2024 Rio Grande Research SLAM

[Music] but the infrastructure of the Industrial Age oil platforms oil ters our world is one where our energy demands have bound us to oil production one that drives us to drill and extract in the coldest most remote most fragile regions of the Earth the icing wildernesses of the Arctic are now a scene of record oil production and with this production from consequences thousands of oil spills every year massive shore birds eviscerated his populations costing billions of dollars to attempt to remediate as promising as renewable sources of energy are we won't be getting away from oil anytime soon and so we need new strategies to clean up these oil building before they turn into so what are our options well there are mechanical approaches booms and Nets you can on the oil used to gather all oil together for Recovery or burning but these are super slow and we have to act fast there are dispers which we can dissolve in the oil into the O super fast problem solved right ex all that dissolved oil and the dispers themselves appear poison and you just end up killing everything in the ocean let's use a chemical hder instead deployed by helicopter they're super fast they exploit the awesome power of service engine to gather all the oil together into a fix Spate from which then it can be recover burn the only problem is that all of these disperss are incredibly toxic to marine life so your fish aren't being killed by the oil itself they're being killed by the dispers during clean up so that's where I come in I'm working on algae Drive chemical vers good for fish we start with algae the stuff exploding out of our patented fish flowing helicopter and we inside that is a molecule called phol which is the stuff exploding out the alga we take phol and give it a very polar head group meaning that part of the molecule really likes water the rest of molecule doesn't like water and combine this turn SP into a very powerful chemical ver so then we create model well spills in the laboratory both big and small and we deploy our H to these W spills as we hope dries the oil together into a thick slick now we can ask the big question is it thick enough to burn thick enough to remove thick enough for our bur with the Flaming Tor to burn that o SP but the Benchmark for commercial H is about 3 mm and we found that we can go even thicker greater than five our meaning a more effective more environment friendly clean up operation so maybe only so much on the ground let's Ure there's noil the oce on thank [Music] you so first official trivia question what is the real brand called in Mexico Big River it could also be called the real the um the Dual name SS from colonial era confusion about whether the upper and lower courses of the river were connected so they named it twice and then like there was some concern about the candy distribution so I was like am I actually supposed to I feel like might beity issues so we about a leral distribution method which hopefully will be less hazard for all con parties good news um with all of the catering coming through SL is also be responsible after this event so uh a little bit burritos us and our second presenter is Zachary Gibson from the Air Force research laboratory space Vehicles directorate presenting next St survivable spacecraft accelerated aging of spacecraft materials Mars to form a new colony is the last of survival for the human race but your space path wasn't built to last so the outer insulation starts to discolor crack and peel away even you exposed to the harsh space environment me either but I have been on my way to the grocery store in an unfamiliar place my GPS failed so I got lost both of these issues rely on understanding materials in space so that we have survivable reliable spacecraft whether that's for interplanetary space travel or GPS satellites one key issue is spacecraft charging I don't mean like charging your phone for example if you rub your feet on the carpet you build up an excessive charge you can walk up to your friend and Shop them ding that charge satelles don't have friends when they build up an excessive charge they Arc and Spark and shock themselves therefore it's critical to understand the electrical properties of these materials now now children are much more resilient than an oce they can topple over and then bounce right back up when I was an adult I can hardly stand stubbing my tub analogously spacecraft materials are often red for pristin or young materials but when they're exposed to the hard space environment those materials properties drastically change aging that so we need to understand the nuances of agery so we want our space back grow B grow old inad we can simply watch them grow old we love watching our children do so but that takes a lifetime what if we don't have that one well then we need to artificially accelerate caging so that we can conduct rapid testing in the laboratory my research investigates the effects on a dose rate of aging and electrically insulating spacecraft materials this is because dose rate can have a drastic impact on the results imagine your slowly smoking a pork shoulder on a sunny summer afternoon you tenderly pull it for a delicious sandwich versus Turing a microwave that same pork shoulder clearly there can be Stark differences when energies applied at different rates specifically I a materials and then I deposited charge by electron gun and then I measured the internal charge distributions with the post electroacoustic method I then appli an electric field to poke and and probe the transport charge transport property of materials when they were aged more slowly a single Peak charge distribution was observed that was nonresponsive to PO and prod when aged a bit faster two non-responsive Peaks appeared when aged even more rapidly then the material behave more like the conductor charge sashing around within the B these drastic differences in material properties are very important for designing a reliable resiliant spacecraft that don't fail us when we need