HiPACC Education/Public Outreach Press Room. From: UCLA
The Education/Public Outreach Press Room highlights opportunities made available to K-12 or university students or the general public, to learn more about astronomy and computational or data science in all fields, offered by the UC campuses and DOE laboratories comprising the UC-HiPACC consortium. The wording of the short summaries on this page is based on wording in the individual releases or on the summaries on the press release page of the original source. Images are also from the original sources except as stated. Press releases below appear in reverse chronological order (most recent first); they can also be displayed by UC campus or DOE lab by clicking on the desired venue at the bottom of the left-hand column.
October 14, 2014 — UCLA hosts 24-hour invention competition to meet health care needs
A team of UCLA students working on their project during the 2013 Inventathon competition. Credit: Samantha Le/UCLA
UCLA 10/14/2014—Just a stone’s throw from Silicon Beach (the epicenter of technology in Los Angeles) the Business of Science Center at UCLA, with support from the Center for Advanced Surgical and Interventional Technology and Center for Digital Behavior, is spurring innovation as the organizer of the second-annual Inventathon. The event is a unique 24-hour competition designed to develop solutions for pressing healthcare needs using the latest device technology and mobile applications for use in the healthcare field. During the 24-hour competition, the teams will have access to tools such as 3-D printers, augmented reality glasses that can be used to help design and test applications for wearable devices, and special boards to help make mini computer chips, which are the brains behind the applications.
Read full UCLA Press Release
August 7, 2014 — UCLA undergrads are first to build an entire satellite on campus
Once in orbit, ELFIN will study the phenomena that cause the dazzling auroras. Credit: ELFIN
UCLA, 8/7/2014—To conduct research on space weather, an enterprising group of UC Los Angeles undergraduates is manufacturing the first satellite built entirely on the UCLA campus. When launched in 2016 or 2017, the breadbox-sized Electron Loss and Fields Investigation (ELFIN) CubeSat will determine how solar wind particles and radiation behave in Earth’s environment, a topic of increasing concern because magnetic storms can wreak havoc on space infrastructure like GPS, communication and weather satellites, and even damage the electrical grid here on Earth. Uncertain whether the project would someday be fully funded, several dozen intrepid undergraduate students took on the project as their own, collectively putting in thousands of hours over three years as a labor of love, developing and testing the satellite’s subsystems. In 2013 the U.S. Air Force awarded the team a $110,000 grant to continue development and buy much-needed parts. In February 2014, the NASA’s CubeSat Initiative and the Low-Cost Access to Space program guaranteed them a launch spot. And in May, the team was awarded $1.2 million jointly from NASA and the National Science Foundation, ensuring enough funding to put the space-qualified hardware in orbit and to operate it for six months from the UCLA Mission Operations Center, to be located on campus.
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May 12, 2014 — Undergraduate Research Week celebrates students’ diverse accomplishments
Brett Lopez, an aerospace engineering student who is presenting his project during UCLA's Undergraduate Research Week, examines how different alternative fuels react to sound waves. Credit: UCLA
UCLA 5/12/14 — Brett Lopez, a UCLA aerospace engineering student, conducts experiments on how different alternative fuels — such as methanol and ethanol — react to sound waves. The senior is just one of approximately 600 students who presented their research prowess and talents during Undergraduate Research Week May 12–16 at UCLA’s Powell Library. Open to all UCLA undergraduates, Undergraduate Research Week provides opportunities for students to present their research in the sciences, humanities, arts, and social sciences to the campus and broader community. UCLA undergraduates “have the opportunity to conduct the kind of high-level and meaningful research that often isn’t available to students until graduate school,” said Patricia Turner, dean and vice provost of undergraduate education in the UCLA College of Letters and Science.
Read full UCLA Press Release