The Indiana University Nanoscience Center is sponsoring a workshop on advanced battery technologies from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 13, in the IU Bloomington Chemistry Department. The workshop is an outgrowth of a major two-day Energy Conference held at IU Bloomington and Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis in August.

The Indiana University open house to end all open houses, complete with a perilous bed of nails, streaking rocket cars, imploding oil drums and soda cans ripped apart by magnetic fields, will be brought to you Saturday (Oct. 31) by the IU Departments of Physics and Astronomy.

Award-winning science writer and University of Southern California Annenberg School of Journalism professor KC Cole will speak here Monday (Oct. 19) about her new biographical memoir of atomic bomb developer Frank Oppenheimer.

Indiana University nuclear physics professor Mike Snow's investigations into the weak interactions of low energy neutrons will advance using equipment funded by the IU Office of the Vice Provost for Research and then put into use at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Black holes are a common scientific discussion topic today -- but to the astrophysicists, theoretical physicists and mathematicians attending Indiana University's Capra Conference on radiation reaction, predictions still outweigh proof when it comes to black holes and their interstellar antics. The conference begins Monday, June 15 and culminates Friday, June 19.

Research by a theoretical physicist at Indiana University shows that the crusts of neutron stars are 10 billion times stronger than steel or any other of the earth's strongest metal alloys.

They may be traveling through solid rock at about 200 miles per millisecond, but Indiana University's Mark Messier and a team of 180 other physicists hope that by keeping a close eye on those fast-moving neutrinos they may find an answer to one of particle physics' longstanding quandaries: Why do the most elementary particles have the mass that they do?

For more than a decade Indiana University physicists have only been able to theorize about the nature of exotic hybrid mesons, unique particles that may be the key to unlocking how quarks bind together to form matter's building blocks. But the journey to move beyond theory in the search for these elusive particles moved a step closer Tuesday (April 14) with the turn of a shovel in Newport News, Va., where IU physicists were on hand to break ground on a $14.1 million, 8,000-square-foot experimental hall designed to test theories about exotic hybrid mesons.

Indiana University and Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center recognized the success of an ongoing partnership to enhance national security and advance research opportunities in life sciences, physics and other fields during a ceremony Monday (April 13) at IU's Cyclotron Facility.

Indiana University Bloomington atmospheric scientist Rebecca Barthelmie has been honored for her wind energy research by the European Academy of Wind Energy. Barthelmie, a professor of atmospheric science and sustainability, accepted the EAWE's Academy Scientific Award for 2009 at the European Wind Energy Association annual conference and exhibition in Marseille, France, on March 16.

Six Indiana University physicists collaborating with researchers from around the world have helped move mankind one step closer to finding the Higgs boson, the still unidentified particle predicted by the Standard Model to be the origin of mass for all elementary particles.

Charles Horowitz, professor of physics at Indiana University, has been elected to fellowship in the American Physical Society, the preeminent organization of physicists in the United States. Horowitz was honored for his contributions to research involving dense nuclear matter.

Physicists working to disprove "Lorentz invariance" -- Einstein's prediction that matter and massless particles will behave the same no matter how they're turned or how fast they go -- won't get that satisfaction from muon neutrinos, at least for the time being, says a consortium of scientists that includes Indiana University physicist Stuart Mufson.

A Biocomplexity Institute team led by Indiana University Bloomington biophysicist James Glazier with collaborators András Czirók, Randy Heiland, Charles Little, Herbert Sauro and Santiago Schnell is set to receive $2.7 million from the National Institutes of Health to expand studies of early animal development, addressing age-old problems in developmental biology.

Crackling sparks, dazzling colors, spinning merry-go-rounds, and perplexing sounds will entertain and educate visitors to the 2008 Physics and Astronomy Open House on Saturday, Oct. 18. The free event will begin at 9 a.m. and end at 2:30 p.m. in Swain Hall West (727 E. 3rd St.) on the IU Bloomington campus. The Open House features exhibits similar to those found in San Francisco's cavernous Exploratorium, and in previous years has attracted anywhere from 800 to 2,500 attendees from across the state.

On Tuesday, April 29, Indiana University will welcome one of the most famous -- and controversial -- physicists in the world. Roger Penrose, whose work ranges from black holes to the fundamental physics of human conciousness, will present a surprising proposal for what happened before the Big Bang. His theories could help explain one of cosmology's biggest questions: the origin of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states, among other things, that one cannot get more energy out of a system than what is put into it. Penrose will present two talks in Whittenberger Auditorium. The first is Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. and the second is at 4 p.m. on Wednesday.

A team of scientists from Indiana University, Princeton University and the Los Alamos National Laboratory recently gained new insight into how blowflies process visual information. The findings, published in an article in the Public Library of Science Journals, show that the precise, sub-millisecond timing of "spikes" from visual motion-sensitive nerve cells encodes complex, detailed information of what the fly is seeing.

Indiana University Bloominton's newest science building, Simon Hall, has won high honors in R&D Magazine's 2008 "Lab of the Year," an architecture competition for research facilities. Madison, Wisc.-based Flad & Associates, which designed Simon Hall, submitted their contest entry in January. Flad architects worked closely with IU architects to design a 141,000-square-foot structure that encourages interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers in fields as disparate as biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics.

SpheroSense Technologies Inc. has entered into a licensing agreement with the Indiana University Research & Technology Corp. to develop market-ready biosensor technologies. SpheroSense has chosen a headquarters for its research and development activities on Bloomington's south side.

Hans-Otto Meyer, professor of physics at Indiana University Bloomington, has received a Humboldt Research Award in recognition of lifetime achievements in research. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany annually honors up to 100 internationally renowned scientists and scholars from abroad.

Scientists of the MiniBooNE experiment at the Department of Energy's Fermilab announced their first findings Wednesday (April 11). The results resolve questions raised by observations in the 1990s that appeared to contradict findings of other neutrino experiments worldwide. The MiniBooNE research team included five physicists from IU.

A new company, SpheroSense Technologies Inc., founded by scientists at IU Bloomington, aims to become the leader in continuous-monitoring devices for research, medical and safety applications based on a new type of miniature optical device. Unlike most existing technologies, this biosensor can detect small molecules, drugs, proteins, viruses, DNA and RNA, and it can be manufactured inexpensively enough to be disposable after delivering results in minutes. The combination of flexibility, compact size, high-speed detection and low price will make the new biosensor ideal for clinical, laboratory and industrial applications, including in a physician's office.

Imagine being able to take a fantastic voyage into the human body and see how life evolves in a single cell, observe what triggers and sustains a beating heart -- or perhaps journey into a tumor to witness how cancer destroys life. Such a possibility is not the stuff of overactive imaginations or sci-fi films; it's the domain of Assistant Professor Santiago Schnell, who heads the Systems Biology Laboratory at the Indiana University School of Informatics.

This issue of Lecture Notes features speakers on the Bloomington campus discussing a variety of topics, including sexual risk taking, the foundations of physics and the beauty of Roman women.

It's a cliché in football that every fan thinks he's a coach. Now there's a computer that thinks it's a coach. Indiana University scientist Chuck Bower and two partners have created ZEUS, a computer model of football as it's played in the National Football League, based on years of NFL statistics. ZEUS runs on an off-the-shelf laptop, perfect for a football sideline or a coach's booth, and it does what a coach needs to do during a game but can't -- calculate the consequences of a decision before he calls the next play.