Horgan Seminar Blog

  Our eyes process 36,000 bits of information per hour, taking around 65 percent of our brain's capacity, the most out of any organ, in order to deliver our reality to us. In the center, where your optic nerve resides in a small blind spot, the hole in our vision, which, unless you develop certain eye diseases, you would never discover. This blind spot is filled in by the brain through the processes of perceptual filling, using contours in the space, past experiences, and the surrounding colors and lighting to make up the difference for this small region. This skill, while incredibly important to providing us a full field of vision, leaves us vulnerable to visual tricks.  See for yourself, hold these cards out arms length, focus on the dots, and take turns closing each eye. You will notice the stars disappear.  Traditionally, there are two theories to explain the neurology behind perceptive filling: symbolic and isomorphic. Proposed in 1988 by Kingdom and Moulden, the sym...

  Jonah Diaz Professor John Horgan HST 401-A 26 January 2026 Honey I Shrunk the Robot: Breakthrough in Microscopic Actuators with Potential Applications in Healthcare Nothing frustrates me more than dimensioning components pertaining to an engineering design concept. Naturally, it would be reasonable to optimize the design’s GDT (geometric dimensioning and tolerancing) based on a set of parameters such as performance and efficiency, but you’ll find that the real world presents its own arsenal of constraints to hinder or compromise any “ideal design.” A group of peers and myself had designed a robotic hand which we felt would perform its directed set of tasks optimally and this had been further validated through a series of simulations and analyses run. However, it was to our team’s utter dread that we realized that this design could not be realized as any viable actuation method would make the design unwieldy cumbersome, lacked the necessary deliverable power or could not fit withi...

  Faye Gilbert Prof. John Horgan - HST401  January 29 th , 2026          Disruptions in the Flyway: Sharing our resources with the Red Knots   The word “flyway” reads somewhat poetically. Even to one unaware of its meaning, it could be gathered from the liquid consonants and the continuity that the letter “y” drives softly forward. I can only imagine it was chosen representatively by the 19 th  century journalists who coined it, even subconsciously.                    It’s May. The Red Knot, a small, stocky, yellow-bellied shorebird is mid-migration and makes it typical stop in its flyway at the Delaware Bay, just as it did last year and the year before. It arrives hungry, and it searches the shoreline for the abundance of excess horseshoe crab eggs it found so conveniently strewn about last year’s beach. The horseshoe crabs are ...

Fusion energy has been on the horizon for decades now. Touted as containing “the power of the Sun”, but never actually realized, it has been a rather sore topic for those in the field. It was often joked, to the annoyance of those scientists, that fusion energy was “always a decade away”. As it turns out, this field is exactly my anticipated career path. Connecting with scientists during my journey into graduate school, these sentiments are exactly what I haven’t heard from scientists in the field. Aware of fusion’s history, they are confident in its future, owing to recent developments in the field. Opponents will be quick to point out fusion’s historical shortcomings, but recent developments display marked differences that promise not to repeat fusion’s muddy past. Computation, a cornerstone of fusion research, has advanced rapidly, starting in the early 2000’s. Computational power in general increased substantially and has continued to; more sophisticated and efficient simulations h...

  Zachary Rosario   Professor John Horgan   Seminar in Science Writing   28 January 2025   What’s  the Plan for Nuclear Waste?   Since 1970, the United States has been trying to find a  suitable  location for  a national nuclear waste repository.   Lack of public support has spoiled every attempt so far, however, so have technical difficulties 1 .   Naysayers  to  nuclear  waste storage  often  get  labelled as neo-luddites, but their worries are  founded  given the NRC’s record.   The first  selected   location  was in Lyons,  Kansas,   deep in the tunnels of  an abandoned salt   mine 2 . Salt  deposits have been proposed  since the 1950’s as  a practical   place  to store  nuclear   waste .  This is because t hey  are often  f ound in areas with low earth-quake  activity;   their   p...