Disclaimer: machine translated by DeepL which may contain errors.
Faculty of Science Extraordinary Public Lecture and 33rd Public Lecture
Yuichi Iino (Director of Public Relations / Professor, Department of Biological Sciences)
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| Lecture Poster (Top: Extraordinary Public Lecture by the Faculty of Science, Bottom: The 33rd Public Lecture by the Faculty of Science, The University of Tokyo) |
The Faculty of Science and Graduate School of Science have been holding public lectures once or twice a year to introduce the fascination of science to the general public, and the 32nd Public Lecture scheduled for March 2020 was postponed due to the corona disaster. After the sample return of Hayabusa2 on Sunday, December 6, which excited the whole country, we decided to hold an extraordinary public lecture by three Graduate School faculty members who played important roles in the project, and chose February 23, 2021 (national holiday, Tuesday) as the date.
On that day, the three lectures were delivered online in the afternoon from Koshiba Hall (Fig.) Professor Seiji Sugita (Department of Earth and Planetary Science) talked about the nature of the asteroid Ryuguu as revealed by the Hayabusa2 spacecraft, and Associate Professor Tomokatsu Morota (Department of Earth and Planetary Science) explained the difficult process of landing on Ryuguu's surface in "The Road to Touchdown on the Surface of Ryuguu. He introduced the path to the successful landing on the surface of Ryuguu with realistic images. Professor Shogo Tachibana (UTokyo Organization for Planetary and Space Science) followed with a presentation on "What's inside the jewel box from Ryuguu? - Prospects for Future Analysis" by Prof. Shogo Tachibana (ISAS), he talked about the recovery and initial analysis of the samples dropped in Australia with a sense of realism. Symbolic of the high level of interest in the world, a maximum audience of 695 people, several times the capacity of Koshiba Hall, attended the lecture. The lecture was characterized by the wide age range of participants, with two peaks in the teens and 50s, and was designed to allow interactive dialogue by accepting on-time questions using the web system "slido" and having graduate students from the speaker's laboratory mediate the questions. Participants were highly satisfied with this method.
Figure: A scene from the extraordinary public lecture (Lecturer: Professor Shogo Tachibana, UTokyo Organization for Planetary and Space Science)
The 33rd Public Lecture was delivered on the afternoon of Thursday, March 11, 2021, also from Koshiba Hall. As with the extraordinary lecture, the lecture was interactive. Professor Mitsuhiko Shiotani (Department of Chemistry) gave a lecture on "Molecular design and coincidence, what will break new ground in chemistry? In "Capturing Black Holes" by Assistant Professor Kazumi Kashiyama (Research Center for the Early Universe), he talked about the grandeur of the universe, including how to observe black holes that suck in even light and how many black holes there are. How many black holes there are in the universe? Next, Assistant Professor Yoshie Koganebuchi (Department of Biological Sciences) presented "Unraveling Human History with the Shimoto Gene and the Ryukyu Genome" on topics both familiar and profound, such as the genes that determine the characteristics of each individual and large-scale genetic analysis that investigates their origins. This lecture also attracted a great deal of interest from the audience, with the highest number of live viewers being 428.
The Public Relations Office and Information Technology Team collaborated in the preparation, recording, and distribution of both lectures. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to all those who viewed the lectures and to all those who assisted in various ways.
Faculty of Science News, May 2021