Spring 2008

Climate Change: A Tipping Point
Last semester’s senior biology colloquium addressed the subject “Climate Change: Trends, Implications, and Public Opinion.” The authors of the resulting paper assert that “… if we do not begin to take steps to curtail our emissions substantially, we may reach a tipping point from which the Earth’s climate may not be able to recover.”

No More Erasers
Mathematically inclined Sudoku fans will delight in an online article by Tim Chartier, assistant professor of mathematics. Chartier discusses the history of the popular puzzles and demonstrates how they can be solved when formulated as binary integer programs.

Synthetic Biology: A Blend
What is synthetic biology, and how will it affect your life? Students enrolled in last semester’s synthetic biology seminar created Wikipedia pages to explain this increasingly important field of study that blends math, biology, computer science, and engineering within the liberal arts context.

Election Year “Discord”
Political Science major Zeke Webster ’09 is trying to generate some dialogue on politics during this election season with an ideologically neutral blog called “Discord.” An unabashed liberal, he claims that the blog attracts moderates, conservatives, libertarians, “and people I wouldn’t even know how to classify.”