that so we can get where we're going whether that's colonizing Mars we're getting to the grocery store thank thank you so much Z our next trivia question this one's a little harder how deep is the real grand Forge near to New Mexico I will be super impressed if anybody knows this I go with kind of order magnitude you know closeness if you want to get with seven 800 B yes 800 I didn't know it was multiple choice wow I didn't know that variable well played well play the real grand G stretch for about 50 mil and is a key feature of the RoR Del nor National Monument The Gorge reaches depths of around 800 ft in some areas and showcases dramatic geological formations revealing millions of years of Earth's history to expose volcanic rock and sediment lsit also if you should happen to fall into the gorge we have uh MERS of the mountain rescue teams rescue crew here so Andreas will help pull you back out our speaker is Aaron bales from the national renewable energy laboratory presenting the renewable energy Rumble finding the right Catalyst for sustainable carbon fiber production ladies and gentlemen everyone welcome to the main event in this corner we have our reigning Champion The Undefeated re the dinosaur and in this corner we have our underd the upstart Mike the micro this is the admittedly unlikely match up you don't want to miss it's also an act metaphor for my research did you know that even if we all switch to driving El Vehicles overnight we'd still be using huge amounts of oil every day petroleum products are everywhere the synthetic fibers in your clothes the ChapStick in your backpack the Legos that you played with as a kid and much much more finding a way to replace Petroleum in the commodity supply chain is one of the greatest challenges of our time and one of the toughest to happen it's really hard to find an alternative that's cheap and abundant well while still being effective and environmentally friendly well in my group we found an alternative to take down dinosaur based fossil fuels The Humble migro we engineer common bacteria to consume sugar and produce chemical precursors that can then be used to make all of the products currently made using oil this means that we can replace petroleum with biomx that would otherwise go to the landfill my work focus is on adapting a large scale process currently being used to convert petroleum into carbon fiber a critical component in bites cars and aircraft this process is called thermocatalysis it involves flowing our chemical precursors into a reaction vessel containing the Catalyst and heating everything up to make our F the catalyst is there so we can use lower temperatures but the conventional t with petroleum based approach is expensive and doesn't work well with our new biologically sourc he so it needs to be reoptimized I've been exploring new TS based on cheap materials like iron titanium and syconium so that when the time comes it'll be economical to scale up this process and once we're successful it will be a total knockout win for renewable energy resources thank you you so much our next trivia question which geologic feure created the re so is apparently not multiple choice so absolutely very R marvelous the de scen a canyon carved by the r Grand River in Northern New Mexico it stretches for about 50 miles and is a key feature of the r Grand National Monument I feel like they got that second one copy from the previous one but we'll say that 800 ft is still impressive and there are still dramatic features if you would like to go visit them um they're apparently also you can see the re Grand RS in play by looking at the re Grand the West waiting on the trivia for this this side I appreciate the the assist so geologists okay any other geological features that we should be sure to observe there's Taylor even just little volcane Volcan that are so if you've ever wondered a junior bology degree apparently taking Mexico is absolutely the way to go um calderas and all of the fun things just remember to pack water and good shoes all right our fourth speaker is Aaron Thornton from the Air Force research laboratory directed energy directorate presenting Rainbow Connection [Music] in a time or in a time of increasing polarization in the vision I think it's more important than ever to examine points of view very different than for example as a physicist in the Air Force in 2024 you might expect that I don't really have a lot in with those peace and love of the 1960s I'm talking to you today for example pretty conservative business attire not some fantastic ti-e dress and let's just say my drug testing requirement to ensures that I have a different form of recreation than what might have been enjoyed at Woodstock but where we do have a connection is our shared love ofos so that leaves me to wonder what if the Air Force one the hardest of power so back to my in directed energy physics as was spoiled a earlier we examine ways to defend against enemy attack by using the power of the electromagnetic spectrum to defeat enemy systems in other words more specifically we use high powered lasers and microwaves to provide an overwhelming amount of signal housing systems to fail similar to ways that a power surge might provide or TV at home frequently it's really important us for us to know what is in the air that we're sending these signals through as it can kind of affect how well our signals are able to get from point A to point B your lighter lers are really good at doing atmospheric sensing especially when you're looking for something specific like methan gas however if you're wanting to scan for a whole bunch of things at once things get really tricky and this is because each particle uh responds to different colors or wavel uh so in order to scan for a bunch of things in the sky at one time you have to rapidly switch between wavelengths and lasers this is where my research comes in instead of looking into using a whole bunch of different lasers I'm looking into Ultra stal which emits such high inity light that our single colored