Launched May 2006

General Information

 

Date:	Tuesday 16th May
Title:	The Arctic & global warming
Speaker:	Quentin Cooper, host of Radio 4's Material World Chaired by Sheila Ochugboju (local biomedical scientist and science communicator
Description:	The Arctic, global warming, science, science communication, the radio and suchlike ...

Date:	Tuesday 27th June
Title:	Lonesome George - the life and loves of a conservation icon
Speaker:	Henry Nicholls
Description:	Lonesome George is a 5ft long, 200lb tortoise aged between 60 and 200. In 1971 he was discovered on the remote Galapagos island of Pinta, from which tortoises had supposedly been exterminated by buccaneering whalers and seal hunters. He has been at the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz island ever since, on the off-chance that scientific ingenuity will conjure up a way of reproducing him and resurrecting his species. Meanwhile a million tourists and dozens of baffled scientists have looked on as the celebrity reptile shows not a jot of interest in the female company provided. Today, Lonesome George has come to embody the mystery, complexity and fragility of the unique Galapagos archipelago. His story echoes the challenges of conservation worldwide. It is a swashbuckling tale of combat and collecting on the high seas, Darwin, sexual dysfunction, hostages, moonlit escapes, culture clashes, cloning, DNA fingerprinting and eco-tourism. Henry Nicholls writes for many of the world's leading science periodicals including Nature and Science. Following his PhD in Evolutionary Ecology with Tim Birkhead (Promiscuity and The Red Canary), he edited The Encyclopedia of Life Sciences and wrote for BioMedNet News before becoming Editor of the leading history of science journal, Endeavour. He lives in south London with his wife and new son.
Date:	Tuesday 25th July
Title:	Intellectual Property - we patent products but can or should we patent ideas?
Speaker:	Wendy M Grossman
Description:	“The difference between ideas and things is obvious as soon as someone hits you over the head with an idea - so obvious that until recently it was entirely clear to the law. Things could have owners and ideas could not. Yet this simple distinction is being changed all around us. Ideas are increasingly treated as property - as things that have owners who may decide who gets to use them and on what terms.” Andrew Brown, Owning Ideas, The Guardian, 19.11.05. Wendy M Grossman is an American freelance writer based in London. She writes a weekly column, net.wars, as well as writing for publications such as Scientific American, The Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, and ZDNet UK. Wendy was founder and former editor (twice) of the British magazine The Skeptic and still writes a column for it and also one on scepticism for the Philosopher's Magazine. She has also written or edited five books and sits on the advisory boards of several privacy, open rights and intellectual property organisations.
Date:	Tuesday 29th August
Title:	Our nearest star, the Sun
Speaker:	Paul Harper, Chair of Croydon Astronomical Society
Description:	Paul will take us on a fascinating tour of our local star, the Sun; its formation, its make-up and how it affects us both here on Earth and in space. If we are going back to the moon and on to Mars, what are the dangers for the space traveller? Why is space weather very important to space agencies? Croydon Astronomical Society has around eighty members of all abilities. The Society was found in 1956 and is celebrating its fiftieth birthday this year. Its observatory on Kenley Common is open to the public on Saturdays through the winter and it holds regular lectures at the Royal Russell School. Paul Harper has been chairman of the society for just over a year and is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. His main interests are planetary and solar observation and human space flight.

Date:	Tuesday 26th September
Title:	Fusion: powering the future?
Speaker:	Chris Warrick (UKAEA)
Description:	With fossil fuel reserves dwindling and environmental concerns over the emission of greenhouse gases, research into alternatives such as nuclear fusion (the process that powers the sun) takes on increasing significance. The world’s largest fusion experiment, the European JET experiment at Culham Science Centre in Oxfordshire, has heated a plasma (hot, ionised gas) to greater than 100 million °C and demonstrated the fusion of deuterium and tritium ions, producing some 16MW of fusion energy. To progress to a fusion power station, the larger ITER international device is to be built in Cadarache, France over the next ten years.  ITER will be able to produce 500MW of fusion power and test the reliability and engineering of the device for future fusion power stations. ITER could be a path to commercial fusion power which may see the first demonstration plant within thirty years. Fusion could be an abundant, safe and environmentally responsible additional energy option for the middle part of this century. Chris Warrick is a member of the Public Relations team at the UKAEA Culham Science Centre. After graduating with a degree in physics from the University of Wales, Chris joined UKAEA at Culham in 1990 working as an experimental physicist on various fusion devices until 2001.  He was particularly involved with plasma microwave heating systems and plasma radiation measurement devices. Since 2001, Chris has been a member of the Public Relations team with particular responsibility for education and public outreach.

