Upcoming Events   

February 20th 2012

Exploring astrophysics at the extreme

Andrew Levan

Andrew Levan will describe how we find and study the most energetic and exotic astrophysical events known in nature. In the process he will give a tour of the universe across the electromagnetic spectrum to study how stars evolve and end their lives, and how we know anything about it. 

An Associate Professor in the Astronomy and Astrophysics group in Warwick University’s physics department, Andrew’s principal research interests focus on gamma-ray bursts and supernovae.

March 19th 2012

Faster than light?

Daniel Scully

Recent results from an experiment at CERN have suggested that neutrinos may be travelling faster than the speed of light: a thing forbidden by Einstein's theory of Relativity. Has a mistake been made? Or could this be the beginning of the biggest revolution in the history of physics?

Daniel Scully is a particle physicist at the University of Warwick, working primarily with neutrinos, the weak but mysterious particles which may hold the answers to some of the biggest questions in physics. He does this as part of the T2K neutrino oscillation experiment, based in Japan.

Recent speakers   

January 16th 2012 

The world's smallest motors

Rob Cross

Imagine tiny railway engines hauling cargo along tiny rails inside your cells, each motor a single protein molecule. What can these miniscule automata have to do with radishes and thinking?

Monday 12th December 

The Transparent Body? 

Frances Griffiths, Richard Wellings and Julie Roberts

Digital medical imaging technology is capable of producing increasingly realistic images of the inner body. Thousands of images can be produced from a single scan and these can be cross-sectional, 3D, moving images or ‘fly-through’. Not all of these images will be useful to doctors for making medical decisions but there is considerable interest in their potential for aiding doctor-patient communication. But what do these images really show us? How easy are they to understand? Can viewing medical images be harmful to patients? And what would be needed to make them useful in medical consultations?

Monday 21st November

Pseudoscience and advertising

Rachel Quarrell

“Advertising: the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it", wrote the Canadian wit, Stephen Leacock. But what happens when it's science under discussion? Oxford chemist Dr Rachel Quarrell discusses how the slacker ends of consumer advertising play fast and loose with technical terminology. She unlocks the secrets of adverts stuffed full of pseudoscience and explains how some well-known products really work.

Monday October 17th 2011

Big science in big trouble 

James Le Fanu

This might seem the best of times for science. Certainly, its funding has never been more lavish, its mega projects routinely run to tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, or for the Large Hadron Collider,  seven billion dollars. But reflect on what it all adds up to and the result seems surprisingly modest - certainly compared to a century ago when, in the first decade of the twentieth century, (inter alia) Planck’s Quantum and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity rewrote the laws of physics, Ernest Rutherford  described the structure of the atom and William Bateson rediscovered Mendel’s laws of genetics. This seemingly inverse relationship between the scale of research funding for today’s Big Science and the insights that it generates threatens to undermine the credibility of the scientific enterprise, epitomised by the prospect that the LHC might, after all, fail to deliver – or as New Scientist put it recently ‘Don’t panic about the missing Higgs - for now’. Similar considerations apply to genetics and neursscience, whose massive projects, organised on quasi-industrial lines, threaten to bury the true spirit of scientific enquiry under an avalanche of undigested and indigestible facts.

Monday September 19th 2011

Are we ready for Humanity 2.0?

Steve Fuller

There is much talk that the mere ‘human’ is on its way out, and that some other life-form will be replacing it shortly. Will this be ‘Humanity 2.0’ or something entirely different? It all depends on how we envisage the future of humanity. Steve will consider the futures currently on offer, especially in terms of how they relate to a range of influential conceptions of what makes us human.

Monday July 18th 2011             

Decisions, decisions! When is the human mind better than electronics?          

Martine Barons 

It is claimed that 100,000 Britons deactivated their Facebook accounts in May. Facebook has been beset by concerns over its privacy, the most recent of which concerned its facial recognition technology, which commentators have described as sinister. This is an example of ‘machine learning’ in action; so is the tool that helps specialists decide if a breast lump is benign or cancerous. Like almost all technology, machine learning is morally neutral, but the uses to which it is put may not be. What can we do that machines cannot do? And what can machines do that we cannot?

