15x4 — Share Your Knowledge!
15х4 is a movement of young scientists and science fans.
We want people to speak out and share their knowledge.
Contactless payments, access cards for offices, identification of animals – only a few every-day applications that have made life easier. But are we sure that the data are sufficiently protected? Let's talk about privacy problems and how to secure against them.
Many perceive leadership as a mystical force possessed by few, affecting many. But what does research say about it? What makes a good leader and what do great leaders do? Join us in understanding the science of leadership through music.
Let’s explore the Chinese language and look at some of its fascinating features. In this interactive talk, we’ll talk about some beautiful characters, the tonal system, interesting grammar, and how to form names.
A personalized, made-to-order, mini human brain? Why not? All we need is some skin or hair cells from a person! Learn how scientists are making mini brains (boring scientific term: cerebral organoids) and how they are using them to study brain development and disease.
There is a lot of abstract art in the world! Bad or good, abstract painting exists since the beginning of 20th century. Let’s talk about it’s history, about the most influential abstract artists of all times, and let’s learn the main principles of abstract art.
From time to time, everyone needs storytelling to pass on a message. Some of us use it when delivering a presentation, while others use storytelling for a sales pitch, thesis defense, or even a salary negotiation. At 15x4, we gained a lot of experience in helping speakers to improve their storytelling skills. In this talk, we will share our knowledge to help you convey your messages.
How do the small molecular machines which make our cells work look like? Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) can answer that question and was awarded the 2017 Nobel prize in Chemistry. Never heard about Cryo-EM? In this talk André will explain what it is, how it works and why it will help us understand life.
After more than forty years of research, we discovered gravitational waves! Why did it take us so long? How can they help us to see the Universe in its infancy? Come and find out!
Most living organisms have a day-night cycle. Surprisingly though, these 24-hour cycles are kept hidden by these organisms. How do these molecular clocks work? Come and find out!
Have you ever wondered why children can anticipate possible future events and learn about the world with very little verbal interaction, while computers nowadays still need millions of training examples? In this talk, I will shed some light on unsupervised learning, a subdiscipine of Artificial Intelligence concerned with tackling these problems.
Cryptocurrencies are booming these days. Bitcoin's price has tenfolded in the last year. Why all that fuzz about them? How do they work? And will they die again or is it some new and amazing technology which has a breakthrough?
Our brain processes information from the surrounding world and drives our emotions and behavior. Despite many years of research we still lack understanding how billions of neurons work together to enable this driving function. This lack of knowledge is to a large extent due to our limited ability to control activity of individual neurons. Optogenetics, a new technique capable of controlling the brain with light, has revolutionized neuroscience and opens new ways to treat neurological disorders in humans.
Radiation is often misunderstood and feared. However, it is naturally present and has many highly beneficial uses. Come and learn about one of these uses - radiotherapy, which helps many people to combat cancer.
Cognitive reserve explains how some people tend to be more resilient to brain changes or damages than others. Greater understanding of this concept could lead to interventions to slow cognitive ageing or reduce the risk of dementia.
Text translation, Face Recognition, driverless driving, and even Cyborgs. What all of these share in common: Neural Networks. Join me on the journey to explore how all of these complex looking things at their core share a simple yet powerful principal motivated by the smartest machinery in this world aka the Human Brain.
Getting peoples attention in the current environment of information overload is getting more challenging. David explains the power of stories as a method of getting your points across and making your ideas stick. We are wired for stories. Find out the important elements of a story and how you can develop your own for use in your writing and presentations.
The physics of the very small gives us the weird world of quantum mechanics, the physics of the very big gives us the weird world of relativity and time dilation. But in between them there is a gap, a huge gap in our knowledge. If the models are not wrong, then at least we know they are not complete. Will discuss some weirdness, and look into the gaps.
Have you ever wondered why it is hard to recover from brain damage? Or what happens inside the brain when it is injured? We will explore not only this, but also the latest and most exciting research from the science of brain repair!