Date:	Tuesday 31st October
Title:	Upgrading humans – technical realities and new morals
Speaker:	Kevin Warwick
Description:	Implant technology is diminishing the effects of certain neural illnesses and increasing the abilities of those affected. As part of his research, Kevin Warwick received a neural implant that linked his nervous system directly to a computer. Neural signals were transmitted to various technological devices, such as the fingertips of a robot hand, both directly and via the Internet and feedback came from ultrasonic (extra-) sensory input and signals from another human’s nervous system. Would someone whose brain were part human-part machine have abilities that far surpass those who have only a human brain? Would they have different moral and ethical values? If they did, what effects might this have on society? Kevin Warwick is Professor of Cybernetics at Reading University researching into artificial intelligence, control, robotics and biomedical engineering. He is also Director of the university's Knowledge Transfer Centre. His work is used as material in A-level physics courses in the UK and in universities including Harvard, Stanford, MIT & Tokyo. His implants are on permanent display in the Science Museums in London and Naples and he was responsible (with Jim Wyatt) for Cybot, a robot exported around the world via Real Robots magazine. In 2005, Kevin gave over twenty lectures, including presentations in Los Angeles, Kuala Lumpur, Poznan, Prague, Barcelona, Hong Kong, Coimbra, Leuven, Istanbul, Calgary, Eindhoven and Paris.

Date:	Tuesday 28th November
Title:	Does the world still need scientists?
Speaker:	Sheila Ochugboju
Description:	The older generation regularly worries about the lack of young people taking up science. Industrialists, bankers and learned societies raise alarms about the future of British economic growth and global prominence if the study of science continues its decline. Classrooms are emptying in schools and universities and courses disappearing, as young people deserting science, engineering and technology in droves. Does it really matter? Is the rapid expansion of global technology and capability evidence that a growth is taking place in new areas? Sheila Ochugboju argues that science and the creative arts are  forging new natural alliances and promoting new forms of knowledge. The scientist of the future will have to be creative and innovative. We need to develop new strategies to engage extraordinary young people in science and the creative arts in dialogue. Sheila Ochugboju has been dedicated to promoting science, using creative arts and imaginative new media, for more than ten years. As a Daphne Jackson Research Fellow at Oxford University, she researched into the use of genetically engineered viruses as biological pesticides. She has worked at senior levels in academia, business and the public sector.

Date:	Tuesday 30th January
Title:	Nerves! - the neuro-emotional basis of modern ailments
Speaker:	Nick Read
Description:	Fifty per cent of visits to doctors are for illnesses that have no obvious physical cause and cannot be cured. Drawing on research in affective neuroscience and psychology and his extensive clinical experience, Nick Read offers an explanation for this seeming modern epidemic and offers an alternative means of dealing with it; discussing why unexplained illnesses are getting more common, why the medical profession is unable to deal with them and how we can find a way back to health.  Nick held chairs in physiology, human nutrition and integrated medicine at Sheffield University.  He now works in private practice as a physician and psychoanalytical psychotherapist and writes popular articles and books on various topics including medicine.  His latest book is Sick and tired; healing the illnesses doctors cannot cure.  Copies will be available at the cafe.

Date:	Tuesday 27th February
Title:	Life and death decisions about newborn babies - an ethical debate
Speaker:	Catherine Moody, Acting Director of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics
Description:	"Let premature babies under 23 weeks die, doctors told" The Guardian "Doctors cannot 'play God with babies' lives" The Daily Mail "When to let a baby die: experts set the guidelines" The Times  These are just some of the headlines sparked by a recent report of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics on the care of extremely premature or seriously ill babies. Should you try to give intensive care to the earliest babies when their chances of survival are so slim? At what point might an older baby's life become so intolerable that you should consider letting them die?  Should doctors ever actively end a baby’s life? Who should make decisions on behalf of babies who cannot speak for themselves? Dr Catherine Moody will lead an exploration of the ethical, social and legal issues which are raised by this controversial and emotive topic. Catherine has a background in the biomedical sciences and has been at the Nuffield Council for three years, drawn by an interest in ethical issues raised by scientific progress. She began her career as a research scientist before becoming a scientific programme manager for the UK Medical Research Council, which funds scientific research aiming to improve human health.

