Neal Weiner (NYU) gave the brown-bag about recent exciting developments in Fermi—a line in the Galactic Center region at 130 GeV—and also explained the relationship between this observation and the WIMP miracle
that a weak-scale particle naturally explains the abundance of dark matter in a thermal freeze-out model. It was a great seminar in every way (pedagogical, current, and highly editorial), and got me more excited than I already was about this possibility that the dark matter is illuminated.
After brown-bag, David Levitan (Caltech) gave an informal talk about finding variable stars in the Palomar Transient Factory data. He focused on AM CVn stars, which are crazy high mass-ratio double-degenerate binaries. He has done great work on calibrating and using for discovery (mining?) the PTF data.
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