He now works for COM DEV http://www.comdev.ca/, a Cambridge, Ontario company near the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo that specializes in space hardware, robotics in space, satellites, space telecommunications, electronics and optics, and anything else that gets launched into space—likely a lot of military stuff too. They are prime contractors for Canada Space Agency.

He's worked on many satellite and space missions and is now leading a new Quantum Entanglement and Encryption micro-satellite mission.

eatART is an educational charity with a mandate to use art to raise awareness about energy. This talk will focus on eatART's two current works in progress: Titanoboa and Prosthesis. It will also be an opportunity to hear about eatART's message, how we function as an organization and how you can get involved.

Learn how to build professional looking prototypes in metal, platics and ceramics taking advantage of the unique capabilities of water jet cutting, available to UBC students

Creo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creo) was founded in 1983 by Dan Gelbart and was acquired by Kodak in 2005. Creo specialized in imaging technology and software development for professional computer printing and publishing. The company had over 4200 employees when it was acquired.

Dr. Green will show images of his kayaking expeditions in the Pacific Northwest

The end is near. It seems the end is ALWAYS near. And the end is always being brought about by hadron-crazy particle physicists, or predicted by ancient Mayans, or the result of betrayal by our trusted friend, the Sun, erupting in a temper tantrum of a solar superstorm. Will time itself end in 2012? What's science and what's science fiction? And what's sometimes both at the same time?

How do astronomers think the Universe might end? The closing chapters in the Big Bang Theory used to be either an infinitely long slide towards absolute zero or a "Big Crunch". Now, why are some cosmologists talking about "The Big Rip"?

Set your calendar for Wednesday, 16 November, to learn some of answers. If the world ends before then, the talk is cancelled. No refunds. (No charge for admission, either.)

About 13.7 billion years ago, our Universe was born in a Big Bang. That early universe was a big steaming stew of radiation and exactly equal numbers of particles and antiparticles. But somehow, a symmetry was broken, and a lopsided-ness arose, leaving a very small excess of matter over antimatter. And by the time the universe was less than a second old, essentially all the antimatter had annihilated with matter in bursts of light/energy, leaving a small residual excess of matter - which is all the matter we see in our universe; the matter we're all made of.

Understanding Charge-Parity (CP) violation and its origins is a key element in understanding this matter-antimatter asymmetry. The Standard Model of Particle Physics has been a triumph of particle physics - but it has a shortcoming: it accommodates CP violation, but at a level orders of magnitude too small to explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry of our universe.

Charge Parity violation, was first observed 47 years ago in the neutral kaon system, and in 2001 using the BaBar Experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, we were the first to observe CP violation in another system: the B meson system.

In the 1970's three theoreticians proposed a model to explain how the universe is dominantly matter and not anti-matter, but it was not until recently that our group and another finally confirmed their theory, earning them their 2009 Nobel Prize. (we earned a mention in their Nobel citation!)

I'll review our 15 year experimental program, studying the decays of hundreds of millions of B mesons, examining CP violation and testing the Standard Model of Particle Physics to great precision. An overview of the experiment and results will be presented.

This presentation will highlight 50+ years of technology development and breakthroughs pertaining to the test and design for test of ICs, Systems on a Chip (SoCs) and Systems of SoCs. Some highlights of the major challenges faced by the research communities and by the industry will be presented. Highlights of emerging trends and solutions will also be presented.

Quantum information science and technology promises to have a tremendous impact on the future of technology, and on our society as a whole. By manipulating information at the quantum level, tremendous improvements can be made on the way we compute, communicate and sense. In this talk, I will explore several experimental implementations of quantum information processing, including nuclear magnetic resonance and quantum dots. I will discuss experimental challenges, as well as their current and potential applications.

A general theme threads my research: how is our understanding of astrophysical phenomena and fundamental physics connected. Neutron stars provide a laboratory to test our knowledge of nature at the extreme. The magnetic fields, densities and pressures of neutron stars exceed those produced on Earth more than a billion-fold. Neutron stars provide a unique opportunity to extrapolate and verify our theories of matter, energy and their interaction. I will present observations of tsunamis and earthquakes on neutron stars and what they can tell us about these extreme objects.

There is going to be so much food this time. Sandwiches, fruit/veggie/cheese platters, cookies, drinks... almost everything imaginable! So do come out! As I have said last time, I will need you to bring yourself, a sharp mind, and great questions. Oh yeah, and an empty stomach.