Date:	Tuesday 27th March
Title:	The scientific basis for herbal medicine ... is there one? !
Speaker:	Liz Williamson
Description:	There is a huge market for herbal medicines, but many people think they are either unproven placebos, or perhaps dangerous untested drugs. Liz will try to separate some of the truth from fiction, explain how herbal medicines are made, how they differ from other drugs obtained from plants, and whether they are in fact safe, especially with prescription drugs. Professor Williamson is a member of the British Pharmacopoeia Commission, an adviser to the European Pharmacopoeia on herbal drugs, and a former member of the Medicines Commission. Her research interests centre mainly on evaluating the quality and pharmacological effects of herbal medicines, in particular their synergistic interactions, including the medicinal use of cannabis.

Date:	Tuesday 24th April
Title:	Maths in the weirdest places
Speaker:	Paul Stevenson
Description:	Are the sorts of equations which make the news every now and then helpful in portraying maths and science in a favourable light, and what do they say about our numeracy? Paul will be talking about the use of maths in describing everyday things, such as how to walk in high heels, eat with chopsticks, choose the perfect beach or park a car. After graduating from the University of Oxford in 1999 with a D.Phil in theoretical nuclear structure physics, Dr Stevenson spent a year as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. From there he was appointed as a Research Fellow at Surrey, a job he held for two years, which was followed by being appointed a Temporary Lecturer at Surrey in 2002, and a full Lecturer in 2005.

Date:	Tuesday 29th May
Title:	The neuroscience of love
Speaker:	Davina Bristow
Description:	A certain smile? A nice bottom? Too many large drinks? Just what causes attraction?  Explore this and much more in this alluring presentation. Davina will take us through the evolutionary purpose of love, why we fall in love, why we get jealous and why sex is a good idea. Davina Bristow studied biology at Oxford before going on to do a PhD in Neuroscience at UCL.  She now works full time for the BBC Science Department, and has also written about science for the Daily Telegraph.

Date:	Tuesday 26th June
Title:	A medical life in crime
Speaker:	Stephen Hempling
Description:	What is forensic medicine?  Dr Hempling will talk us through its many forms using examples from his varied career.  This fascinating session will also explore the history of forensic medicine, where we are now and what the future may have in store. Stephen Hempling worked as a GP for 25 years, and was a police surgeon from 1972 until 1991.  Since 1997, he has worked full-time as a forensic medical and medico-legal expert. He has a vast range of expertise, including causes and interpretation of injuries, child and adult sexual assault and medical negligence, particularly that involving GPs.

Date:	Tuesday 31st July - note change of date
Title:	Today's 'best buy' in public health: moderate or vigorous activity?
Speaker:	Gary O'Donovan
Description:	Gary O'Donovan is a Research Fellow in Exercise Physiology at Brunel University. His main research interest is the effect of exercise intensity on aerobic fitness and other heart disease risk factors. Gary is currently leading a team of experts which will produce the British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences' consensus statement on physical activity in the prevention of chronic disease.

Date:	Tuesday 28th August
Title:	Twenty-first century technology in drug safety testing
Speaker:	Margaret Clotworthy
Description:	The problem of how best to safety test new drugs was recently illustrated by the Northwick Park clinical trial tragedy, where six young men almost died after taking a new drug shown to be safe at 500 times the dose in monkeys. Moreover, Vioxx, a painkiller, killed tens of thousands of people between 2000 and 2004. Is it time to modernise our drug testing requirements to embrace the latest, most human-relevant technologies? How should we decide how to go about discovering & developing new medicines today? Margaret Clotworthy has a PhD in cell biology from the University of Cambridge and an honours BSc in biotechnology from Dublin City University. She has worked in academic laboratories and in industry.  She is Science Consultant to Europeans for Medical Progress Trust.

