With the Winter Olympics set to start in Sochi, Russia and Super Bowl 48 featuring the Denver Broncos, the beginning of February will not be boring in the sports world. Many Mines students will be sure to be found huddled around a television somewhere with chicken wings in hand. But the question is, what will they be watching? A week before Super Bowl Sunday, Minds at Mines asked, “Which are you more excited for this year: the Super Bowl or Olympics?”
What time is it anyways?
University of Colorado, Boulder—A group of researchers led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed a strontium atomic clock that is hailed as the most stable and precise device for measuring time in existence. The strontium clock, said to be able to accurately tell time for approximately the next 5 billion years, is housed in at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics located at the University of Colorado Boulder. Though the clock holds new world records for both its precision and stability, researchers believe the clock still has room for improvement. Jun Ye, group leader and NISIT/JILA Fellow, said, “We already have plans to push the performance even more. You can expect more new breakthroughs in our clocks in the next five to 10 years.”
“I really think rare earth elements are fascinating and represent the unknown of the useful periodic table and rare earth elements will become much more important in the future” says John Bristow, a graduate student working on rare earth mineral research for the geological engineering and geology department. Bristow is currently doing independent research on the absorption of rare earth minerals by all the varieties of clays in hopes of seeing whether certain kinds of clay collect the minerals at a greater or slower rate. His research is notable because of the rarity of independent research at the Colorado School of Mines as well as the fact that his work is experimental in nature, as most research in geology here at Mines is done in economic ore bodies, hydrology, or geological engineering.
Richard Feynman once described gravity as “damned weak, but not negligible.” Gravity is the weakest of physics’s four fundamental forces, and measuring it accurately can be an engineering challenge, one tackled by University of Colorado alumnus Dr. Tim Neibauer and his company, Micro-g LaCoste.
Martin Luther King would have been eighty-five on January 15 of this year. To memorialize him, Martin Luther King day was celebrated this past Monday. Although the Colorado School of Mines does not take this day off, it was commemorated by holding a breakfast in his honor. At Mines, Martin Luther King Day is also the start of the week known as Delta Day, a celebration of how much Mines has changed over the years.
Renewable energy seems to be the way of the future as energy companies search for ways to invest in both clean and renewable sources of energy. However, some of the regions of the world best suited to produce renewable energy, especially wind energy, hold cities, towns, and villages that oppose the harnessing of renewable energy on their land.
Pro-EU integration protests escalated into open conflict between protesters and riot police in Kiev as it did early in last December following the passing of laws to punish and discourage protesting in response to the movement in Ukraine. Riot police, while not authorized to use live ammunition, have been photographed using molotov cocktails and improvised fragmentation grenades to disperse protesters. While dialogue has opened between government officials and opposition leaders, there is skepticism whether anything useful will come from the talks.
This year’s Delta Days keynote dealt not with racial diversity or gender diversity but rather with age diversity. Keynote speaker Audrey Nelson, who holds a B.A., M.A. and a Ph.D. in Communication, focused on the differences between each generation currently in the workforce. Nelson along with the audience identified the different characteristics and stereotypes of each age group to enhance understanding of each generation.
Problems in the field of electromagnetics (EM) can get very complex and become very difficult to solve computationally. As a result, the cost of running simulations for these problems, especially regarding the time it takes to complete, can be rather high. But when these computations are the only means of solving these problems, as is often the case, the only way to minimize this cost is to develop a more efficient means of accomplishing the same computation. One of the more prominent methods to accomplish this is the finite-difference time-domain (FTDT) technique.
Music is often thought of as an attempt to capture transcendental emotion into vibrations of air so that we may all again experience the sensations of somber peace with the world, the warmth of our first loves in the summer sun, or the cold distant pain of loss. Instead of those particular emotions, “By the Light of the Northern Star” by Týr is exaltation and passion coming from Viking lore and Norse mythology. Týr is a viking metal band from the Faroe Islands. For those not familiar with the countless subgenres of metal, the band plays songs that blend the black metal and folk metal by combining loud songs, relatively slow paces, and lyrical themes coming from viking lore and Norse mythology. Every song on this album is majestic and powerful yet accessible to those new to the genre even with two of the songs beings song in Faroese.