Monday June 20th 2011         

When redundancy is a good thing: the hidden world of error-correcting codes

Robert Low

Redundancy is a word which few of us want to hear most of the time. However, when it comes to communication, redundancy isn't just a good idea, it's essential. Consider the problem of speaking to somebody in a noisy room, or over a poor telephone line. If there were no redundancy in the signals we send, even the slightest error in reception would cause information to be lost. And yet we can understand what people say even when a substantial part of their message is lost or drowned out. f u cn rd ths, u shd relise tht writn Englsh s hly rdndnt to.

Monday May 16th 2011            

Race and mental health: when science and politics collide

Swaran Singh

Inequalities in ethnic minority mental health have long been considered a manifestation of institutional racism in British psychiatry. Successive governments have spent millions of pounds trying to tackle this issue, without any improvement in the statistics. But are these figures correct? Are there genuine differences in the treatment and outcome of ethnic minorities in the UK? If so, are these due to racism within the mental health service? What does science tell us? More importantly, what does the politics deny?

Monday April 18th 2011          

Zombie Dynamics : The emergence of complex behaviour in simple particle systems

Quentin Caudron          

All around us, there exists a plethora of systems that have a large number of simple parts that together display unpredicted global behaviour. From the atoms that make up the molecules that make up the cells in your body, via ants building complex colony structures and demonstrating intricate patterns of behaviour, to billions and billions of stars aggregating into enormous galaxies, emergence transcends scales in both space and time and leads to behaviour that looks like intelligence and organisation. Behaviour that, when we consider the simple rules that these systems follow, we might not expect.

Monday March 21st 2011

Advances in dental science

Carrie-Anne McGeough

Acid Erosion is an ongoing challenge to dentists and researchers alike.  The focus of concern – which for the past century has been on the tooth decay disease, Caries – is shifting to Acid Erosion: in the last decade there has been a substantial rise in the amount of diagnosed cases of Acid Erosion due to the modern diet which is rich in acidic foods and beverages.

February 21st 2011

On-line privacy and surveillance

David Barnard-Wills

Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested last year that young people should expect to change their name at the end of adolescence, so that they could separate their adult selves from their youthful mistakes in an era of powerful search technology and pervasive databases. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of social networking site Facebook, argues that 'the age of privacy is over' and that privacy is no longer a social norm. Is privacy dead? If so, was the internet the murder weapon?  

Monday January 17th 2011

Can machines live?  From Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Life.

John Pickering

Psychology is a discipline with something of an identity problem.  Because of it’s struggle for academic acceptance, it modeled  itself too closely on the natural sciences. Hence, the advent of the computer was greeted with uncritical enthusiasm.  What quickly became know as Artificial Intelligence, or AI, raised the glittering prize of making computers do things which, if they were done by people or animals, would be taken as evidence of being able to perceive, understand and act.  This appeared to be just what psychology needed to show that it too could be properly scientific.  It was be to psychology what mathematics was to physics: a way of making theories explicit and the means to apply them to practical matters.

Monday December 13th 2010 

The music instinct: how music works and why we can't do without it

Philip Ball

Throughout history, all human cultures have made music. Why? How music can excite deep passions and how we make sense of musical sound are questions that have, until recently, remained profoundly mysterious. Even with what appear to be the simplest of tunes, the brain is performing some astonishing gymnastics: finding patterns and regularities and forming interpretations and expectations that create a sense of aesthetic pleasure. 

Monday November 15th 2010

Applied neuroimaging

Gemma Calvert, University of Warwick

Over the past twenty years, advances in human brain imaging technology have made it possible literally to 'see inside' the functioning human brain and to gain a superior understanding of the multitude of conscious and unconscious emotional and cognitive processes that characterises our daily lives. These technologies are now  being used by industry to gain deeper insight into their consumers' minds, to find out what stimulates them and what turns them off. Is the application of these technologies for commercial purposes ethical? What price to the UK economy is a failure to understand and predict the consumer?

Monday October 18th 2010

Dieting for health: science or pseudo-science? 