Date:	Tuesday 25th September
Title:	Hypnosis: all the world's a stage
Speaker:	Paul Johnson
Description:	The subject of hypnosis provokes strong reactions, but it has become deeply embedded in our culture, from stage shows to therapy, and from self-help CDs to mainstream medicine and dentistry. Paul Johnson will ask: what’s really going on in hypnosis? Paul is a hypnotherapist with a keen interest in using scientific study to strip away the unnecessary mystique and mystery so often surrounding the subject.
Date:	Tuesday 30th October
Title:	Visions of the deep: the bioluminesence and eyes of animals in the deep sea
Speaker:	Ron Douglas
Description:	Vision plays a pivotal role in the existence of most animals, often being the principal route by which environmental information influences behaviour.  This is even true in the deep ocean; down to around one kilometre, sunlight provides light by which to see but lower down more light is produced by the animals which live there, through bioluminescence. The functions of bioluminescence are manifold and include being a means of communication. Ron Douglas will talk about some of the amazing visual adaptations of deep sea animals, such as a squid that whose left eye is about three times the size of its right and dragon fish that use ‘invisible’ red light for sex. Professor Ron Douglas is a marine biologist by training and now teaches human anatomy and physiology to optometry students as professor of Visual Science at City University. He has also written sections of the new edition of the classic medical text book, Gray’s Anatomy. He regularly participates in expeditions aboard research vessels to destinations including the waters off Madeira, the Canaries, Senegal, Hawaii, Midway, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and New Zealand.  Almost more than anything else, Ron Douglas likes to talk about his work, appearing on radio programmes such as the Naked Scientist and Radio 4 whenever he can and visiting schools. This will be his second outing to a Café Scientifique.
Date:	Tuesday 27th November
Title:	Drug addiction and crime in Croydon
Speaker:	Robin Moffat
Description:	Robin Moffat has been in forensic medical practice since 1959. From then until 1999 he was an appointed Metropolitan Police Surgeon (now known as Forensic Medical Examiner). He was elected president of the Section of Clinical Forensic Medicine at the Royal Society of Medicine and, a few years on, elected the Honorary Secretary. He is now a Council member of the Medico-Legal Society and of the British Academy of Forensic Science. He has appeared as an expert witness in numerous criminal trials involving criminal aspects such as non-fatal wounding, sexual offences and drink driving offences. There have been contributions by him in medical presses and he has also written chapters in medical text books.  Dr. Moffat has been a Police Surgeon in Croydon for several decades, working on numerous cases including the recent high profile Sally Anne Bowman case. He will be talking about his work and his experiences focusing particularly on the links between drugs and crime.

Date:	Tuesday 18th December
Title:	Albert Einstein: Kindness, Beauty, Truth
Speaker:	Ben Livingstone
Description:	At the beginning of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein's theories changed science forever, making him so famous that his image as the dishevelled, eccentric scientist is one that is recognised to this day. But how many of us understand his theories and what do we really know about the man? With the help of actor Ben Livingstone of Spectrum Drama, this is your chance to discover the beautiful simplicity of Einstein's theories and to learn more about the complex man behind them.

Date:	Tuesday 29th January
Title:	Climate change: will energy saving save the Earth?
Speaker:	David Shewan, the Energy-Saving Trust
Description:	David Shewan works for the Energy Saving Trust, a government-sponsored body that helps householders take individual action to reduce their CO2 emissions. David has provided advice to householders on home energy efficiency for five years, following his degree in Earth and atmospheric science.  David will talk us through the science behind climate change.  He’ll then give advice on increasing energy efficiency in our homes and guide us through the different renewable energy options: how they work, how much they cost and how much energy they save. This Café Scientifique is inspired by the Museum of Croydon’s latest exhibition: Croydon’s Climate Challenge, demonstrating what local people are doing to save energy.  We have asked a local family, a community group, a school, a local business and Croydon Council to show us what they are doing.  Come along and be inspired to take up the challenge yourself. Croydon Clocktower, 26 January - 26 April, 10.30– 5pm, Mondays – Saturdays FREE

Date:	Tuesday 26th February
Title:	Cradle of civilisation and the seeds of change
Speaker:	Anne-Marie Brennan
Description:	From coffee to clocks and surgical instruments to soap, few of us realise how many of the items we use in our everyday lives originated in the Muslim east. Hear Dr Brennan speak and visit 1001 Inventions, an exhibition bringing to life an often overlooked golden age of invention discovery from the seventh to the seventeenth centuries.