post gets pretty groovy as it poates and separates into an entire rainbow providing all the colors that we need so again instead of having to use many different laser systems to make many different colors I have one system that propagates one color light that then generates all the light for all of the colors in the atmosphere to do our sensing right now I'm working on using spectrometers to better study all the different types of rainbows were able to generate using lasers and different Central wavelengths and the research and data that I'm generating will be used to better identify and then comping those particles and and in the end I think we had a lot to learn from the 50s and through my work with ultra short pulse lasers and rainow I hope someday I'll find it the Rainbow Connection the lovers the dreamers the dod thank you so much G our next two questioned which national park does the r run through this all our war stre people on this park big nation Park in Texas where forms the southern boundary and carves through dramatic pions like Santa Elena offers opportunities for back in it also flows through the National monument in New Mexico Where the River cuts through the forge showcasing more setting Landscapes and Wildlife like after this world going to have to go for a hike or Kay or some version of outdoor adventuring my dogs would totally H sponsor his trivia okay any interesting livestock for wildlife that youve encountered since visiting for this particular Adventure road runners road runners are fantastic much smaller been advertised by the acne Corporation thank you so much our fifth speaker is Michelle B from sanan National Laboratories presenting de can only you can prevent wildes but despite these warnings you continue to witness the devastating and far reaching effect W can have in our communities and sadly it doesn't seem to be getting water in fact over the past decade we've seen a set increase in the number and intensity of wildes since January New Mexicans experienced eight large wildes over 1.2 billion in damage two of those fires dising over 8,000 people one C of wildfire often Overlook is our elri room where tree falls onto the line or 4 line spots into nearby vegetation action between these can ignite and spread wildes in addition once the wildf is already in progress burning trees compose the rest critical infrastructure and potention cause extensive power AR so may smoke my research comes in my a is to reduce to and using computer models and simulations by combining satellite imy field measurements with cool like Ai and Li which captures the 3D I'm able to develop High solution models to better inform fire simulations everywhere in the state why vegetation models well without vegetation wouldn't have much to work with no trees no shrubs no fuels no fire we don't want to chop down the few trees we have Mexico or destroy our P of the forest it's important that we manage yours the more we know about what's out there the better we can predict by Behavior but mapping trees is not as easy as it sounds some characteristics are straight forward but can be a little bit more tricky for example which exact tree poses how much biomass fuel is within a given tree methods meur in these are inconsistent very by loation and of at such a large shale with low resolution we can't really tell what's happening but with our Innovative approach we can develop these detailed vegetation models to better inform our simulations to tell us where vegetation management can be done pro actively and efficiently what even really exciting that these models have broad applications that can be used to further reduce the number and intensity of WiFi in our communities a little bit easier thank absolutely thank you so much our next tricky question which of the following rers is not a tributary to the [Music] r the river the s River Rio or r that is uh actually still one of the tributaries so we're looking for the one that is not a tributary question is not than our is gonzal from Los National Laboratory presenting hearing the unseeable the silent Symphony of structural safety did you hear that it wasn't actually The Sound of Silence it was ultra sound be the human R of do you know that sound that we can't hear but we used to listen to S objects like materials to help us understand how structur sound or robust the sorry um sorry these guys are putting to much pressure on did you hear that it wasn't actually The Sound of Silence it was ultrasound the human of here do you know that s that we here we used to Listen to Objects like materials to help us understand how structur sound over the for example the shape of commercial earthplan has been optimized for decades old and new planes look almost identical the real difference is in the materials they used to build ples from 2024 are 30 ver wider than PL from the90s since Metals which are heavy and cor are replaced by light with t Composites this materials are shaped and put through a temperature and pressure Cycles to harden them for high performance durability but how do we know that a particular clean component sa the way is properly baked or as we call it C one way to test it would be toate the half and see how postive to break it but that would be pretty practical because you have a lot of broken wings and no flying airplanes that's what my con I specialize in listening materials with sounds that hum can't hear my ping device generates ultrasonic waves to the material without then detects how the material Al s if the material is Harden the sound is mov and F however just like the cake we can't see we have breing it if the inside of the wind is on the r but we can hear this time the sun waves will be jacked and slowly my job is to analyze these Sun waves in real time to certify that each each plan component has the optimal properties to safely the Dem maning habitation the thir of this technique is that receiving material cost and reducing the amount of waste that occurs the testing process this is very important because these broken