Lucy Aphramor,  University of Coventry

Obesity is never far from the news, and body weight seems to have attracted a panic of epidemic proportions. But is the imperative to get thin based on sound science? Or does it instead reflect contemporary western attitudes that devalue the fat body as unattractive, and censure fat-bodied people on moral grounds including an assumed lack of self-discipline?

Monday September 20th

Screening for disease - why? And how?

Craig Webster

Craig’s talk will, from the perspective of biochemistry, examine the principles behind screening and how they are implemented in common screening programmes, such as neonatal and cancer screening.  He will explore the reasons why some things are screened for, why some things aren't and ask whether screening is always a good idea.

Monday July 19th 2010

Game theory and climate change

David Mond, Mathematics department, University of Warwick

Finding an accurate way of a predicting future climate patterns or devising new low-carbon technologies is challenging enough.  But designing and implementing legislation which will reduce carbon emissions, while still being politically acceptable, is possibly even more of a challenge. Game theory, a mathematical model for studying the factors that influence decisions, strips away some of the complexity of the political problems, to reveal some simple structures which may help to inform our thinking. 

Monday June 21st

Carbon Conversations: a practical and emotional guide to lowering carbon footprint.

Tony Wragg and Jane Orton

Most of us now recognise and accept the dangers of climate change and often have a clear idea of what they (the government, the scientists, energy businesses, them next door) should do about it. Some of us have a clear idea about what we would like to do. But we still find it hard to make changes ourselves.

May 17th

The adolescent brain

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore

Adolescence is a time characterised by change - hormonally, physically, psychologically and socially. Yet until recently this period of life was neglected by cognitive neuroscience. In the past decade, research has shown that the brain develops both structurally and functionally during adolescence.

Monday 19th April 2010

Homeopathy: dispelling the myths, establishing the facts

Steven Cartwright

Despite being used by millions of people worldwide, homeopathy remains highly controversial in western medicine. This is primarily because homeopathic medicines are produced by a process of sequential succussion (shaking) and dilution of solutions well beyond the point at which any molecules of the original pharmaceutical remain. Without molecular evidence to demonstrate how it works, conventional science is sceptical of homeopathy.

Monday 15th March 2010

Serious playtime: computer games for education, therapy and research

Simon Scarle

Computer games are rapidly becoming a ubiquitous form of entertainment, so much so that even educators and scientists are starting to notice – as shown by the rapidly expanding field of Serious Games, where games are used for more serious purposes other than fun. This began as being seen as useful for education and training, but has moved on to produce games and game-like virtual worlds for therapeutic uses and carrying out research.

15th February 2010

Synthetic Biology, Hope and Hype

Derek Woolfson

Synthetic biology is an emerging area of scientific research at the interface of biology, chemistry, engineering, physics and mathematics. The research promises cheaper and faster routes to drugs, biofuels, and new materials for medical applications. However, synthetic biology also provokes controversy because it aims to 'engineer biology'.  Thus it raises ethical questions as well as pragmatic and ‘purely’ scientific ones.  

18th January 2010  

Organic Photovoltaics: a viable renewable way of producing energy?

Rafaello Da Campo, EPSRC Research Fellow, Warwick University

The increasing demand for fossil fuels, and the accompanying decrease of newly discovered sources for them, are shaping a completely new approach to the way energy will be transformed and supplied in the future. Moreover, the environmental issues associated with current energy sources are giving scientists additional motivation to find new ways of fulfilling the need for energy.

Monday 21st December 2009

Christmas Quiz

Kevin Byron

16th November 2009

The human body clock

Russell Foster

A 24h biological (circadian) clock controls, modulates and fine-tunes our sleep patterns, alertness, mood, physical strength, blood pressure, and every other aspect of our physiology and behaviour. Even our responses to different drug treatments show a large daily variation. Under normal conditions we experience a 24-hour pattern of light and dark, and our clock uses this signal to align biological time to the day and night. The clock is then capable of anticipating the differing demands of the 24-hour day and adjusting our biology in advance of the changing conditions. 