Date:	Tuesday 29th April
Title:	Evolution and creationism: a matter of acceptance and belief
Speaker:	James D Williams
Description:	The Darwin-Wallace theory of evolution is 150 years old on 1st July 2008. As theories in science go, it has been one of the most controversial, being blamed for everything from ‘proving’ that God does not exist to ethnic cleansing and teenage gun rampages in the USA and elsewhere. Those who oppose evolution, the creationists, would like to see it removed from the school curriculum, or at the very least demoted. Creationism is often seen as peculiarly American problem, plaguing the Southern States – the so-called Bible belt. But with a creationist museum already open on the South Coast of England and plans for a £3.5million creationist theme park in the Northwest of England, creationism is alive and well in the UK. The latest creationist attempt at infiltrating and overturning science in our schools is Intelligent Design Creationism. It dons the mantle of science to try and persuade us that some things just cannot be explained without invoking a designer.  In this talk James Williams, lecturer in science education at the University of Sussex, looks at the different types of creationism from Old Earth creationism to the Young Earth creationists who subscribe to a literal or plain reading of Genesis and on to the roots and aspirations of Intelligent Design Creationism. Using examples from nature and investigating ‘how science works’, misconceptions about evolution are exposed, flaws in the design argument are highlighted and creationism as a belief system is explored. Can evolution and creationism coexist and is a belief in God necessarily anti-science and anti-evolution?

Date:	Tuesday 27th May
Title:	Astronomy with gravitational waves: looking at what the eye cannot see in the sky.
Speaker:	Markus Schulte
Description:	The LISA gravitational wave detector is a satellite-based instrument jointly developed by ESA and NASA, which will do astronomy using not light but gravity, to look at the universe. This will enable scientists to look farther out into the universe than ever before, seeing black holes and other objects which are not visible to conventional astronomy. Markus Schulte will introduce the exciting but not well-known science of gravitational waves and their use in astronomy and cosmology. Dr Schulte studied physics at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, receiving his PhD in 2004, before moving to the UK to work at Imperial College, London first as a post-doctoral researcher and then managing the effort to build our part of this exciting project (and still sneaking off to the lab whenever he can). Imperial College is developing one of the key technologies necessary to tackle the measurement of gravitational waves in real life, the charge management device. This technology will be responsible for keeping disturbances to the measurement due to static electrical charging at a minimum. They are also beginning to work on ways to analyze the data which will be produced by the instrument, which will be launched in 2010 (Lisa Pathfinder) and 2018 (LISA). Dr Schulte also teaches maths at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Date:	Tuesday 29th July
Title:	Memories are made of this
Speaker:	Eleanor Maguire
Description:	How will you remember to come to this talk?  How will you find your way to the Braithwaite Hall?  How are you able to imagine and plan what you might do afterwards?  These are amazing feats, patients lives can be devastated when they aren’t able to accomplish them.  In my talk I will consider how your brain allows you to perform these vital cognitive functions. Eleanor Maguire is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, UCL, where she heads the Memory and Space research laboratory at the Centre. In her work, Eleanor is trying to understand how memories are formed, represented and recollected by the human brain. The Centre explores this complex issue by studying healthy volunteers as well as patients with memory impairments, using structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and neuropsychological testing.

Date:	Tuesday 30th September
Title:	Designer babies: fact or fiction?
Speaker:	Louise Naylor (Biosciences Dept, University of Kent)
Description:	Planning parenthood? Don’t leave it to chance. Let our experts help you create that special baby to order ... More than a million babies have been born through IVF and other assisted conception techniques. Explore the facts and the fiction behind the headlines. As reproductive medicine continues to push back the boundaries of parenthood, debate the extent to which we can or should manipulate human life in this way. Come and hear about the recent scientific advances in this area (from conception to cloning) and discuss the ethical implications for mankind. Dr Louise Naylor joined the University of Kent in 1989 as a Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer, in Biochemistry – a post she held for fifteen years. In 2000, she was seconded to the Office for Quality Assurance and Validation to support departments preparing for Subject Review and became Head of the Unit in 2006, following the merger of quality assurance and enhancement activities at the University. Louise leads a team responsible for the initial and continuing professional development of academic staff, curriculum and educational development including e-learning, the quality management of learning and teaching and providing student advice and guidance for effective learning.

