Barely a week goes by without a story about collapsing ice sheets, climate turmoil as the polar oceans unfreeze, and resident species are catastrophically impacted by things like giant rogue icebergs crashing into defenceless islands. It’s a story of almost constant gloom backed by the narrative that the poles are an untouched wilderness. As a...
Evolution shapes all life on Earth. But is evolution predictable? What if we could replay it many times? Would it turn out the same way every time? Experimental Evolution aims to understand the fundamental principles of evolution using controlled experiments and is transforming our understanding of why life evolves the way it does. Dr. Tiffany...
Evolution shapes all life on Earth. But is evolution predictable? What if we could replay it many times? Would it turn out the same way every time? Experimental Evolution aims to understand the fundamental principles of evolution using controlled experiments and is transforming our understanding of why life evolves the way it does. Dr....
As the great Niels Bohr famously remarked "Anyone who is not shocked by Quantum Theory has not understood it". Even today approximately a century after the extended formulation of Quantum Theory, its foundations continue to puzzle and perplex most of us. Dr. Alessia Pasquazi will show us the reality of quantum technologies that already underpin...
Barely a week goes by without a story about collapsing ice sheets, climate turmoil as the polar oceans unfreeze, and resident species are catastrophically impacted by things like giant rogue icebergs crashing into defenceless islands. It’s a story of almost constant gloom backed by the narrative that the poles are an untouched wilderness. As a...
Farming isn't simply planting and harvesting crops or herding domesticated animals, it is the construction by the farmer of entire alternative ecosystems. Agriculture, invented by humans around 12,000 years ago, has obvious advantages over hunting and gathering, but there are also costs. Increased mutual reliance between the farmer and a very small number of domesticated...
Viruses are everywhere – in all environments, within all animals and plants, and in humans of course, in huge numbers too. We have all learnt much about viruses in the last year but what about their wider significance in the environment and in the geological record, too? Indeed, is there evidence for fossil viruses since...
This event is online only Join Professor Bruce Hood as he explores the themes raised in his latest book "Possessed". The talk will cover man’s need to own possessions, the background to those needs and in view of the current climate emergency, what should we be doing? Bruce Hood has been the Professor of Developmental...
You can watch this event LIVE at Queen Square or online – please select the appropriate tickets when booking. Marie Curie was born in Warsaw in present day Poland in 1867. She joined a sister in Paris in 1891 and registered at the Sorbonne to study physics and mathematics with the intention of returning to...
Over the last 18 months, authorities around the world have relied upon the conduct of new randomised control trials to inform Covid-19 prevention and treatment guidance. This approach has been applied equally to novel drug therapies developed by the pharmaceutical industry in response to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as well as to safe, established, broad spectrum,...
This talk is online only The theory of the universal quantum computer has brought us rapid technological developments, together with remarkable improvements in how we understand quentum theory. But what lies ahead of quantum theory, and of the universal quantum computer? To shed some light into these questions we need a shift in the mode...
This talk is online only. The history of water on Mars has huge implications for the possibility of life on Mars and the future of life on Earth. This is the first of two lectures on this subject, with the second lecture to be given by Steve Clifford in February Widespread fluvial dissection of the...
The 2021 Victor Suchar Christmas Lecture Our Earth has existed for 45 million centuries, but this is the first time that just one species - ours - has the planet's future in its hands. And Covid 19 is a wake-up call, reminding us how vulnerable our interconnected global civilisation is. Advances in biotechnology, robotics, and...
You can watch this talk live at Queen Square or online; please select the correct tickets when booking. There are many ways in which our psychology influences what we eat, whether through our deliberate choices (such as the plans we make in line with our values and intentions), through non-conscious processes (such has habits or...
Architecture and science may sound worlds apart. However architecture reveals itself as a source of inspiration in the use of materials that are at the same time efficient and sustainable. Science, on the other hand, can deliver solutions to the many challenges faced today. Construction industry and buildings are responsible for around 30% of CO2...
This event can be watched at Queen Square or online - please select the correct tickets when booking. The World Meteorological Organization recently declared lightning flashes to be an Essential Climate Variable. This declaration elevates lightning flashes to a climate quantity that is currently mainly assessed by lightning imagers on satellites and ground based lightning...
The pregnancy test and the glucose meter are classic examples of biosensors that have a clear impact on people’s lives. More recently, everyone has become familiar with COVID-19 self-tests. The provision of healthcare is changing, with a tendency towards telemedicine whenever possible. But such changes are only truly effective with new biosensors that patients can...