wings can not be recycled specifically if we want to achieve a suable research in manufacturing breaking this one time materials is not a choice the even bigger advantage of this technique is that it can used in the field so if you want to know how the wing is falling up after three or 10,000 flights we can test it again and again ensuring that everything component remains at PC which is essential if we don't want to visit our families for and trally this technique toize any material like want us to build space or so to ensure our safety and their liability of our p and infrastructure let's keep listening to his Noble materials May of hearings thank you our next triy question how long is the rear again they have given you Convent benchmarks 1800 to 1900 miles 1900 to 2000 mil 2100 miles 2100 to 2200 miles eight absolutely consider a navigable so if you want to take your 1900 mile track you might have to do some actual hanging carrying of kayaks and otherwise navigating around favorite Wildlife around River Riv I like it also lar than our s Condor is principal K from the Air Force research laboratory SP vehicle director presting trust or don't you [Music] trust trust is absolutely critical to the construction of any BC team and any lack of trust is immediately evident picture an Orchestra conductor who insists on playing every musical instrument because he does not believe the musicians can do a well done well this is similar to the situation we have between our satellite constellations and our human ground operators these ground operators are responsible for telling each and every one of these satellites what to do how to do it and when to do it on top of their normal day-to-day activities and Mission plan but what if we could take some subset of these tasks and give them to the satellites themselves now I know what you're thinking machines and computers have this annoying tendency to break down right when we need them the most and this presents a critical Paradigm with two key questions how do we breathe trust between our between our machines our ground operators and the satellite constellation but also so how we design a satellite constellation to be trustworthy my research focuses on a traditional mathematical artificial intelligence and machine learning to certify trustworthiness of our satellite constellation I do this by leveraging the satellite constellation sensing and communication capabilities to form a Cooperative team where they can help each other accomplish the mission such as this site is about to run into you you need to move by Levering Cooperative key we were able to migrate these paths from the human ground operator onto the satellite constellation themselves but we can also take this information and allow the constellation to make informed decisions about what to do how to do it and when to do it such as they be aware of their surroundings by doing this we can create a Cooperative team that of which the ground operator is just the conductor thank you thank you so much Christoper our next there are three rivers in the USA that areer the so over the next three trivia questions we're going to angle for one uh River each for the next one the Mississippi River is the second longest in the US at approximately 2,340 miles which we now know is longer than 1900 miles flown from Lake patasa and Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico it traverses 10 states and is crucial for Commerce while also holding significant cultural and historical importance in American literature very possibly also saying no PR our eth presenter is Adar from the national renewable energy laboratory presenting Farm to Sky cultivating a clear future for air travel as we mentioned we are using airplanes for long distance tring to save our but have you ever felt guilty or traving to talk about renable energy on a plane powered by petroleum product I just said when I was coming for this event only us is consuming 65 million gallon J fuel every day and it is producing significant air pollution do we have any other option electric vehicles identify super useful for small distances but batteries are indical for Aviation as the plane covers long distances at high altitude up to the 10 mil the sky where the temperature is super low - 75° so we need a hydrocarbon fuel with in a c to C6 carbon range having properties like lightweight high energy density and low point so the question is where we can find this new amazing Fu on a near conf I hope so America is cornland and Americans are using corn for everything do you often think what is happening to the it is going to the trash but it is a unable treasure fully loaded of sugar and perfect s for the jet production however converting this goody cor St into the liquid J Fu requir multi process so we are degrading each cor stop into the sugar monomer and then we are removing water from these monomer and making C5 and C6 molecules to increase the carbon chain L from Beyond C8 we have to add at least of these two molecules but the cas is we cannot add the molecules at any position these should be in a perfect orientation so here my jobs comes in I developing Catalyst and using t for rearrange these molecules in a perfect orientation for CH eration so the good news is by this process we are able to produce lightweight hydrocarbon molecule with low breing Point properties and these have 15% more energy than than the conventional F just assume in near future you are on a plane and you are enjoying your popcorn which is powered by po St and as a passenger your car footprint F 70% lower Inus this process can boost the r economy by creating alternate jobs in the Agriculture and fuel production sector this is the GRE andent future be good full of employment be proud Americans want to give our coming generation thank you thank you so we come back to our if you want to be fast Off the Mark uh what are one of the other two of that are longer than the real excellent this in fact the longest river in the United States stretching 2341 miles oing out the