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 […]

The 10 equations that rule the world

Tuesday 13 October Is there a secret formula for getting rich? For making something a viral hit? For deciding how long to stick with your current Netflix series, job, or even relationship? In this talk, mathematician David Sumpter showed how a small set of formulas can provide the answers to questions ranging from the trivial […]

Cosmic Vision: Watching the radio

Professor Katherine Blundell OBE 7th October 2020, Gresham College Professor Blundell was appointed Gresham Professor of Astronomy in 2019. She is a Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford University and a Research Fellow at St John’s College. Before this she was one of the Royal Society’s University Research Fellows, a Research Fellow of the 1851 Royal […]

Satellites improve lives

This talk was given in association with the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory https://stfc.ukri.org/about-us/where-we-work/rutherford-appleton-laboratory/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutherford_Appleton_Laboratory The Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) is one of the national scientific research laboratories in the UK operated by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). It began as the Rutherford High Energy Laboratory, merged with the Atlas Computer Laboratory in 1975 to […]

A series of fortunate events

Why is the world the way it is? How did we get here? Does everything happen for a reason or are some things left to chance? Philosophers and theologians have pondered these questions for millennia, but startling scientific discoveries over the past half century are revealing that we live in a world driven by chance. […]

Engineering enzymes

RAL is a world leading scientific research laboratory where researchers study everything from particle physics which are very, very small through to the astronomically large, studying space and the mysteries of the universe. They host free talks once a month from September to June over a broad range of topics and in this talk, we […]

Gravity’s Role in the Story of Our Universe

Dr Katy Clough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJk2BNSZI7U by Institute of Physics: Oxford Centre https://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/contacts/people/clough https://kaclough.github.io/CV.html https://www.linkedin.com/in/katy-clough-095809103/?originalSubdomain=uk http://www.grchombo.org/ Einstein’s strange and beautiful theory of general relativity has provided many a plot line in science fiction with its time-warping effects around black holes. But gravity also plays a major role in the story of our universe as a whole, not […]

10 years at the LHC

A composite image of the Large Hadron Collider Credit: CERN It’s 10 years since the first particles smashed into each other at the world’s biggest scientific experiment, the Large Hadron Collider. Since then physicists have discovered the Higgs boson, created forms of matter not seen since the Big Bang and ruled out a whole host […]