Zaber Technologies designs and manufacturers precision motion control devices. Basically they are tiny little robots that move very small distances (sub-micron) under computer control. These are used for everything from aligning components in laser systems to biomedical experiments. We have customers in 50+ countries around the world, and 20% of our employees are Fizzers.

We are going to talk about two things:

• How to start a high tech company with no money and no experience
• How to achieve precision motion control with inexpensive and imprecise components.

General Fusion (GF) is a privately funded company with the ultimate goal of building a nuclear fusion electrical power plant. Just that!!! GF is using a hot fusion method called Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF). MTF is a fusion approach first developed in 1976 and still studied very slowly by various labs with very little resources. In MTF a relatively cool and low density magnetized plasma is first formed. The plasma has electrical current flowing inside generating magnetic fields that confine it; there are no external coils to support this so called compact torus (CT). The self-supporting CT is then sent into a metallic container that is rapidly collapsed, compressing and heating the plasma to thermonuclear conditions. This injection-compression cycle is repeated to produce power. GF proposes to use a new lower cost compression system. By applying more resources and with the faster development possible in a small private company, GF hopes to demonstrate net energy gain from this fusion approach in a few years and a power plant in less than a decade.

For more information, please see http://www.generalfusion.com/.

People have been visiting alien worlds in the movie theatres for more than 100 years, since Georges Melies tooks audiences on "A Trip to the Moon" in 1902. But it has only been since 1995 that astronomers have been able to explore alien worlds around Sun-like stars (remotely, with telescopes) after the discovery of the "hot Jupiter" exoplanet 51 Pegasi b. And only recently that exoplanets have been found whose masses and sizes approach those of the Earth. And very soon, the idea of an exoEarth will no longer be science fiction but science fact.

Are there Pandoras out there? Are there Goldilocks Planets? What's a Goldilocks Planet and is one of them Gliese 581g? It sounds like a boring name for an alien world that could support life, and one that could inspire the setting of the next Avatar film. It might not even be a real world with a warm watery surface, but one thing is certain: the name Gliese 581g will generate heat for some time to come.

The recent announcement of this exoplanet made astronomers and exobiologists almost as excited as if they had found Pandora or Tatooine. Why? Because Gliese 581g would have been the first planet known, other than our Earth, to orbit in the Habitable Zone, at a distance from its parent star that would allow liquid water to exist on its surface. Think of it as the "Goldilocks Zone" where the planet is not too hot, not too cold, but "just right" for water oceans. And maybe just right for life?

Even more recent was the suggestion by other expert exoplanet hunters that Gliese 581 g was a figment, not of one's imagination, but of the noise inherent in the measurements made to find planets around other stars. Now you see it; now you don't. Has Goldilocks turned into the Cheshire Cat? And have astronomers fallen down the rabbit hole?

A few years ago, the subject of life on other planets seemed like a fairy tale (or an X Files rerun). Today, we are on the verge of finding exoEarths (Earth-sized planets in Earth-sized orbits around Sun-like stars). How do we search for alien worlds? What have we found? How will we look for evidence of life on these planets as we find Goldilocks worlds? Find out on November 16th.

In 1884, Edwin Abbot published the satirical book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. This book has motivated many readers to think of how to visualize extra dimensions. A natural question is, what are the laws of physics in flatland or, more precisely, 3-dimensional spacetimes? This is not only a toy model of the real world; the physics of spacetime dimensions other than the observed 4 are considered for everything from the Large Hadron Collider to cosmology. Furthermore, on the intermediate scales, the physics of certain condensed matter systems and of certain quantum computers are described by theories in lower dimensions. In this talk, I will discuss some current research on aspects of gravitational physics in 3 dimensional spacetimes related to problems at the forefront of modern theoretical physics.

When we look back through the history of humankind, a pattern emerges: when humans harness a force of nature, great changes occur. Take the discovery of fire, which led to agriculture, communal living and the eventual development of steam power, which sparked the industrial revolution. The discovery of electromagnetism was the catalyst that led to incalculable technological advancements leading to today’s information society. For the past 20 years or so, mathematicians, computer scientists, chemists, physicists and engineers have been working to harness the next, and most fundamental, forces of nature — the laws governing the quantum world. By harnessing and controlling quantum effects such as the superposition principle and entanglement, quantum information processing promises significant improvements over today's computing, communications and sensing technologies, among many other advancements. In this talk, I will overview the theoretical and experimental bases of quantum information processing.

For more info, please see: http://www.iqc.ca/