Mississippi by like a mile uh from Montana to St Louis Missouri it flows through several States and has been vital for exploration and development of the American West supporting diverse ecosystems and serving as an important Waterway for both transportation and agriculture it is well known to be a navigable marvelous our next speaker is Peter venberg from The Air Force research laboratory direct of energy directorates presenting moving lasers forward [Music] trying to make sure that lasers don't fire backwards now when I say lasers maybe you're thinking of an office laser pointer or a cat and if those were backwards and the worst happen is confused co-workers or a well I am talking about those but multiply by a billi high power lasers these kinds of lasers are being used in some pretty incredible applications from igniting D reactors to drone Warfare defense if these lasers were to fire backwards um a dissatisfied keine would be the least of your wor high power lasers produce Optical wavs which are immediately directed into Optical fibos made primarily of glass when the optical weight becomes strong enough enough it can actually cause the glass in these fibers to contract and expand this movement creates a forward shock wave that pushes some the optical wave backwards into the body of laser in other words your laser fire backwards our job is to design and evaluate new materials for these Optical f to help mitigate this effect by creatively arranging different kinds of glass we can create diving structures that're resilient enough to keep this stock wave from forming at the output densities that we require this ensures that we can safely use lasers to ignite Fusion reactors to create n energy and drone defense networks to protect our troops there is just one problem C designed op Fighters are expensive and very time consuming fabricate even just th meter length can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars so in order to evaluate different designs to decide what works best we either need to spend years and millions of dollars to fabricate each one or we need a way to predict which designs will be most efficient that's where I I create computer models that can take a design for laser and tell you the exact Optical W of intensity that will cause the dividing optical fiber to produce this do some of these models are relatively quick to run for more complex designs the necessary models may take several days to run on a super computer but that's still a lot less time than years and spending the GDP of a small country to experimentally deter this in short my work is yours that the next time you play with your cat or the next time you go to a fusion reactor you can feel confident standing behind lasers in part to our research you know they will only fire the way they are intended now if there was only a way we could find to Tex the Red Dot thank you so much Peter there is one last River that's longer than the re a little bit farther away from here any want to name River the Yukon river flows primarily in Canada the third longest river in the US at about 1,979 mil flowing through Alaska known for stunning Wilderness and historical significance during the clond gold rush it served as a key Ro for Prospectors in the late 19th century although that could not have been fun to naate at time somewhat different uh climate and wild wild fent of the im as well welc back to about road runners back to our previous lot uh the top speed of a coyote is almost 10 miles hour faster than the top speed of a Road Runner so your whole childhood our next speaker is Al from s National Laboratories presenting Beyond silicon the next generation of electronics for decades silicon has red cre pain of the technological vage powering everything from virtual reality to the vast satellite raised above our heads but what you might not realize is that the vast majority of United States silicon comes from overseas producers this presents a national security risk because it creates potential avenues for our adversaries to infiltrate our supply chains and compromise our electronics for example just how dangerous supply chain vulnerabilities can be considered a recent attack on the group in lean in which their pavor supply chain was infiltrated to plant explosives that killed 37 people and injured thousands more however right now we're in the midst of a technological Revolution devices are shrinking Quantum Computing is emerging and artificial intelligence is demanding faster more energy efficient Computing systems these things might spell an in to Silicon rain and this creates an opportuni to the United States to secure control of the production and supply chain infrastructure for Next Generation Electronics by investing in the new materials that will take us Beyond silicon now one candidate for this is a group of materials called two-dimensional or 2D materials these are incredibly thin sheet likee materials that we can grow or isolate at thinkness of 100,000 times thinner than your average piece of paper and yet they have unique properties that make them ideal for computing and memory applications unfortunately their thin nature also makes them extremely sensitive to the surroundings and so we still have a lot to learn about how they behave in real devices so a critical part of any electronic device is What's called the contact interface and this is where a semiconductor like Silicon or the 2D material meets up with metal components so that they can talk and exchange information so I zoomed in on this critical interface to see what was happening to our 2D material when we put the metal on top of it and what I saw was some shocking disruptions in the shooting materials properties has felt bad news for his performance upon closer investigation it turns out that the culit was actually the metal itself not the DD material the layer we had put down was imperfect and because of its sensitivity the 2D material was simply mirroring these imperfection c s and I was disrupting its properties so this means