The instructors at OmniLearn had an exciting opportunity to travel to Brookhaven National Laboratory this past June! Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is a national research laboratory under the United States Department of Energy located about 70 miles east of New York City on Long Island. For most of the past year, we met virtually with Dr. David Biersach, Technology Architect at BNL, to learn about his efforts and strategies to teach scientific computing at the middle and high school level with the goal of incorporating what we learned into our own teaching. Scientific computing refers to the ways scientists use computers as a tool for their experiments, often by writing code to rapidly collect measurements and analyze data. At the end of our meetings, we visited BNL in person to further discuss scientific computing in education and to learn more about their programs.
While we were at BNL, we went on a tour of the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II)! A synchrotron is an open ring-shaped instrument, sometimes hundreds of meters across or more, that scientists use to generate X-rays for experimental research. A more famous example similar to a synchrotron is the Large Hadron Collider, which opened in 2008 in Europe to study the smallest building blocks and earliest moments of our universe. The Large Hadron Collider was central to the work that earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013.
At NSLS-II, scientists send electrons hurtling around the ring of the synchrotron, and they use precisely calibrated magnets to maintain the trajectory of these electrons. As the electrons turn around the ring of the synchrotron, they emit intense light, most often X-rays — the same kind of light used by medical doctors to image bones, but many times brighter. Scientists then use these X-rays to conduct experiments that often can’t happen at all without the X-ray properties, such as brightness, that a synchrotron can provide. These experiments span a broad variety of disciplines including materials science, biological sciences and nuclear physics. Some experiments use high-energy X-rays, or hard X-rays, which are particularly good at passing through matter (like human tissue). This makes them useful to medicine, as well as research on crystalline materials, for example. Other experiments use soft X-rays, which carry less energy and less readily pass through matter, making them useful to, for example, some kinds of microscopy. The synchrotron at BNL can produce both hard and soft X-rays.
As part of our tour, we met some of the scientists working at the synchrotron and learned about their experiments. One group of scientists in particular were using synchrotron X-rays to study protein shapes to develop new medicines. We also learned about an experiment that was proposed by a high school student that was conducted at the synchrotron. It focused on examining human tears using X-rays — for example, if happy tears had a different composition or different properties from sad tears.
Experiments like these, and others across all disciplines of science, rely on scientific computing to collect and report their data and findings. This makes scientific computing essential learning for students considering future careers in STEM. Students not actively planning careers in STEM can also benefit from learning scientific computing skills, which can boost productivity in many quantitative jobs and enhance overall computer literacy. The instructors at OmniLearn look forward to bringing concepts and practices from scientific computing to students, instructors, and schools across the city!
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