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Auckland Museum Institute (The Royal Society of New Zealand -
Auckland Branch) presents…
For current
events see their website
Upcoming events
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Date: |
6.30pm,
Wednesday 25 August 2010 |
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Title: |
Walking Tall: the Rex Bionics Story |
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Speaker: |
Richard Little |
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Description: |
Rex Bionics
was co-founded by Richard Little and Robert Irving about seven years ago
when Robert received a multiple sclerosis diagnosis and realised he may need
to use a wheelchair in future. The two life-long friends dreamed of making a
product that would enable people with wheelchairs to stand and walk.
Working with a team of talented people, they
launched the Rex pair of robotic legs. Today, Rex Bionics
has 25 engineers and a handful of other staff committed to bringing Rex to
market around the world. Richard will join us to tell two stories: firstly,
the dream which led to Rex’s invention; and then the
challenges
confronting small inventors trying to develop new technologies in New
Zealand. We invite you to come to the Horse & Trap, 3 Enfield Street from
6pm, August 25th to hear more. This free event is hosted by the
Auckland Museum Institute but open to all. |
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Date: |
Wednesday, September 29th, 2010 |
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Title: |
3-D Printing: Printing the Future |
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Speaker: |
Olaf Diegel
, AUT University |
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Description: |
3D printing is coming of age. It is now at the cusp of
becoming a rapid manufacturing technology that will have a great deal of
influence on how we live in the future.
In the not too distant future we will, for example, be able
to select a product from an online catalogue and, after customizing it to
our preferences, our home 3D printer will manufacture it for us on the spot.
Your mechanic needing to carry spare parts (or needing 6 weeks to order
them) will be a thing of the past, as he will simply print out new parts as
he needs them. Tired of waiting six months for your house to be built? Why
not print one out in 6 days? Need a new bladder or hip joint? It’s now
possible to print you out a replacement that is completely compatible with
your body.
In this talk, we review the state of the art of 3D printing
technologies and examine some of their current and future applications in
the fields of art, engineering and health. We also discuss some of the
implications these technologies will have on design and on how we live.
Professor Olaf Diegel was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, but has spent much
of his life in countries such as the USA, Canada, South Africa, and Japan.
Professor Olaf Diegel is both an educator and a practitioner of engineering
product development with an excellent track record of developing innovative
solutions to engineering problems.
In his role at AUT, he is Associate Dean, Strategic
Development, Faculty of Design & Creative Technologies, Auckland University
of Technology where he is director of the Creative Industries Research
Institute, an interdisciplinary institute that crosses over between
Engineering, Art & Design, Computers and Communications. He is widely
published in the areas of product development, project management, 3D
printing, smart house technologies, mechatronics and predictive health
systems. |
Past events
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Date: |
Wednesday, July 28th |
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Title: |
Complementary Therapies for People with Cancer: Pearls in a
Sea of Nonsense |
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Speaker: |
Shaun Holt |
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Description: |
People diagnosed with cancer want to do everything they can
to beat the disease and almost everyone will consider or try complementary
therapies. Some of these therapies have been proven to work in good clinical
trials, but the majority have not been tested, do not work or can be
harmful. How does a person in this situation know what works and what does
not? Without scientific training and the time to undertake the research it
is impossible for almost everyone. There are some pearls of knowledge but
they are hidden in a sea of nonsense.
Dr Shaun Holt will tell you how this topic applies to people
with cancer in New Zealand, what works, what doesn't....and how to tell the
difference. He is the director and founder of both Clinicanz, New Zealand's
only clinical trials Site Management Organization and The Vitamin Lab, who
supply vitamins and supplements based on good scientific research.
His 2008 book Natural Remedies That Really Work was a
bestseller, he has a popular blog on evidence-based natural health, is the
editor of the Natural Health Research Review and is on the international
editorial board of the medical journal Focus on Alternative and
Complementary Therapies.
Find out more about these events:
www.youtube.com/user/cafescientifiquenz
www.aucklandmuseum.com
www.cafescientifique.org/auckland.htm |
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Date: |
Wednesday May 26th 2010 |
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Title: |
Living Well in the 21st Century: The Ethics of Sustainability and What We
Eat |
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Speaker: |
Rosalind Hursthouse |
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Description: |
Remember when vegetarianism was mostly about animal welfare? These
days the most forceful argument for vegetarianism concerns the welfare of
the planet. There is a familiar theme here - once more we're being
told that we need to live more sustainably because in a connected, finite
world our descendants' futures are on the line. But surely that means that
we should all be in favour of the proposed Mackenzie Basin factory farms as
long as environmental concerns are properly managed. Or are we
really under a moral obligation to stop eating meat? What's next - an
obligation to stop having children? Sustainability issues seem to
require us to apply a whole new set of values in making our choices - or
perhaps we just need to stop ignoring some very old ones.
Professor Rosalind Hursthouse is a Virtue Ethicist who teaches in the
Philosophy Department at the University of Auckland. She has written
extensively on issues such as euthanasia, abortion and vegetarianism.