that we could go in treat our metal to align its structure smooth out that interface and as a result we saw dramatically improved communication between our 2D material and the metal this is a key step forward for the integration of two dimensional materials for Next Generation electronics and so as we continue to look Beyond silicon this imperative the United States spearhead developments for new materials like these to establish American independence from foreign manufacturing and make sure that our infrastructure and ourselves are safe from those who would harm us our next today question in which mountain range does the rear start or yes now multiple agains mountains the organ mountains or the sacal mountains one one very good than High rugged mountain range in the Rocky Mountains Southwestern Colorado and Northwestern New Mexico the r Grand drains on the east side of the range the other side of the SS the western slope of theal div is drained by tributaries of the San the Dolores and gison rivers which all flow into the Colorado so we're thinking about the Colorado they still a bit of sh [Music] running out of Road Runner I don't know if you've ever heard of Road Runner but if you ever wondered what like one and a half ptor would sounds like that's pretty much what an angry Ro sounds like they p and click and you're like you know that bir dinosaur thing absolutely valid our 11th speaker is j y from losos National Laboratory presenting e proton camps reducing beam loss at the Lance proton storage room the L particle accelerator is a lot like the mon at Disneyland the main difference of course is that while the M will bring people around the different attractions our resor the Lance accelerator will bring tiny particles called protons to different experiments now one experiment in particular is a lot like the loyal Fe right in the heart of his there only a handful of show times throughout the day so ideally you would like as many protons as POS possible to attend each show so that every show can be sold out to accomplish this we use a part of the Lance accelerator c a proton storage room it's a massive 90 m in about which we accumulate millions and millions of protons before setting them off to the experiment how do we do this safely well imagine your a mon conductor you arriv at injector station protons will board the train at the first empty train car Before you depart on your journey around the ring and then when you arrive back in injector station where protons aboard the train and after almost 2,000 turns about the storage room a r Swit is quickly flipped and the train is set on as to the experiment now when T first get on the train they stay half in your seats you know you can clearly see but prot like staying in the for too long over time they start to get an eventually they'll start bouncing around the train fire and some to fly off through the window and as you can imagine those protons cause a lot of problems in the St F damage equipment even cause to become radioactive which take a lot of time and money to fix so our team is currently working on different ways to reduce proton in my job in particular is to create particle stimulations or actually attract protons as they go around the and no deoc where they typically get lost one location in particular is right at injector station where my simulation protons are just missing the Train by improving the efficiency of the boarding process we can ensure that more poons may be on the train before departure my simulations also show that by increasing the size of the be pipe that is increasing the size of the train prot have a lot more space move around and are much less likely to get lost so by reducing you can increase the safety and integrity of our the Vol and quality ofic data in other words by reducing proton loss we can ensure that every proton t our next Tri question we've discussed how long the rear brand is how many miles of the rear Grand run specifically through New Mexico 290 350 470 or 510 if you were paying attention on that flight from Colorado you know there a 25% chance of candy in this if you make a random gu out there 47s the flows approximately 470 miles through New Mexico beginning near to along the Colorado border and exiting into Texas near Sun Park this vital River traverses diverse Landscapes supporting both ecosystems and community throughout its journey we'll segue from Road Runner fun fact to moment have you ever heard the expression bre a leg offered to a presenter it sounds kind of mean uh it actually comes from Shakespeare era the Globe Theater people sat in wooden chairs and because applauding is only so loud they would bounce up and down in the chairs and rock them back and forth to make extra noise and so if they were really an enthusiastic audience they could break break a leg off of a chair and so the idea was get so much Applause from the audience that they break a leg off their chairs so it's not actually your performers it's hoping that the audience absolutely loves everything so we'll see our materials people can give us sometim on those exact we may have to rock the computers a few times and see if we can get all of the electrons in order as well I wanted to have a table like breaking competition um they kind of V that the Q station organizers due to wanting to keep their shares inact and using them again but um perhaps we could give an encouraging Round of Applause to our electronic system we'll give it another minute more f facts okay Shakespeare's Place were actually surprisingly U politically timely we tend to think of him um as this historical figure that was out of the moment but he would tailor his plays very much for the specific audiences so when James the 6 of Scotland uh went down south to become James the first of England he was very concerned with not killing the King because James's one through five had all been assassinated and he had an interesting hobby um of uh studying ways of identifying witches because you know you need a we hobby back in the 1500s and so