Our bodies contain trillions of bacterial cells. What do they do, and how can we know? Are bacteria one day going to destroy us all? How do they adapt to become resistant to the drugs that are meant to kill them? To answer each of these questions we'll need to know something about the rapidly evolving field of bacterial genetics.
Epigenetics means "above genetics". Wonder what that means? We invite you to 15x4 Munich to get a flavour of this exciting science and how processes which it studies affect our lives and overall well-being.
Somewhere between mathematics and psychology a serious topic with the simple name Game Theory tries to investigate people’s behaviour. Let’s play some games and find out who we are: rational egoists or simple-hearted altruists?
What makes virtual reality... reality? In this talk, Nick will discuss the tech challenges involved in tricking the brain into believing it has been transported to another world!
Alexander will explain why and how scientists study lightning. He will also talk about monitoring of lightning-related phenomena like Schumann resonances and how it can help us to track the global temperature of the Earth.
Are you human? Good, this applies to you. Metabolomics offers a high-resolution snapshot of human metabolism. You will want to learn about it as some of the exciting findings may change our view on health and biology. So come to the talk!
What is the Universe made of? How did it look shortly after the Big Bang? Many answers could be found at the Large Hadron Collider.
Did you know that you can actually train your brain like a muscle? Neurofeedback uses modern EEG technology to make the brains’ activity visible so that you can train specific brain frequencies related to specific mental states. And Steven will explain you how it works.
Machine Learning algorithms are routinely used to answer scientific and business questions at a precision never seen before. Students at TU Munich developed algorithms to predict who in the HBO hit show “Game of Thrones” is likely to die next. The work received a world-wide media attention and highlights the power of the field and its wide-ranging impact.
"Nowadays, millions of people cannot imagine their lives without Google. But it was not the very first search engine or the most successful one from the begging. This is the story how 2 Ph.D. students have changed the paradigm of search engines and made the very first steps to the creation of one of the most successful companies in history."
Have you ever heard of the that Artificial Intelligence might one day take over the world? Have you ever wondered whether this is actually possible and, if machines were to become conscious, how could we ever know? Natalia will try to answer these questions, and we will most certainly have an interesting discussion about the future of AI and machines!
Scientists say we will discover life somewhere in the solar system in the next decades. Well, at least microbial life. Why are scientists so convinced? How can we check if they are right and we are not alone here, in space? Kostas will answer these questions in his talk and tell you why the icy moons are so interesting.
Poets often rhyme about the universe floating in a glass of wine. Is there any truth to this claim or is it just poets talking after few glasses of wine? Deriving from a famous lecture by Richard Feynman, Adeel will show that if we ponder long enough - perhaps after having a glass or two - universe does indeed reveal itself in a glass of wine; and this way of understanding the world and its beauty through the lens of science is as romantic and mysterious as any other human experience.
From this talk, you'll know how classical computers work, and why quantum computing may be the next big thing. Or may not. Or both.
The existence of a whole noble gases family remained undiscovered until the 1890s. How was it possible that first of them was found on the Sun before it was detected on the Earth? How did the imperceptible 0.1% discrepancy in the experiment help to crack the puzzle? Come and find out.
What’s a common among paternity testing, fish population ecology and criminal investigation? All those fields are using one method of DNA identification – DNA fingerprinting. In a frame of this presentation I am going to unleash the mystery behind this method. Welcome to Gattaca!
What kind of personal data do the big companies collect, how and why they do it? Should we protect ourselves and what's the cost?
Why scientists even bother to study organisms like a fruit fly (aka Drosophila)? How does their research relate to humans? Eventually, we have more in common that one can possibly imagine! Let's see how this small and sometimes annoying guy can be useful for humanity.
We live in a dangerous world. Thousands of crimes are committed every single day. Many of them are solving due to methodologies that have been developed 2 centuries ago.