iTHES Theoretical Science Colloquium by Prof. Robert Sinclair (OIST) was taken place last Wednesday, June 18. This time, 3nd iTHES meeting was combined with the colloquium and three short talks by iTHES researchers were presented. Dr. S.Wanajo (ithes-phys team) started the session with his talk "Nucleosynthesis of Heavy Elements in the Cosmos" in which he discussed how the heavy elements such as GOLD were created in the explosive astrophysical phenomena such as neutron star mergers. Dr. Y. Kamiya (ithes-cond team) turned the subject to "Magnetic Vortex Crystals in Frustrated Quantum Magnets" in which he discussed the interesting topological structures (vortices and skyrmions) near quantum critical point of the frustrated spin systems. Finally, Dr. W. Nishima (ithes-bio team) talked about "Molecular mechanism for drug extrusion by multi-drug transporter MATE" in which he discussed how multi-drug transporters extrude drugs from bacterial cells on the basis of the state-of-the-art molecular dynamics simulations.

After three short presentations, Professor Robert Sinclair gave a talk about "Geometry before Euclid: How Life Explored and Conquered the Dimensionality of 3-Space". He started his career with mathematical and computational physics, and now he studies theoretical biology. Thus, he is a suitable researcher for our interdisciplinary group and his talk did fit us. His talk began with primitive body plans of animals found in fossils. He discussed that animals with two dimensional body, in general, generate gradients of two chemicals to recognize their body, and asked the necessity of them. Then, he claimed the possibility to generate the two dimensional body by one chemical gradient and showed a hypothetical model simulation for making the body of Dickinsonia (an Ediacaran animal). Since his question is fundamental, and his talk started from a very basic point, about 50 researchers from various fields gathered and many were brought into discussion after his talk, and very intensive discussion was held.

I am Maxim Barkov, a member of Astrophysical Big Bang Laboratory (S. Nagataki). My main research field is High Energy Astrophysics. I am graduated from Physical Department of Moscow State University in 2000. After University I was a PhD student in Space Research Institute Russian Academy of Science (Moscow, Russia) under leadership Prof G.S. Bisnovatyi-Kogan. We made hydrodynamical calculations of late optical re-brightaning in cosmological gamma ray bursts. In 2006 I moved to University of Leeds in UK where I start my collaboration with Prof S. Komissarov. In Leeds we did modeling of magnetic acceleration of ultra relativistic jets and numerical calculations of gamma ray burst central engines. In 2010 I started my work in MPI-K Heidelberg (Germany) in the group of Prof F. Aharonian. Being 4 years in Heidelberg I used my experience of relativistic MHD calculations in the field of astrophysics of very high energies. With my co-authors we worked on the problems of very fast variability in GeV and TeV energy range from active galactic nuclei, relativistic pulsar wind in interaction and etc... In the last January I have a pleasure to join RIKEN as Researcher in ABBL. My experience tell me that synthesis of skills and methods from different field can give surprising but interesting results. The iTHES-project can trigger such synthesis process.