DS Daniel Schury

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A personal lab journal — research, technology, systems, and notes

Urbanization shaping – CUPS Press Office Article How Bouldering keeps urban communities in shape So, you too enjoy this amazing sport, where people climb over comparatively short distances without any tools, such as ropes or harnesses? Amazing! But, to quote a famous British ensemble, now for something completely different. Today we want to talk about a more serious and urgent topic: flood risks. The recent flood in the New York City area convincingly showed us the risk of flooding in (highly) populated urban areas. Climate change and socioeconomic developments keep on increasing this risk further and further.
ICD in endohedral fullerenes – CUPS Press Office Article Shedding light on transfers in soccer – from a physicist’s point of view Ever wondered about the connection between sports, architecture and molecular physics? These three distinctive fields come together when we talk about fullerenes. Fullerenes are a modification of carbon with some very interesting properties. The most outstanding one is their structure: They are hollow spheres made up of several penta- and hexagons, resembling a cage. The most famous fullerene C60 (Fig. 1a) actually looks very similar to the traditional pattern of a soccer ball (Fig. 1b). Fullerenes are named after the American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller who is famous for his constructions of geodesic domes, very similar to the fullerenes structure (Fig. 1c). Therefore fullerenes are commonly referred to as Buckminster Fullerenes or Bucky Balls. Fullerenes can build a unique molecular structure where atoms, molecules or even other small clusters are bound inside of the cage. These molecules are called endohedral molecules, with Ho3N@C80 (Fig. 1d) being an example introduced later in this text.
Random Walking – CUPS Press Office Article Random Walking – When having no clue where to go still makes you reach your destination In empirical sciences, theories can be sorted into three categories with ascending gain of knowledge: empirical, semi-empirical and ab initio. Their difference can best be explained by an example: In astronomy the movement of all planets was known since ancient times. By pure observation astronomers could predict where in the sky a certain planet would be at a given time. They had the knowledge of how they moved but actually no clue why they did so. Their knowledge was purely empirical, meaning purely based on observation. Kepler became the first to develop a model by postulating that the sun is the center of the planetary system and the planet’s movement is controlled by her. Since Kepler could not explain why the planets would be moved by the sun, he had to introduce free parameters which he varied until the prediction of the model matched the observations. This is a so-called semi-empirical model. But it was not until Newton who with his theory of gravity could predict the planets movements without any free parameters or assumptions but purely by an ab initio, latin for “from the beginning”, theory based on fundamental principles of nature, namely gravity. As scientists are quite curious creatures, they always want to know not only how things work but also why they work this way. Therefore, developing ab initio theories is the holy grail in every discipline.