Bridge the Gap

How can we detect exoplanets, i.e. planets orbiting other stars, potentially a few tens of lightyears away from Earth? What can we learn about their host stars from the way their light is dimmed by the planets themselves? These are only some of the questions we asked our guest, Kristina Kislyakova, who is Assistant Professor at the University of Vienna, and works on the evolution of the early solar system rocky planets and atmospheric losses to space among other interesting topics.

What is the effect of clouds on the global and local climate on Earth? How much of the solar radiation can they reflect back to space? How much of the surface heat can they trap? Can we describe and predict how the climate will be in 50 years? What can we know about the climate on Earth ten thousand years ago and how can artificial intelligence help us in this endeavour? Professor Aiko Voigt, from the University of Bonn, will talk about these and other related topics on today’s episode.

What is a catalyst? And what is an enzyme instead? It turns out catalysts are fundamental in speeding up chemical reactions that would otherwise occur in a very, very long time. Enzymes, biological catalysts, take part in a lot of the chemical reactions in our body to keep us running. Can we engineer enzymes to produce specific compounds? Can we do it in an efficient and sustainable way? Do we need special solvents to do so? In this episode we dig into the chemistry of enzymes, how they work, and how we can exploit them to produce compounds that are useful in industry and science. Our guest, Xenia Georgiadou, a PhD candidate at Graz University of Technology will guide us through this fascinating and complex journey.

Who says phase transitions are only diagrams and critical lines? What if they could be understood through something as simple as making a smooth, cheesy sauce? In this episode, Ivan Di Terlizzi, from the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex systems in Dresden, will tell us all about the physics of cheese in the classic Italian dish Pasta Cacio e Pepe. Don't miss this tasty and brainy episode!
Link to the paper: https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pof/article/37/4/044122/3345324/Phase-behavior-of-Cacio-e-Pepe-sauce

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle prevents us from pinpointing an electron in real time with arbitrary accuracy. What this means is that if we were to shine light on an electron and excite it, we would not be able to follow its trajectory precisely. And yet, recent years have witnessed the development of so-called ultrafast spectroscopic techniques which allows us to indirectly reconstruct a movie of the elections evolution within a molecule. Peter Puschnig, Professor at University of Graz, Austria, will lead us through this fascinating world of ultrafast spectroscopy to hopefully answer fundamental (and cool) questions about electronic motions in real time.