Date:	Tuesday 28th October
Title:	The science of taste and flavour
Speaker:	Peter Barham (Bristol University)
Description:	What gives food its flavour? What makes some foods taste really good while others can be mediocre or even disgusting? How far can science go in answering these (and other) questions that are so important for domestic cooks and chefs alike? Peter Barham will try to answer these and other questions and show how we use all our senses to assess the food we eat. We use our eyes to see the colour, shape and size, our ears to hear sizzling or crackling, hands to feel the texture, tongues to sense the taste, noses to detect the aroma and the nerves in our mouths to assess the 'mouthfeel'.  The integration of these sensations we call 'flavour' and decide whether or not we like it. Peter Barham is Professor of Physics at Bristol University and Visiting Professor of Molecular Gastronomy in the Life Sciences faculty of the University of Copenhagen. In Bristol, as well as carrying out his own original research in fundamental polymer physics, and in the conservation of penguins, he is involved in undergraduate and post-graduate teaching.  In Copenhagen, he is helping to create research and teaching activities in the new and emerging area of Molecular Gastronomy (the application of physical, biological and medical sciences to understanding our appreciation of food as prepared in the home and high-quality restaurants). In the last few years Peter has collaborated with a number of chefs (notably Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck) with the idea of bringing science closer to the kitchen, both at home and in restaurants.
Date:	Tuesday 25th November
Title:	Utopia theory - the physics of society
Speaker:	Philip Ball
Description:	Are there 'laws of society' in the same way as there are laws of physics – inevitable rules that govern the way people behave and organise themselves collectively? And if so, can we use them to find better ways to live? Philip Ball will show how the social, economic and political sciences stand to benefit from tools and concepts borrowed from a seemingly unlikely source: statistical physics, the science of large numbers of interacting, inanimate particles. He will argue that, to understand and perhaps to predict human behaviour, sometimes the social sciences need to worry less about the psychology and idiosyncrasy of individuals and should focus instead on the ways that collective decisions arise spontaneously from their interactions. These ideas can be applied to phenomena as diverse as traffic flow, economics, voting and international relations. Philip Ball is a freelance science writer and a consultant editor for Nature, where he worked as an editor in physical sciences for over ten years. Now Philip writes about anything that takes his fancy - generally with a scientific slant, but his current books (a study of Gothic cathedrals and the "twelfth-century renaissance and a novel) show that this can end up pretty much any place.

Date:	Tuesday 16th December
Title:	Visual music and synaesthesia
Speaker:	Jamie Ward
Description:	Synaesthesia is a remarkable way of experiencing the world.  For some people, listening to music is a kaleidoscope of moving shapes and textures; hearing words triggers flavours on the tongue; or numbers glide through three dimensional space.  In this discussion, Dr Jamie Ward will briefly outline what synaesthesia is and what causes it.  He will then go on to consider in more detail one particular type of synaesthesia that has been linked to art and creativity - namely visualised music.  This type of synaesthesia provides a potent source of inspiration to artists but, intriguingly, it is something that we can all tune into.  Jamie Ward is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sussex in Brighton, and is one of the world’s leading experts on synesthesia.  He has published over 40 scientific papers and several books including The Frog who Croaked Blue: Synesthesia and the Mixing of the Senses (Routledge, 2008). In addition, he has contributed to the public understanding of science through numerous talks and media coverage in newspapers, radio and television including documentaries produced by the Discovery Channel and BBC Horizon.

Date:	Monday 26th January
Title:	Cryptography
Speaker:	Simon Blackburn
Description:	Over the past century, the field of cryptography has developed from its origins in keeping military messages secret to a flourishing science that's involved in everyday activities: securing cash machine networks, wifi communication and verifying credit card details on the web are just a few practical examples. The theory of cryptography has made some amazing things possible. For example, the theory shows how two people can communicate confidentially even when they have never met before: even an eavesdropper who knows their communication method, and who listens to all their communications, knows nothing. Cryptography allows digital messages to be signed: the digital signature is a sequence of bits added to the end of the message, but shares most of the properties we want from a normal signature on a document. Counter-intuitively, the theory even allows you to prove to someone that (for example) you know a certain number, without the proof revealing any information about that number at all. Simon Blackburn is a Professor of Pure Mathematics at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is interested in discrete mathematics. He publishes papers in applicable mathematics (cryptography and coding theory), and in pure mathematics (group theory and combinatorics).