when he assumed the throne Shakespeare was like don't kill the King which is NI that this is uh actually where that whole process came from it was a kind of a political suck up move uh that worked very very well but then also became of the Haunted version of the play so the flip side of saying break a leg instead of something encouraging is to not mention the word mbath in theaters since we're not in theaters I think we're probably safe on that front also because we're doing science instead of place but you know for our fun random hoping that our systems become unhunted sort of trivia we can run with the big left option at a certain point you run the risk of how many phds does it take to fix the computer system you've got quite a few in the room all right opening the floor to you f facts regarding and yesak where was Shakespeare invented shakes was that a question anyone know I know AR wased by very good at coming up with NCL that trickled into the English language it's about three poets that have had a lot of influence on on vocabul so the next time you mention an arm to someone um Shakespeare excellent and apparently on computers as well so who know for us our 12 presenter is no Lewis from the Air Force research laboratory space Vehicles directorate presenting investigation of unresolved objects avoiding the T fir our orbit first orbit is complicated and filled with debris such as rocks and dust and every year we make it more complicated by adding new satellites spacecraft and junk however this runs the risk as we increase the amount of stuff in our orbit of stuff either coming back to Earth or ranning into other stuff and other serious hazards this may eventually lead to what's known as the kler SYM this is a situation in which there's so much stuff and debris in our orbit crashing into other debris creating new debris that we essentially cannot operate safely in our orbit we are essentially locked into our planet if this happens we can say goodbye to GPS and communication satellites older satellites have follow basic rules and can be easily tracked and predicted however new satellites modern satellites can often self-propel these satellites along with space junk can often have unpredictable able ordinates they can also have varying threat levels this means that in order to protect ourselves we have to properly monitor these objects so we can assess their overall Threat Level for these untracked objects we have essentially two primary ways to monitor the first is radar which is really only good for lower altitude objects the second is visual telescopes which can give us a view of valuable research uh valuable real estate such as the Geo Val however these visual telescopes provide often noisy and unresolve images this is where my work comes into play I'm developing image processing and object detection algorithms that can take these noisy unresolved images and provide information about the object's height the material composition of the object and even its origin this presents uh the first real step in properly monitoring our orbit and hopefully protecting GPS and communication in these satellites and preventing the CER SYM we've been talking about cleaning up the pollution on Earth and in the sea it's time to talk about cleaning up space thank you and thank you no our next TR question how many miles of the rear Grand separate Texas from Mexico 1,120 miles 1,240 mil 1360 miles or 1,4 nice like that again floating it out there war four chance of candy if we make a random gu 124 good the re serves as a natural border between Texas and Mexico stretching about 1,254 miles okay along the Texas Mexico boundary in Texas the river flows through sever several major cities including ELO Ando and plays a crucial role in the Region's Agriculture and water supp the river is also significant culturally and historically as it's been a vital resource for communities on both sides and is Central to the areas which Our Lucky 13 Halloween speaker is Natasha Murphy from the national renewable energy laboratory presenting Ty scales in favor of antic recycling is your favorite old t-shirt made of polyester plastic every day where generating a bunch of plastic waste that's just piling up in fact in the us alone this equates to 36 million tons of waste generated every year and shockingly as low as 10% of that is making it into a viable recycling process but as we look to the Future we've got a unique opportunity to design test and optimize New Recycling Technologies to deal with our Plastics and that's exactly where my work comes in enzymes are an emerging technology that are capable of taking that t-shirt breaking it down into its constituent monomers and then from those building blocks we can repolymerize and reform a new plastic product whether that's a new plastic bottle or a new t-shirt and we can kind of think of this as Pacman continues to consume indefinitely or at least until you use the game when a single enzyme can consume a thousand times its weight in plastic but there's a massive challenge for the entic recycling processes to scale up and that challenge is that it uses an awful lot of chemical inputs and it generates a lot of salt waste vibrants and one of these chemical inputs is sodium hydroxide per kilogram of plastic you need three lers of non-recoverable sodium hydroxide so we hypothesized that if we swap sodium hydroxide for ammonia then not only can those P men run more efficiently on ammonia but ammonia is a chemical that we can regenerate again and again and so with this one simple chemical Swap and reaction that we passing to the enal we've been able to reduce the salt waste outputs of this process by 84% the overall fossil fuel usage by 33% and the greenhouse gas emissions are down by 6 6% and so what this means for you and for me is that one day your favorite o t-shirt can be recycled efficiently reformed and become someone else's thanks all right question so we got miles of the rear Grand through New Mexico but for Emeral people how many miles of the rear Grand went