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Bravo TV recently announced the names of seventeen gourmets who will vie for the title of “Top Chef” on Top Chef: Las Vegas, the sixth and yet most sinful season of the cable network’s popular culinary reality show. Among the contestants is Ashley Merriman ’98, who brings years of restaurant experience in New York City and Seattle, Wash., to the chopping block.

To the east of North America are the White Mountains of New Hampshire. To the north, the Monteregian Hills of Quebec. Just west of these is Cannon Point, a cape on Lake Champlain near Essex, N.Y. These three formations typify the uncommon magmatic activity (behavior of molten rock) in the Northeast. Moving past Cannon Point to the west, a person would be hard pressed to find any magmatic features before coming upon the magnificent Rocky Mountains. That makes Cannon Point a rarity among eastern rock structures, and its magnetic igneous intrusions make up the western-most activity of the region. Jonathan Traylor ’10 is studying these rocks to see what they might say about regional magmatic activity that dates back to the Cretaceous period.

A physicist is different from a biologist or chemist in that his data will always be open to debate. No matter how hard he tries, he will not be able to flawlessly measure a physical value, whether it is momentum, magnetic field, or moment of inertia. According to him, uncertainty behaves asymptotically – the range of error gets closer and closer to zero but never reaches it. Scientists are especially fond of tacking more decimal places onto physical constants, like gravity. They make it their goal to alleviate uncertainty as much as possible.

Every two minutes, someone in the United States is sexually assaulted, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN). This statistic is both disturbing and humbling – in the time it takes you to brush your teeth at night, yet another person has been raped, harassed, or damaged in a number of emotional and psychological ways. At the same time, this figure makes us feel powerless – what can anyone do about a crime that might be occurring hundreds of miles away? Chelsea Dilley ’10 is working at RAINN this summer, and her efforts there prove that even small contributions to a cause can span the distance between a bystander and a victim.

Having taken a class on research methods at Hamilton, Sanjana Nafday ’10 is well-versed in statistics. But when she heard that 50 percent of those arrested in the Kings County District of Brooklyn belonged to ethnic or racial minority groups, she didn’t need a hefty knowledge of numbers to understand that something was going on beneath the surface. The Bureau of Justice Statistics had reported that many of these individuals were from the lower economic strata or had poor educational background. To Nafday, there was an obvious hole in the study that she could not ignore. 

When Maximilien Yelbi ’11 visited the West African Ivory Coast at the age of 12, he contracted malaria. Like many inhabitants of underdeveloped countries, Yelbi suffered from the exhausting grip of the disease, which is the fourth leading cause of death in the world among children under five years old. Its victims live primarily in tropical or sub-tropical countries, where the climate and economic conditions allow for easy transmission and high mortality rates. The sickness eventually left his body, but the thought of it continued to amble through his mind.

The Eighth Annual National MERCURY Conference on Computational Chemistry, devoted solely to undergraduates who are working on research projects in computational chemistry, was held at Hamilton from August 2 - 4. Hamilton, National Science Foundation and SGI provided support for the conference.

Michael “Doc” Woods, professor of music, wrote a guest editorial for the Utica Observer-Dispatch (8/2/09) titled “Paying the price of being talented – and black.” The piece discussed the recent controversial arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates and described Woods’ experience of racial profiling when he was followed by a police car after stopping to ask for directions to a symphony office.

Michael Bethoney ’11 is a self-proclaimed “political junkie loser,” but he characterizes himself as such jocularly. He is among dozens of other interns working in Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s Commonwealth Corps Department, and they all share the same love for campaigns, grassroots organizing and other political programs. Bethoney obtained the position at the Massachusetts State House through Hamilton alumnus Mark Lilienthal ’97, who is Governor Patrick’s Director of Constituent Services.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Debra Boutin recently published a research article "The Determining Number of a Cartesian Product" in the Journal of Graph Theory. This work continues Boutin's studies finding a smallest set of nodes that captures all the symmetries in a network. In this recent work she closely bounds the size of such a set in a large class of networks created by taking products of smaller networks.