Open course ware

[MUSIC PLAYING] JEFFREY GROSSMAN: So we've sort of got into this place where we can make anything we want all the way to scale the atom while at the same time, we need that more than ever to solve the most pressing global challenges. It's a really exciting time to understand how atoms come together and what we can do with that. SARAH HANSEN: Today on Chalk Radio, we're talking atoms. In this episode, we're going to see what it takes to bring concepts from theory to reality and how one professor at MIT has learned to make his course content real, tangible, and important to his students. JEFFREY GROSSMAN: If you can touch and feel some aspect of what you're learning, then you learn it in a richer way. You learn it from a different angle. You see the problem a little bit differently. SARAH HANSEN: We're going to explore the world of solid state chemistry course 3.091, which as always is available on MIT OpenCourseWare. And to take us through, we'r...

JEFFREY MARK DRAZEN: So this is how I view pharmacogenomics. It's the use of genetic information to determine who will respond favorably or unfavorably. And I think, actually, unfavorably may be a better phenotype to a given type of treatment. And the reason I say that is that, especially the condition that I study, asthma, there are a lot of folks that have a placebo effect from treatment. And so if I'm studying a drug and I give everybody a placebo-- that's my trial. I compare placebo A to the pink placebo, to the yellow placebo. And I know this is just a sugar pill and shouldn't have any biological impact on asthma. But I know that 25% of people are going to get better from this. And if I'm stratifying my outcome by genotypes, you'll see that I could be misled. But if I'm looking for a phenotype which is less likely to be contaminated by a placebo effect-- for example, people who get worse with treatment-- then I'm looking at the natural...

[SQUEAKING] [RUSTLING] [CLICKING] JEFFREY C. GROSSMAN: I want to start with this sort of big picture, all right. So we're going to kind of introduce energy storage, and then we'll talk about sort of why electrical storage is kind of a thing and important, and then we'll kind of go into batteries and then talk about the chemistry of batteries and throw in a couple of, why this matters. So if you think about this on a planetary scale, actually, the planet is kind of a storage device. It's an energy storage device for that thing over there, right, and so like if you think about all the energy flows that go on on planet Earth, well, then you've got-- there's a picture I like. It kind of shows you the different energy flows, right. You've got the sun, so you've got like solar radiation. You've got tides, there's the moon, you've got wind. You've got all these kinds of energy happening on the planet, all the way down to life happe...