through color 175 225 275 or 325 275 little lower than 275 but good guess so now there's the 30% 175 the S mountains of Colorado near the town ofed and flow Southward through the state before entering New Mexico in Colorado the river through ex stunning Mountain scenery and recreational opportunities including fishing rafting and Hiking along the as it through the state the r also supports local ecosystems and provides water for agriculture and communities making it an essential resource in the region our 14th speaker is Daniel V from San National Laboratories presenting L batteries are flamable but polymer electrolytes might help I want to alarm you but you may have parked next to a PRI last year in New York City there were 268 lithium ion battery fires and when it's the electric car catches on fire it can be very difficult to put out often the whole vehicle has to be completely submerged in a tank of water for days completely extinguished commercial lithium ion batteries contain flammable liquids that form a necessary part of the battery called the electrolyte which is what allows the lithium ions to move back and forth so we can charge disar batteries we'd love to replace these funable liquids with something more stable but it's extremely difficult to make a good electrolyte for lithium ions the electrolyte has to dissolve lithium ions it has to let those lithium ions move quickly and it needs to be stable the th of the liquids we use are really good at the first two but not so much with a third an alternate class of materials for electrolytes are solid polymers which dissolve lithium ions really well and are very stable but they don't allow for that fast lithium motion in fact lithium ions are 10,000 times slower in a solid polymer compared to a pure liquid so n material was perfect but what if we could combine them to create a new material that has the best Both Worlds that's what my team is to do so we're going to use a special type of polymer that self assembles forms Nano stale channels that run through the material then going to take a small amount of the liquid and inserted into these channels to swell them and create highways for our lithium to move through my team was able to synthesize these materials that are 80% polymer and 20% liquid when we found that these highways do form in part through high accuracy molecular simulation unfortunately we still don't have that fast lithium motion we need the lithium are still 10,000 times slower than the pure liquid so what's going wrong my simulation revealed that there's groups on the polymer that like to attacked onto those lithium ions and slow them down you can think of these groups as like traffic knops sitting by the side of the highway and slowing down traffic are kind of go fast so with this Insight we making changes to the polymer and liquid chemistry to try and mitigate the impact of these traffic top GRS and so far we've seen a factor of 100 increase in the mobility of which means we're only a fact of 100 off of the so we've made a pre significant improvement with these new materials and these materials have significantly reduced quantities of flamable liquid compared to existing lium batteries this is a critical step to improving their safety and preventing the fires that can occur in cars or your phone or any other mobile device that has a looking we hope that these new materials will us being UNR to the safer where you have to drive past this that wonderful thank you for sharing we have a a really difficult choice so now it's on you for the People's Choice Award there's QR codes on the table you can scan the QR code to your phone or enter the web address to oh or you can SC it on the screen it's that okay never mind the table ones won't work use this one updated information so QR code you can vote for your favorite presentation and there's a special word for that people St work so if you were not envying the judges was very very difficult decision now you get to be difficult to we'll take a short break to allow you to submit your votes um the judges and organizers will do some math and work out the winners um feel free to take a a little bit of a break stand Wile and we'll call everyone back in just a bit to announce our winners and one more time thank you everyone you did such a wonderful job presenting and thank you audience for contributing your own wisdom and insight to our re you are all amazing yeah you did great must yes I hope right there right there I hope okay cool don't know all right would it be okay if I sit up the stand of course yeah yeah yeah right I think so once you set it up I'll let you know and I can move e e oh scen one minute thank you something is okay that excuse me I know the conversations are fantastic and the L that magnificently distracting smell so let's announce our winners and then we can Mo stage to come back up here just one more time we're gonna take every's phot and for all of yourvery and and contribs to really fun thank you so much Dr for all your work with us one more one more perfect thank you our third place award to San National Labs Michelle B second place award to emal Aaron bales for first place also to end round Natasha Murphy thank you showing just how close uh all of these scores came our People's Choice Award goes to afrl Christopher Hayes that makes our overall lab team winner this year the national renewable energy Laboratory thank you so much welcome to and we could not have successfully executed this event without a lot of individuals who are listed in this slide so our Tech Team the computer people Everyone Do The Magnificent staging the last round of applause to all of our organizers judging panel facilities team sponsors and the people who made lunch and the say2 you're very welcome to stay for Lun to connect with fellow researchers and attendees this is a really great chance to talk about all those school projects you just heard and find out when will be coming to real life near you thank you so much everyone we appreciate your organiz and presenters