Date:	Monday 23rd February
Title:	Chaos and the quantum world: are they compatible?
Speaker:	Jens Bolte
Description:	Many physical systems show a behaviour that appears to be unpredictable although in principle they are deterministic in nature. This phenomenon is known as "deterministic chaos" and can be found even in apparently simple systems. A widely studied example is the motion of an idealised billiard ball on a stadium-shaped billiard table. Since Heisenberg, Schroedinger, Dirac and others introduced quantum mechanics, it is known that the microscopic world is governed by quantum laws which are largely different from the classical laws governing phenomena on a macroscopic scale. It turns out that in the quantum world there is no direct analogue of a chaotic behaviour. In the field of quantum chaos one now studies quantum systems that  would be chaotic on a macroscopic, i.e. classical, scale. Over the years scientists working in this field have discovered exciting phenomena with surprising links to various areas of modern mathematics. Jens Bolte - obtained his degree and PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Hamburg in Germany. After having worked at the Universities of Hamburg, Clausthal and Ulm in Germany, in 2007 he moved to Royal Holloway, University of London, where he is a Reader in the Department of Mathematics. His area of research is mathematical physics, specialising in quantum chaos and semi classical quantum mechanics.

Date:	Monday 30th March
Title:	How old is the universe?
Speaker:	Daniel Mortlock
Description:	How can creatures that live for just decades even hope to measure the age of something which has lasted almost a billion times longer? Our earliest serious attempts (both scientific and religious) were certainly not very successful, but over the last century there has been steady progress to the point where the answer is now known to within a few per cent. This talk will take a look at the astronomical observations and physical theories that have combined to make this awesome measurement possible. Daniel Mortlock grew up in Melbourne, studying science and doing a PhD at Melbourne University, before coming to the UK, where he has had research positions at Cambridge University and, now, Imperial College London. Daniel's research has covered various areas of cosmology, astrophysics and statistics, with the closest thing to an overall theme being using large astronomical surveys to discover rare objects. At present he is working mainly with data from the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey the biggest-ever survey in infrared light, to try and find the coldest stars in our Galaxy and the most distant objects in the Universe

Date:	Monday 18th May
Title:	‘Power' is not about resources, it's about sex
Speaker:	Steve Moxon
Description:	'Power' is assumed to be about resources and to be exercised by one sex over another. But this to misunderstand the biology of dominance, which is same-sex, and serves not to apportion resources more efficiently by minimising conflict, but to create competition so as to apportion reproduction. To understand society, our concept of 'power' needs radical revision. Steve Moxon is a freelance author/researcher. He has published a provocatively titled book, ‘The Woman Racket: the new science explaining how the sexes relate at work, at play and in society. His essay on dominance is to be published as an editorial in the journal Medical Hypotheses.

Date:	Monday 29th June
Title:	Music and the mind
Speaker:	Alexandra Lamont
Description:

Date:	Monday 27th July
Title:	Water: the magic of molecular science
Speaker:	John Dore
Description:	Water is a familiar material with properties quite distinct from other liquids’. Most people know that its chemical formula is H2O and that snowflakes usually have hexagonal symmetry. They also know that water is essential for life; the presence of water on other planets is a possible indicator of extra-terrestrial life. Water has a direct influence on our weather and has played a central role in shaping the geology of our planet. One might expect that scientists would know all that there is to know about this important chemical but, despite much experimental investigation, there are still many things we don’t understood about water.

Date:	28th September 2009
Title:	Chimps Are Not Us
Speaker:	Jeremy Taylor
Description:

Date:	26th October 2009
Title:	The Big Bang Happened Everywhere
Speaker:	Molly Swanson
Description:	Molly Swanson will be correcting commonly held misconceptions about the universe. This is a chance to understand what the Big Bang really means.

Date:	30th November 2009
Title:	A Closer Look At Science at The British Museum
Speaker:	Caroline Cartwright
Description:	Caroline Cartwright is a Senior Scientist at the British Museum and will be discussing their unrivalled collection of material from all around the world ranging from turquoise mosiacs from Mexico to medieval icons.

Date:	Monday 22 February 6.30pm
Title:	Space exploration... man vs machine
Speaker:	Hugh Mortimer
Description:	How do we perform planetary exploration, what machines do we use, how do they work and what can we hope to find... ?