Institute News
What’s better than science? Shiny science in a cozy atmosphere accompanied by a fresh and cooling pint, of course! This year, the three-day science festival Pint of Science was also filled with content from our research. Two scientists from caesar impressively demonstrated how to make science vivid, gripping and understandable for everyone!
At the event "Of Robots and Optics - Exciting Stories from Neuroscience", Andres Flores-Valle and Ivan Vishniakou inspired over 50 participants. Afterwards, there were exciting and sometimes very humorous discussions and questions.
Andres’ talk “Are robots already more intelligent than insects?” kicked off and raised the question “Are robots smarter than insects?” In the last years we have seen many cool robots navigating autonomously, for example self-driving cars, robot vacuum cleaners, robot dogs, etc. They seem to be already very smart, right? In the talk he explained how insects navigate in comparison to robots, how their tiny brains do math, and he showed what we can learn from these small animals to develop better robots. Andres' contribution was followed by Ivan's. His presentation was entitled “Looking at stars with a microscope. What is adaptive optics and how it can help us see better”. But if you think that sounds rather dry, you haven't reckoned with Ivan's drawing and explaining skills! He took us into the world of astronomy and its importance for the development of microscopes: Twinkle twinkle little star… – said no astronomer ever! In fact, significant efforts were put into making space images stable, clear and sharp by developing adaptive optics. Nowadays this technology is finding more applications in various fields. He ended up in showing how adaptive optics works, and how we power it with artificial intelligence to make images in our microscope better.
What a night! Soon, recordings can be seen on youtube.