19th October 2009

Britain’s Forgotten Pandemic

Mark Honigsbaum

Between the summer of 1918 and the winter of 1919 the ‘Spanish’ influenza claimed the lives of an astonishing 228,000 Britons. Worldwide the death toll was simply unimaginable with as many as 100 million dead. But for all the pain and suffering the pandemic left few traces in public memory. The Times declared: “Never since the Black Death has such a plague swept over the face of the world and never, perhaps, has a plague been more stoically accepted.”  Now, as Britain prepares for a similar wave of illness triggered this time by the swine flu virus H1N1, we need to hear the ‘forgotten’ story of the Great Flu pandemic of 1918 and the heroic stories of the individuals who survived it – and to learn from them.

21st September 2009

Sex differences in brain and behaviour: implications for future treatment of psychiatric disorders

Jo Neill and Kay Marshall (Bradford University)

Jo Neill and Kay Marshall, working in the field of Psychopharmacology & Reproductive Endocrinology, have been investigating the learning differences between men and women, and their connection with psychiatric disease and memory.  Could it be influenced by sex hormones?  Their talk will focus on the effects of gonadal steroids, particularly oestrogen, on the ageing female body and brain.  Recognising the positive effects of oestrogen, they will consider how far HRT could be the answer.

Monday May 18th 2009

Paradoxical Nature of the Human Genome

Frank Ryan

From the perspective of biology, the February 2001 revelation of the makeup of the human genome could be seen as the Leviathan of the twenty-first century; successor to and dependent on the twin Leviathans of (in the twentieth century) the structure of DNA and (in the nineteenth century) Darwin's theory of evolution. The bi-centenary of Darwin's birth is an appropriate time to question the way his evolutionary theory has itself 'evolved'.  The traditional view, that evolution is brought about through natural selection operating on random mutations, can no longer be seen as the exclusive explanation of life.

Monday April 20th 2009

Polymaths – who needs them?

Alasdair Beal

Polymaths - those brilliant people who range across all kinds of subjects - can be very entertaining but what have they done for science? Are they just dilettanti, 'jacks of all trades but masters of none'? The orthodox view is that real progress comes from the sustained efforts of specialists who concentrate their efforts on a limited area of research in order to make the real breakthroughs. 

Monday March 16th  2009

Robots with Biological Brains and Humans with Part-Machine Brains

Kevin Warwick

This session looks at how implant and electrode technology can be employed to create biological brains for robots, to enable human enhancement and to diminish the effects of certain neural illnesses. In all cases the end result is to increase the range of abilities of the recipients. Kevin Warwick will indicate a number of areas in which such technology has already had a profound effect, a key element being the need for a clear interface linking a biological brain directly with computer technology.

Monday February 16th  2009

100% organic food and farming - the future for a post-oil-based farming industry?

Ulrich Schmutz

Ulrich’s career as a researcher in organic farming and horticulture shapes his take on the possibilities – and possibility - of total organic farming. He will draw on several projects he is involved with and other current and published research. He will outline the strength and weaknesses of the organic approach, and look at the fossil-fuel (aka carbon footprint) issue and other environmental economic issues of current conventional food production.

Monday January 19th  2009

How to catch a fly ball: how perception and action let us interact with the world

Andrew Wilson, Research Fellow at the Department of Psychology, University of Warwick

Perception is our way of staying in touch with what's going on in the world. The most important thing that perception allows us to do is to guide our actions, so that we can move around and interact with things with minimal crashing into things.

Good old fashioned 'sensation-perception' stories suffer from one major problem - if we tried to solve the problems of perceiving the world the way they say we should, we would get run over by a lot of buses. These problematic accounts attempt to explain how a perceiver might tie simple sensations into meaningful perceptions via mental transformations, or 'representations'. 

Monday December 15th 2008

PART ONE: Once upon a calculator... or It didn't happen that time …

Graham Reynolds

After a career working as an engineer for Rolls Royce, Graham can reveal some of the Projects that Failed – and that’s just the ones he knows about!  Projects relating to Defence and all aspects of Energy, which could have changed the course of history (or not); projects that were stopped for political reasons; projects you can’t believe were given serious consideration; projects weird and wonderful; facts you wouldn’t believe.  

