2015 Holiday Card

Get Stell-AR

Use your smartphone or tablet to watch a fascinating video about how our community of scholars views stars.

1.

Download the free Layar augmented reality (AR) app on your smartphone or tablet via your mobile app store.

2.

Open the Layar app and hold your device over the second panel inside this card and click scan.

No mobile device?

You can view the video at dornsife.usc.edu/stars

This card, like a star, glows in the dark.

W

e often say “reach for the stars.” But across academic fields, stars represent everything from navigational tools to scholarly notations for incorrect grammatical constructions. At USC Dornsife, we take pride in looking at all the facets of a seemingly simple concept — opening up the possibility for new ideas and interpretations. As you read this card and watch the accompanying video, indulge your imagination. What do stars bring to mind for you?

Best wishes for a resplendent New Year!

Dani Byrd Interim Dean of USC Dornsife

A

fter they stopped teaching celestial navigation in the late 1990s — deeming it irrelevant and too difficult — the U.S. Naval Academy is reinstating the course into its curriculum. Why? Because sextants and nautical almanacs are not vulnerable to cyber attack, unlike GPS devices and satellites. The Naval Academy’s class of 2017 will be the first to graduate with this old-school skill.

This card, like a star, glows in the dark.

T

he red hypergiant UY Scuti is the largest known star at approximately 1,700 times the size of the sun. Flying at its standard cruising speed of 900 kilometers per hour, a jetliner would take nearly 1,000 years to circumnavigate the star’s surface.

E

ver wonder why people “see stars” after hitting their heads?

Because the brain is protected by a layer of cerebrospinal fluid, small disturbances are unlikely to cause any contact between the skull and occipital lobe. But if your head incurs a sudden jolt or impact, your brain may clash into your skull, causing a disruption to the visual cortex — the area responsible for decoding images — and dupe you into seeing those eerie stars.

Download the free Layar app, hold your device over this panel, scan and watch video.

*Wishes warmest for a New Year happy!

I

n linguistics, a ‘starred’ form is one notated with an initial asterisk indicating that the sentence or word structure is ungrammatical and generally sounds wrong to a native speaker of that language.

S

tructural biochemists are among the most visual of scientists, always seeking ways to understand molecules pictorially.

This model depicts the proteins that make up the outer shell, or capsid, of a virus. Using molecular modeling to reveal the capsid’s star shape, chemists are able to identify structural vulnerabilities and develop vaccines that protect people from illness.

S

ix-pointed stars, or hexagrams, have been excavated from Armenian burial mounds that date back to the third millennium B.C. Armenians believed the hexagram held magical powers and incorporated it in astronomy, sacred art and architecture. Additionally, many Armenian churches were constructed in the shape of a six-pointed star.

D

uring the early days of silent films, the names of the actors and actresses were not publicized because producers thought this would lead them to ask for higher salaries. But by 1909, actresses such as Florence Lawrence were already well known — though nobody knew their names. Lawrence was referred to as the “Biograph Girl” because she worked for D.W. Griffith’s Biograph Studios. In 1910, Lawrence switched to the Independent Moving Pictures Company, began appearing under her own name, and was acclaimed “America’s foremost moving picture star” in IMP literature.

University of Southern California dornsife.usc.edu

This card, like a star, glows in the dark.