By Paul Caine Producer, WTTW’s Chicago Tonight

Originally published at: https://chicagotonight.wttw.com/2014/04/29/climate-change-and-national-security

What does climate change and national security have to do with each other?  Everything according to international science and military experts. They say changing weather patterns effect food and freshwater availability resulting in a competition for resources and possible political instability.  We take a closer look at the issue on Scientific Chicago with retired Brig. Gen. Stephen Cheney, CEO of the American Security Project, Elisabeth Moyer, co-director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Robust Decision Making on Climate and Energy Policy, and Andrew Holland, senior fellow for Energy and Climate from the American Security Project.

Continue reading “Climate Change and National Security”

By Elise Byun, Medill Reports

Originally published at: http://newsarchive.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news-229592.html

By Dawn Turner Trice, Chicago Tribune

Dirk Morr came of age in Germany in the 1970s watching the television show “Star Trek,” which was dubbed in German. Imagine Capt. James Kirk’s often parodied, halting speech pattern delivered in a foreign language.

The show and its idea to boldly go “where no man has gone before” sparked in Morr a deep curiosity and love for science. Today, Morr, 47, is a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Continue reading “Trice: UIC professor sets phasers to fun in ‘Star Trek’ Q&A”

By Cheryl V. Jackson, Special to Blue Sky, Chicago Tribune

Originally published at: http://bluesky.chicagotribune.com/originals/chi-dirk-morr-star-trek-bsi-not-20140403,0,0.story

Communicator devices from “Star Trek”? We’ve already got ‘em in our cell phones.

But it probably won’t soon be possible to be beamed up by “Scotty” or anybody else, according to a physicist extolling the technological legacy of the science fiction franchise.

“Star Trek has fascinated us for the last 50 years,” University of Illinois at Chicago physics professor Dirk Morr said Wednesday during a Chicago Council on Science and Technology program at the university. It was part of a series of events surrounding Gov. Pat Quinn’s designation of Illinois Innovation Day Thursday.

Continue reading “How ‘Star Trek’ predicted the technological world we live in today”