8.30 – whenever …

PART TWO: I’m sorry, I haven’t a clue – about science

We finish off the year with the antidote to science quizzes.

Borrowing from the late, lamented Radio 4 comedy panel quiz I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, our not-so-resident Café-Sci quizmaster sets quirky questions, terrible tasks and 'orrible ordeals to sort out collectively - all in the name of comedy. Or science. Or, ideally, both.

Monday November 17th  2008

Into the heart of matter - the Large Hadron Collider

Helen Heath

To investigate the smallest building blocks of matter we need to build very big machines. The 27-kilometre long Large Hadron Collider (LHC), near Geneva, is the biggest of these big machines and is due to start exploring matter at the smallest scale in October 2008. This is the biggest scientific project since men were sent to the moon and involves thousands of physicists and engineers. 

Monday October 20th  2008

Letting others into your genes

Richard Trembath

Biology and medical research has been transformed through increasing knowledge of DNA sequence and genetic mechanisms. Sections of the media suggest we are in grave danger from an intrusive interrogation of individual genetic profiles. The talk will focus on the challenges and opportunities of placing health care in a proactive rather than reactive state.

Monday 15th September  2008

Brain surgery - a beginner's guide

M.C. Choksey

Everything you wanted to know about brain surgery but were too afraid to ask.  

Sunday 20th July  2008

Special Summer Event

Guided walk through the ancient Tocil Wood on the campus of Warwick University, part of the old Forest of Arden, followed by a barbecue picnic.

Monday 16th June 2008

Embryos, eggs & ethics - the history of infertility treatment

Jack Cohen

Monday 19th May

If computer science is a science, why is IT so difficult to deploy?

Alec Cassells

There are more war stories than we would like to hear about failed IT projects that cost hundreds of millions, especially in Government projects, while companies like Amazon, ebaY, Argos and many others run massive and successful businesses for a fraction of the IT cost.  What is the answer?  Is it incredibly simple, or mind-blowingly complex? Why can Argos tell me if a hair-dryer is in stock in Coventry but not in Leamington – today – but the NHS in Coventry does not have the results of a blood test in Warwick after three months, and has no expectations of ever receiving them?

Monday 21st April 2008

A brief history of infinity

Brian Clegg

Infinity is so remarkable and strange a concept that contemplating it has driven at least two great mathematicians over the edge into insanity. Where did the idea of infinity come from? Who defined and refined this paradoxical quantity? Why is infinity, a concept we can never experience or truly grasp, at the heart of science? How can some infinities be bigger than others? An exploration of the most mind-boggling feature of maths and physics, this talk examines amazing paradoxes and the people who devised and refined the concept.

Monday 17th March 2008

Who’s afraid of the unconscious?  Science and psychotherapy today

Jean Knox

The incomprehension - sometimes hostility - that exists between academic psychology and psychoanalysis largely turns on the different models of the mind and the nature of unconscious processes. Jean Knox believes that partisan attitudes across these branches of scientific enquiry are preventing new understandings of the unconscious to develop.  A more integrated understanding of unconscious processes requires both that therapists draw on scientific research to help reframe analytic theory, and that academic researchers develop tools to explore the problems analysts encounter in their clinical practice.

Monday 18th February 2008

Science on the stage: some plays and perspectives

Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (St Catherine's College, Oxford)

A systematic look at the phenomenon of the science play - theatrical events that weave scientific content into the plot lines of the drama. Most people are unaware that the tradition of plays that deal with science goes back at least to the Renaissance, and is still flourishing today. 

Monday 21st January 2008

A mingled yarn: questions, meaning and models in science

Nigel Sanitt 

Nigel’s talk – and ensuing discussion - will be broadly based on his book Science as a Questioning Process (Institute of Physics Publishing, 1996). In this, he argues for a view of science based on questions rather than answers, and he attacks the idea of "objects" or "truth" in science. 

Monday 17th December 2007

Christmas Crackers: a chemical demo evening

Mick Thompson, Myton’s very own ‘Dr. Bunsen Honeydew’.

Monday 19th November 2007

Science and Un-common sense!

