AirUCI Faculty Michael Dennin was consulted by the History Channel and appeared on a program they recently aired about construction of batteries. In his lab on March 31, 2016, Mike demonstrated the basic concepts of batteries and proceeded to build a rudimentary battery with the show's host, author and researcher David Childress.
View the program clip
News
Here's the latest news from AirUCI — our events, our people, our science.
2016
Tuesday, September 6, 2016
Monday, August 22, 2016
AirUCI Director Barbara Finlayson-Pitts has been awarded the prestigious Francis P. Garvan–John M. Olin Medal from the American Chemical Society. This award recognizes distinguished service to chemistry by women chemists, and the medallion will be presented at the WCC luncheon held at the ACS spring 2017 national meeting. Congratulations, Barb!
Monday, August 15, 2016
AirUCI faculty Steven Davis has been widely quoted in a number of published articles that debunk the "chemtrails" conspiracy theory, which claims that governments, military agencies, airlines, and corporations worldwide are colluding to release chemicals into the atmosphere. To believers, the chemicals being sprayed could be used to control the food supply, promote population control, or manipulate weather patterns. Some even think it is a scheme to either fight, or possibly create, climate change. This conspiracy is debunked in a new study published in Environmental Research Letters. “We don’t imagine that we’re going to sway the beliefs of hardcore adherents to the chemtrails conspiracy theory with this study," Steven said in a statement. "But we thought it was important to go on the record with fundamental scientific facts to refute claims that the government is deliberately spreading harmful chemicals from aircraft.”
Read the article
Thursday, August 11, 2016
AirUCI faculty Michael Kleinman will be interviewed this morning on Take Two, a public affairs program broadcast on PBS station KPPC, about an article in the Orange County Register dealing with the human costs of air pollution in Southern California. On average, over 2,000 people per year die in our region due to poor air. “We have more traffic; we have more cars. It’s inevitable to have more emissions and more output. When you have more fires and they’re more intense, there’s more exposure to people throughout the South Coast Air Basin, and Orange County is not immune.”
Read the article
Wednesday, August 10, 2016
AirUCI's Mallory Hinks, grad student in the Nizkorodov group, is participating in the ACS ChemChamps Competition for younger chemists to explain their research or chemistry in general to non-scientists. She has created a three-minute video describing her research and will advance in the contest based on the number of people view her video. Lend her a hand, and click here to watch her video.
The ACS ChemChamps takes place over four rounds.
- Round 1: Shoot a 3 minutes video about your chemistry research or a chemistry concept (12 advance based on judging and views)
- Round 2: Shoot a 3 minutes video about a particular element (8 advance based on judging)
- Round 3: Trip to Washington DC! Present your chemistry topic in a 3 minute live presentation at the American Chemical Society (4 advance based on audience votes)
- Finals: Trip to ACS Fall Meeting! Make another 3 minutes video about your chosen chemistry topic. Present two 3 minute live presentations at the ACS Meeting.
The winner gets:
- Another trip to Washington DC to network with professional science communications staff at ACS and attend a briefing on Capitol Hill
- Host an ACS Reactions video
- Join the National Academy of Sciences’ Science and Entertainment Exchange
- A 3D-printed trophy!
Sunday, July 10, 2016
AirUCI's Lisa Wingen, Veronique Perraud, and Allison Vander Wall will participate in the Tech Trek summer camp for middle school girls at UCI, organized by the American Association of University Women. The objective of Tech Trek is to encourage girls to pursue a career in the STEM areas.
Thursday, July 7, 2016
AirUCI faculty Michael Prather was interviewed on the local NBC station on July 7, 2016 about his participation in a seminal NASA study to measure greenhouse gases worldwide using their flying laboratory. The Atmospheric Tomography (ATom) mission route includes a flight over the North Pole, then New Zealand, the tip of South America and on to the Arctic. Science instruments aboard the NASA DC-8, based at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, will collect information about greenhouse gases and other particles in the atmosphere.
Watch the video
Thursday, June 2, 2016
At the annual Chemistry Department Edward K.C. Lee dinner held on June 1, 2016, AirUCI was represented by Sandra Blair in the Nizkorodov group who won the Joan Rowland Award and Dian Romonosky, also in the Nizkorodov group, who received the Smitrovich Prize. In addition Zachary Thammavongsy, Kim Tu, and Jennifer Glancy-Logan received the Michael E. Gebel Award given to graduate students who show great promise after taking time off before graduate school to work in the "real world." Congratulations, all!
Tuesday, May 31, 2016
AirUCI's Mallory Hinks, graduate student in the Nizkorodov group, has won second place in the 2016 Carbon Slam competition, sponsored by the office of the President of the University of California. She not only represented our institute, but the entire UCI campus. This all-day event included talks by kickoff and keynote speakers, faculty climate champions, and top students from all 10 UC campuses working on understanding and communicating the impacts of climate change and finding solutions to mitigate those impacts.
Mallory had to present a three-minute, listener-engaging talk on the effects that aerosols have on climate change, and she used her own "MAGIC" to make it happen—Mallory’s Aerosol-Generating Irradiation Chamber creates aerosols in the laboratory, making them easier to study. Way to go, Mallory! Read the article
Thursday, May 26, 2016
AirUCI faculty Jim Smith and his Ultrafine Aerosol Research Group, collaborating with an international research team at the CERN CLOUD chamber, describe two new mechanisms for the growth of newly formed atmospheric aerosol particles in recent articles that appear in the journals Nature Communications and Nature:
- growth due to collisions of sulfuric acid clusters with newly formed particles (read it here)
- growth by the condensation of highly oxidized, low volatility organic compounds (read it here)
In the latter study, a global model that incorporate these new results (see chart below) predicts that this process may contribute to as much as a 50% increase in the number of cloud condensation nuclei, thus potentially impacting global climate and precipitation patterns.