The United Nations has declared 2022 as the International Year of Glass to celebrate the heritage and importance of this material in our lives. This talk will explore some of the places where glasses are encountered, with examples ranging from the boiled sweets in a candy shop to the prehistoric arrow heads in archeology. Since...
We represent a student-led research team at the University of Bath. We are the University’s first ever iGEM team, a synthetic biology competition where teams from around the world engineer biological systems to solve pressing issues. Our project involves engineering a bacterium that can remove phosphate from water to be reapplied on crops as a...
A new initiative from the Bath Royal Literary & Scientific Institution has been launched to showcase hardware and software products from exciting and cutting-edge engineering companies in modern Bath. This free exhibition has been designed to appeal to visitors of all ages and will feature world-renowned work in aerospace, automotives, energy, defence, security, digital technology...
Oesophageal atresia is a congenital abnormality in which the oesophagus fails to develop normally, and untreated the newborn baby will die. Though it was first described over 350 years ago the first successful surgical treatment was not achieved until the 1940s when the mortality of the condition was over 80%. In recent years the mortality...
Headache is the commonest symptom in neurology and migraine is by far the commonest cause of headache. The World Health Organisation considers migraine to be the seventh commonest cause of days lost from work. In recent years we have gained a greater understanding of the anatomy, physiology and biochemistry of the disorder and how they...
This talk will characterise the way autistic adults often think as slow and deliberative, rather than rapid and intuitive, typical of non-autistic adults. Deliberative thinking can have many advantages in predictable environments (such as when logically reasoning), but may also lead to difficulties in uncertain environments (such as social situations). The processing of predictable and...
Are we moving from “The Age of Oil” to “The Age of Minerals”? A talk exploring how the necessity of making the transition to greener energy practices requires the use of minerals such as lithium, cobalt and rare earth elements as the source materials for new technologies. How in which case do we move towards...
How might our more eccentric behaviours be linked to Pathogens? One area of research has investigated the psychological and behavioural defences that evolved in response to pathogens, and how the findings from this research have informed our understanding of emotions, social perception, and cultural variation. Disgust, prejudice, and conformity, which seem to be unrelated phenomena,...
Possibly the most famed naturalist of the Victorian age, Alfred Russel Wallace’s expeditions to remote Amazonia and southeast Asia became the stuff of legend: a collector of thousands of species, he shared in the discovery of natural selection with Darwin and founded the field of evolutionary biogeography. Yet Wallace also courted controversy with non-scientific pursuits...
The third and final talk in a series to complement our exhibition, Riches of the Earth. From the cave paintings of Neanderthal man to the masterpieces of Vermeer and Picasso, where would civilisation have been without rocks? A talk exploring both the common and unusual minerals used as pigments in Art. Throughout history, earth and...
What do you know about stem cells? Join expert Dr Jonathan Slack and find out everything you ever wanted to know but were afraid to ask. Stem cells are always hitting the headlines but much of the information available online is inaccurate. This talk will introduce the two main types of stem cell: embryonic and...
The COVID19 pandemic exposed the lack of reliable surveillance systems for rapidly identifying viral hotspots. In this talk Professor Barbara Kasprzyk-Hordern (University of Bath) introduces Wastewater-Based Epidemiology (WBE) as a response to this need. WBE has been developed as a community level surveillance tool that uses mass spectrometry and other analytical chemistry tools to ‘fingerprint’...
There is now good evidence that insect populations are declining worldwide in both agricultural and protected natural landscapes, at about a rate of 1-2% per year. This doesn’t sound much, but maintained over decades it has already led to a serious loss of both insect biodiversity and biomass. It’s likely that there are multiple causes,...
Climate change in the Arctic - Sound science and urgent issues Drawing on his own research and field work in marine acoustics, Dr Philippe Blondel will present the challenges faced by Arctic marine environments, from climate change to human impacts, including melting glaciers, shrinking ice cover, increasing shipping and declining biodiversity. But what happens in the...
Phosphates form part of our DNA and are essential for life. However, extensive mining and over-reliance on phosphates is a rapidly growing environmental problem. Phosphate-rich agricultural run-off is a special challenge on the Somerset Levels and Moors, where attempts to limit phosphate pollution are currently playing havoc with house building regulations. Yet somehow the pollution...