Stanford University professor Robert Pogue Harrison gives this year’s Eugene Lunn
Memorial Lecture “What is a River? Nature, Culture, and the Human Psyche” at the
Jan and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art on Jan. 31.
In nature, organic molecules are either left- or right-handed, but synthesizing molecules with a specific handedness in a lab is hard to do. Make a drug or enzyme with the wrong “handedness” and it just won’t work. Now chemists at the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis are getting closer to mimicking nature’s chemical efficiency through computational modeling and physical experimentation.
A study using data from telescopes on Earth and in the sky resolves a problem plaguing astronomers working in the infrared and could help make better observations of the composition of the universe with the James Webb Space Telescope and other instruments. The work is published April 20 in Nature Astronomy.
Tom Garrison (M.A., political science, ’76) wrote Hiking Southern Nevada, Volume One (CreateSpace, April 2018). It is his third hiking guide, and fifth book overall published since 2013. He has also written more than 100 hiking, political and humorous essays for regional newspapers since December 2010.