in the last year the LHC has made significant  progress in its search for the Higgs boson. Particularly at the end of 2011 initial search results were observed that show tantalizing hints that a discovery might be very near which received a broad echo within the scientific community and the popular press. In my lecture will describe the LHC and its experiments, the relevance of the Higgs boson and the current state of the experimental searches.

Beate Heinemann received her Diploma and PhD from the University of Hamburg in Germany, working on the HERA electron-proton collider. From 2006-2006 she was a fellow at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom, working with the Tevatron near Chicago. In 2006 she was appointed Associate Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. She works both on precision measurements of known processes, and on searches for new unknown particles, e.g. for the Higgs boson, supersymmetric particles and extra dimensions.

You can watch the video of her talk by clicking on the image below.

LHC images Arpad Horvath and Rainer Hungershausen