The physics of superconductors in reduced dimensions — two in particular — is related to such varied phenomena as high-temperature superconductivity, topological superconductivity, and the paradigmatic quantum phase transition, the superconductor-insulator transition.

Since discovering the existence of a diffuse flux of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos in 2013, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has worked to identify astrophysical sources of high energy neutrinos. Recently, a high-energy neutrino event detected by IceCube on 22 September 2017 was coincident in direction and time with a gamma-ray flare from the blazar TXS 0506+056.

I will discuss how semi-realistic four dimensional spacetimes are obtained from string theory including a new class of Calabi-Yau manifolds, which generalizes earlier notions of mirror symmetry.

Hurricanes are ubiquitous in the terrestrial tropics, and their definition often includes a sea surface temperature threshold, latitude range and other parameters unique to the present-day climate. However, a decade ago the Cassini mission observed Earth-sized cyclones on both poles of Saturn. In the last two years the Juno mission spotted bizarre packings of similar cyclones at Jupiter’s poles. These massive cyclones are by no means tropical but they seem to be a similar phenomenon in some ways to hurricanes on Earth.