What we worked on

This week, we had a very special guest with us during our Tuesday session. Steven Goldfarb, a physicist from the University of Melbourne who works on the ATLAS experiment at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

In the leadup to Steven’s visit, the team worked to develop two opportunity and technology cards to share with him and discuss, as well as add to our collection. We have created six opportunity cards so far, which is an amazing effort! (in our opinion).

We also met with Sarah, Kristina and Hannah from our CBI Buddy team, Team Bee, over Skype. We missed Christian, our fourth team member, as he was apparently asleep.

Alongside all this, the team continued to conduct research and brainstorm/mind map to discover what other opportunities we could identify in the lead up to our trip to CERN.

 

What we learnt

In our discussions with Steve about the CERN technology, we were exposed to his knowledge of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and what occurs inside the collider, as well as how results are detected and what factors are taken into consideration by the sensors when calculating these results.

We had an interesting discussion on the CERN technology, as well as other possible avenues for application, the science revolving around them and Higgs Theory (a field of particle physics), bringing out the physicists in the ASE team. Discussing particle physics (as difficult as it sounds) made us understand the processes involved in the LHC much better and tried to make links with some existing technology, such as that of medical technology.

 

We identified and researched 6 more technologies and 6 opportunities:

Opportunities:

  • ACL/Knee injuries
  • Immigrant trauma & mental health services
  • Accessibility to sexual health services
  • Treatment of Dementia
  • Vegetable Consumption
  • Skin Cancer

 

Technology:

  • Integrated CO2 Cooling System
  • OrthoPix Data Compression
  • Timepix3
  • Structured Laser Beam
  • Flame Detector (Photosensitive)
  • Train Inspection Monorail (TIM)

 

Having these discussions made gave us a greater understanding of the processes involved in the LHC that we believed we knew enough about, so hearing about the greater details really amazed us and we were grateful that Steven was able to have this discussion with us. We agreed on catching up again at CERN as some point during our trip.

 

Quote of the week

“We do our part with science, but this is where you come in, to put it to use.” -Steven Goldfarb to Team ASE. 

 

What next?

The team will continue to conduct research to finish off our opportunity cards and technology cards before our trip to Geneva next week. We have assigned tasks for us to complete with an even workload in order to have our work done in a timely manner. We will also check in with Team Bee at some point early next week to discuss our progress. The week will only get more exciting as we continue to count down the days until our trip!