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Science Pubs at Cozmic Pizza
   When: The 2nd Thursday of the month at 7:00pm Where: Cozmic Pizza, The Science Pub is open to anyone and everyone, no RSVP required. Science Pub is meant for adults. Tell your friends, and we hope to see you there! Thursday, August 19 (NOTE: it's one week later than usual!) Go Up or Get Out? What Will We Do When the Tsunami Hits Oregon? Suppose you’re enjoying a weekend at Seaside and you feel the ground shake—what would you do? The current plan calls for you to follow a marked evacuation route downhill and across two rivers to a designated area 1½ miles from the water’s edge. Do you think you could make it? At night? In the rain? With the family dog in tow? The Cascadia Subduction Zone is the sleeping giant of the Pacific Northwest, a massive fault running from Northern California to British Columbia, similar in many ways to the Sumatra fault that created the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The odds of the fault letting loose in the next 50 years are about 7 to 1, and the latest research suggests it might be as high as 2 to 1. We will have about 15 to 20 minutes before water strikes the coast. In Japan, a country that has lived with tsunamis for centuries, they are perfecting tsunami evacuation strategies using a method called vertical evacuation. In southeast Asia, there are numerous stories of survivors from the 2004 tsunami who reached safety by going up. But there are risks with this vertical strategy. How do we know the structure will survive the initial earthquake? Can a structure be built to withstand a tsunami? At this Science Pub, we’ll explore tsunami science, the engineering behind vertical evacuation, and how we might have to rethink our tsunami evacuation strategy when the giant awakes. We’ll also talk about the recent Samoan tsunami and the Chilean earthquake. Daniel Cox, PhD, is a professor at Oregon State University and former director of the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory. (This is a repeat of the Science Pub held in November 2007 but will have updated information based on recent tsunami in Samoa and Chile and new tests for a proposed Tsunami Evacuation Building at Cannon Beach.) Thursday, Spetember 9, 2010 The Stuff of Life What are you made of? It’s easy to make a list of your “pieces”—cells, bones, muscles, and more—but what determines the physical properties of these materials, and how do these properties guide the forms and functions of living things? Exploring these broad questions ties together physics and biology and illuminates issues as seemingly distinct as how your cells pack a meter of DNA into a space a millionth of a meter long and why an elephant would break its legs trying to leap like a cat. At this Science Pub we'll explore topics in biophysics, paying special attention to the soap-film-like membranes that surround your cells and to similarities between living “squishy” materials (like your flesh) and non-living materials like gels and foams. Raghu Parthasarathy, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Physics Department at the University of Oregon and is a member of the Materials Science Institute and the Institute of Molecular Biology at UO. |
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