Using vegetarianism as an example she will lead us in a philosophical
discussion, challenging us to think about what it might mean to really live
well. |
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Date: |
Wednesday, March 31st 2010 |
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Title: |
Green Chemistry – can clean and green ever beat cheap and dirty? |
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Speaker: |
James Wright |
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Description: |
Many of the industrial processes that produce our consumer goods either use
toxic materials or produce polluting by-products. Green Chemistry aims to
invent new industrial processes that do not use or produce environmentally
harmful substances, so that we can keep making the goods we need but in a
responsible and sustainable way.
The benefits of this approach appear to be obvious – so why has industry
adoption of green chemical processes been so limited? The reasons for this
will be discussed within an historical perspective, and by way of
illustration some examples of real world Green Chemistry solutions will be
given. The presentation will conclude with a brief discussion of the
important role Green Chemistry can play in making our society sustainable –
but only if we want it enough.
James Wright is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the
University of Auckland
and Director of the Inorganic and Sustainability Chemistry Cluster.
He has been carrying out research in the field of Green Chemistry for over
12 years and has a particular interest in developing environmentally
friendly catalysts for oxidation chemistry. He has developed and taught
courses in Green Chemistry at the University of Auckland during the last 8
years.
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Title: |
Cafe Humanities - How
much do our thoughts and feelings affect our health? |
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Speaker: |
Roger Booth
Assoc. Prof of Immunology and Health Psychology,
University of Auckland |
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Title: |
New Zealand's
adventures into space |
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Speaker: |
Peter Beck, Rocket Lab
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Title: |
DESIGN AT THE SUSTAINABILITY
FRONTIER |
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Speaker: |
Dr I.R. Ron McDowall FIPENZ, FNZIM, MRSNZ, CPEng, IntPE(NZ),
Snr Lecturer, Faculty of Business & Economics, The
University of Auckland
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Title: |
Café Humanities
Understanding the Global Financial Crisis through the analogy of a
Traditional Village Market |
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Speaker: |
Keith Rankin,
UNITECH Business School |
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Title: |
CO2 Sequestration - Band Aid Solution or a Silver Bullet? |
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Speaker: |
Rosalind Archer
- Snr Lecturer
Department of Engineering Science the University of
Auckland. |
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Date: |
Wednesday,
August 26th 2009 |
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Title: |
Where will all the flowers go?
Honeybees, the Varroa mite, and the Future of Food Production
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Speaker: |
Peter Dearden |
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Details: |
Honeybees are the most important insects on
earth: most flowering plants, including a third of our domestic
crops, rely on honeybees for pollination. But the relationship
between bees and flowering plants is under pressure. In New
Zealand bees have undergone a remarkable change from being a
managed, but wild, species, to one that is wholly domestic and
reliant on human intervention for its survival. This change has
been brought about by the introduction of the varroa mite, just
one of a number of devastating diseases now affecting honeybees
world-wide. Peter will talk about the evolution of the
relationship between honeybees and flowering plants, and how our
treatment of bees and other insects is threatening this
relationship and therefore the production of food.
Peter Dearden is a senior lecturer in
developmental genetics at the University of Otago, the founding
Director of Genetics Otago, and an Associate Director of the
National Research Centre for Growth and Development. As an
evolutionary developmental geneticist he seeks to understand how
the developmental processes that determine the forms an animal
take change over evolutionary time. |
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Date: |
Wednesday,
September 30th 2009 |
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Title: |
A
Sustainable Future for the Aerospace Industry: Cleared for Take-off or
Flight of Fancy? |
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Speaker: |
Karen Willcox |
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Details: |
The aerospace industry
faces two fundamental challenges to its future sustainability:
the economics of air transportation and managing a global
environmental footprint. Karen's research programme develops
methods to support design of new aerospace systems, with a
particular focus on future environmentally-sensitive aircraft.
In this presentation, she will discuss some exciting new
concepts including those studied through her collaborations with
the Boeing Blended-Wing-Body aircraft design team and the NASA
Aeronautics program. But can any amount of design innovation
produce a sustainable industry based on making heavy objects
fly?
Karen Willcox is an
Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is currently a
Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Auckland while
on sabbatical leave from MIT. In her talk she will also touch on
her experiences going through the NASA astronaut selection
process and discuss some of the challenges and opportunities in
the future of human space exploration. |
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Date: |
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009, 6pm for 6.30pm start |
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Title: |
Small
Science – Big Price Tag |
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Speaker: |
Bryony James |
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Details: |
Ever since their invention in
the late 16th Century, microscopes have been at the centre
of scientific research, enabling important discoveries in
biology, geology, materials science, physics, and medicine.
In today’s “nano”-obsessed world, microscopes are becoming
ever more powerful – but the price of these instruments is
anything but tiny. Eventually one has to ask: do the
potential scientific advances still justify the cost of
buying the equipment? If the answer is “yes” then who pays,
and how?
The increasing cost of doing
research is a problem facing all the experimental science
disciplines, and there seem to be no easy answers. As the
frontier of knowledge moves outward, probing the unknown
requires ever more sophisticated equipment and scientists
with still greater specialisation of knowledge – which means
new findings come at much greater cost. The research
funding environment in New Zealand has not expanded to keep
pace. So how much can (or should) the nation support?
Bryony James is a
researcher in Materials Science, which requires a
microscopic understanding of structures to explain the
macroscopic properties of metals, polymers and ceramics. In
addition she is the Director of the Research Centre for
Surface and Materials Science, and as such is responsible
for providing electron microscopy research infrastructure to
researchers from across NZ.
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