April Monthly Meeting

Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh Monthly Meeting

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WHEN: Wednesday – April 15
RSVP BY: Thursday – April 9 – by NOON

Download Monthly Meeting Flyer
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TECHNOLOGY PROGRAM – 8:15PM
Rohit Bhartia, Ph.D., Planetary Chemistry and Astrobiology, JPL/NASA/Caltech

“NSmoke, Mirrors and Black Boxes Expanding our Understanding of Mars”
The next Mars mission is scheduled to launch in 2020. This mission includes a roving platform with a suite of spectroscopic and imaging instruments that will be used to explore the surface and near subsurface of Mars with the expressed goal to search for potential biosignatures. One of the instruments, SHERLOC, is an arm-mounted deep UV fluorescence and Raman spectrometer that enables non-contact, spatially resolved, high sensitivity detection and characterization of organics and minerals. This talk will discuss the overall mission, the development of SHERLOC, and how we will utilize deep UV spectroscopic methods to assess past aqueous history, detect the presence and preservation potential of biosignatures, and support the selection of samples for caching and potential return to Earth. …read more

TECHNICAL FORUM – 5:30 PM
Thomas Kensler, University of Pittsburgh

“Broccoli and Your Health: Why It Might Be a Superfood”
Health reflects the ability of an organism to adapt to stress. Stresses — metabolic, proteotoxic, mitotic, oxidative and DNA-damage stresses — contribute to the etiology of cancer and other chronic degenerative diseases. Our work demonstrates that activation of the Kelch-like ECHassociated protein 1 (KEAP1)–NF-E2-related factor 2 (NRF2)-signaling pathway is an adaptive response to environmental and endogenous stresses and serves to render animals resistant to chemical carcinogenesis, other forms of toxicity, and inflammation whilst disruption of the pathway exacerbates these outcomes. …read more