Dr Karl’s strange science

Australian author, radio and TV presenter Dr Karl Kruszelnicki came back to discuss some very strange science facts. In this talk, we discovered how Big Fossil Fuel successfully did a cover-up on Global Warming, how we’ve been making coffee the wrong way for fourteen centuries and the animal that grows a new anus every time […]

Eyes in the sky: Spotting millimetre-scale movements from space

Dr Sakthy Selvakumaran Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge Email: ss683@cam.ac.uk https://www.linkedin.com/in/sakthys?originalSubdomain=uk https://twitter.com/sakthys?lang=en Biography Dr Sakthy Selvakumaran studied Engineering at the University of Cambridge (MA, MEng). She then lived and worked internationally in design, construction and R&D roles within industry and international development, becoming a Chartered Civil Engineer (CEng, MICE). Her roles in industry ranged […]

Seeing with Helium Atoms

Dr. Andrew Jardine Department of Physics, University of Cambridge https://www.phy.cam.ac.uk/directory/jardinea apj24@cam.ac.uk https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-jardine-b849a110/?originalSubdomain=uk Biography: Dr Andrew Jardine is a University Lecturer in Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow and Director of Studies at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. He gained his MSci degree in Physics from the University of Nottingham in 1998 and […]

Seeing the invisible: The dark matter puzzle

Dr Tina Potter Department of physics, University of Cambridge cp594@cam.ac.uk https://www.phy.cam.ac.uk/directory/dr-tina-potter https://www.hep.phy.cam.ac.uk/~chpotter/particleandnuclearphysics/mainpage.html Astronomical observations tell us that dark matter makes up 27% of our Universe and experiences the gravitational force, yet we still know very little beyond this. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN continues to search for new, exotic particles that could explain […]

A physicist’s adventures in virology

Catherine Beauchemin cbeau@ryerson.ca https://phymbie.physics.ryerson.ca/~cbeau/ Two essential ingredients of the scientific method are scepticism and independent confirmation – the ability to glean for oneself whether an established theory or a new hypothesis is true or false. But not everyone has the capacity to perform the experiments to obtain such a confirmation. Consider, for example, the costs […]

Challenges & Changes in Physics I

Dr Jess Wade Department of Physics, University of Oxford Dr Jess Wade discussed her research and the challenges that physics and physicists face, and shared some of her work to push for change. About this Event In the first lecture of this new series from the Department of Physics, we heard from Dr Jess Wade, […]

Cosmic Vision: Attentive Eyes

Professor Katherine Blundell OBE Well-trained eyes can be remarkably useful for capturing light curves of evolving objects in the cosmos, even contributing to modern research programmes. This lecture considered how stargazing with imperfect, non-linear human eyes can accomplish such a feat, and the important contributions that this makes to elucidating the phenomena of nova detonations […]

Happy 200th birthday John Tyndall

2020 marks 200 years since the birth of the scientist John Tyndall, who led the Royal Institution’s research following the death of Faraday. The scientific enquiries and new discoveries of John Tyndall cover an incredible diversity, ranging from: magnetism and the bending of light, to heat absorption in gases and global warming, all the way […]

The hunt for new batteries

The Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, site of cutting-edge research into batteries The hunt is on for the next generation of batteries that will power our electric vehicles and help our transition to a renewables-led future. In this talk, Serena Corr looked at the science behind batteries, discussing why we are hunting for new batteries […]

The alchemy of us

Credit: peter clifford via Flickr How did the brevity of the telegram influence Hemingway’s writing style? How did a young chemist expose the use of Polaroid’s cameras to create passbooks to track black citizens in apartheid South Africa? This talk showcased little-known inventors, particularly people of colour and women, who had a significant impact but […]