Red microbeads indicate the flow of food particles into the digestive tract of the tunicate Ciona intestinalis Type A.

OIST Presidential Lecture Series #2 "Animal Beauty: Function and Evolution of Biological Aesthetics" by Dr. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard July 30, 2018 Where do we come from?  What is the point of beauty in nature?  How do we arise from a single cell?  These questions and more will be addressed by Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, a pioneer who together with Eric Wieschaus identified the genetic basis for the development of the fruit fly.  For this fundamental discovery she was awarded the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1995, jointly with Eric Wieschaus and Edward B. Lewis. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard helped decipher the logic of the genes required to control early embryonic development.  Based on her research, a plethora of transcription control genes was discovered and found to be conserved throughout evolution.  In her talk she will discuss the basic mechanisms needed to establish a distinct pattern of cells during embryogenesis.  She will also talk about the point of beauty in nature as well as why animals have patterns, a subject on which she has been writing a book.  Her research laid the conceptual foundation for our understanding of organ formation and regeneration using the developmental control genes. From 1985 until 2014 Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard was a director at the Max Planck Institute of Developmental Biology at Tübingen, Germany. As Emerita, she is still leading a research group at the Institute focusing on pattern formation, growth and cell migration in the zebrafish, a new vertebrate model organism. For the discovery of genes that control development in animals and humans, and the demonstration of morphogen gradients in the fly embryo, she received a number of awards and honours, among others the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (New York/USA) in 1991 and the 1995 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology. She was secretary general of EMBO until 2009 and a member of many scientific councils (National Ethics Council of Germany, European Research Council). Since 2013 she is chancellor of the German Order Pour le mérite. In order to support women with children in science she founded the Christiane-Nüsslein-Volhard-Stiftung in 2004.

OIST Presidential Lecture Series #1 "The Dark Side of the Universe" by Hitoshi Murayama 2018/07/04 As a first of OIST Presidential Lecture Series, Dr. Hitoshi Murayama, Director of Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, the University of Tokyo, talks about Dark Matter and Dark Energy, which are considered to make up 95% of the Universe. Dark Matter is a part of the reason why we exist. There is plenty of evidence that dark matter exists in our own galaxy, other galaxies, and in clusters of galaxies. On the other hand, Dark Energy is speeding up the expansion of the Universe, and it may even lead the Universe to become infinitely fast and come to an end. Dr. Murayama discusses what researchers are doing, and trying to understand what these are. Dr. Murayama received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Tokyo in 1991, held research positions at Tohoku University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and has been on faculty at University of California, Berkeley since 1995. Currently he is a senior staff member at LBNL and MacAdams Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2007, he has also been the founding director of Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo. He received the 2002 Yukawa Commemoration Prize and the 2017 Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Award. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the Science Council of Japan. Nature’s deep puzzles - from eccentric particles to dark matter to why our universe is expanding faster - are what he strives to solve.

High speed video showing experimental impacts on three textured granular surfaces.

This movie, showing the movements of many integrin molecules, is fast-forwarded by a factor of six from real time. The focal adhesion is shown in blue while the green spots represent single integrin molecules. The yellow lines show the trajectory of the integrin molecule. In addition to movement, it exhibited temporary immobilization shown in red, which the researchers termed Temporary Arrest of LateraL diffusion (TALL).

At time 0, the numbers of fluorescent molecules are about the same in both movies. The number decreases rapidly in the video on the left which employed a conventional observation method, whereas the number of fluorescent spots decreases very slowly in the video shown on the right, which was recorded using the newly developed method. See the spots jostle around in the cell membrane.

Many people came to the OIST Science Festival 2017 to enjoy the world of science.

This video, taken at 500 frames per second, shows the Marangoni effect in action. The researchers introduced a surfactant—a liquid with lower surface tension—to the surface of water. They used hollow glass spheres, which naturally float at the water surface, so a camera could capture the process. (Video: Mahesh Bandi)