Kevin Byron 

Francis Bacon was one of the founding fathers of modern science. However, his contribution to this extraordinary revolution would, in modern parlance, be more closely aligned with psychology. He identified habits of thinking that sustained superstition, self-deception and pseudo-science during his time in the seventeenth century.

Monday 15th October 2007

Sustainable energy

Matthew Rhodes (Encraft, Leamington)

UK energy policy is currently in flux. It aims to support increasingly conflicting objectives (economic growth, environmental well-being, fair access and security of supply) using an increasingly diverse portfolio of competing technologies (nuclear, wind, coal, gas, biomass, fuel cells etc). How can science help overcome the challenges this creates? How should society take decisions about energy policy today that may shape our communities and landscape for the next century? 

Monday 17th September 2007

Climate change and agriculture: will extreme weather leave us hungry?

Brian Thomas (Warwick HRI, University of Warwick Wellesbourne) 

Models of global climate change predict that the UK will become warmer, with drier summers and wetter winters, which could increase agricultural productivity. However, global warming is likely to bring a more variable climate with increased probability and magnitude of extreme weather events that may cause periodic crop failure. So, will extreme weather leave us hungry?

Sunday 12 August 2007

Summer Picnic and guided tour of Birmingham Botanical Gardens

Monday 18th June 2007

New planets: new thinking about aliens?

Jack Cohen

With the recent discovery of Earth-like exo-planets, we may wonder about the possibility of finding humanoid life ‘out there’ (and what exactly is ‘there’?)   Jack Cohen’s claim is that, even if we 'ran Earth's evolution again', we wouldn’t find humanoid life anywhere, but there is nevertheless lots of life. Not the same creatures (no amoebae, reptiles, humans), but herbivores and carnivores probably. Same play, different actors. He believes there are intelligent aliens, but perhaps not extelligence (knowledge outside brains).  Come along to be persuaded or to challenge; come with your antennae waving!

Monday 21st May 2007

Biotrash: traffic in medical garbage in a globalised India

Sarah Hodges, Warwick University

Science is now regularly outsourced to South Asia; call centres, medical tourism or computer software engineering.  India is regularly spotlighted by the British media as one of Asia's most recent economic 'miracles' and they talk about how India increasingly affects our daily lives and economy in contemporary Britain.  But what is the effect on India of these scientific developments?

Monday 16th April 2007

Nuclear fusion: powering the future?

Chris Warrick, Education and outreach manager for  the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority's (UKAEA) department for public relations

Growing energy requirements around the world are placing increasing strains on our current energy sources. It is now almost indisputable that energy generation by burning fossil fuels is driving global warming.  What if there were an energy source that could provide an abundant supply of energy world-wide, produce no air pollution and little, if any, nuclear waste?  Could fusion power be that source?

Monday 19th March 2007

Eat up! A little of what you fancy does you good - was grandma right after all?

David Shuker

We’ve all seen scary headlines about nutrition:  red meat causes cancer! Does it? If so, how? What can you do about it? Should you do anything about it? Do you give a XXXX for it? What about alcohol ? How dangerous is a steak and beer? Come and find out!

Monday 5th March 2007

Science Pub Quiz

A slightly ‘off-piste’ Café Scientifique event, to feed into National Science and Engineering Week – and as an excuse for a bit of fun on an otherwise run-of-the-mill Monday night.

Monday 19th February 2007

Who's afraid of avian flu?

Nigel Dimmock, virologist

Prophesies of a new human pandemic – even worse than that of 1918 – followed the most recent outbreak of Avian Flu.  How seriously should we take this? Or is it just a media panic?

Monday 15th January 2007

Nano-technology in developing countries

David Grimshaw, Practical Action

Technology has often been seen as a driver of economic growth and in the long history of mankind, has been used to create surpluses that enable society to make advances in welfare. High income countries currently gain much of their competitive advantage from the development and innovation of new technologies, yet each wave of new technology tends to increase the divide between rich and poor.

Monday 18th December 2006

The alchemy of wine: an evening of theory and practice

Steve Smith, Coventry University

Monday 20th November

Who do we think we were? Interpreting the first Warwickshire people

Steven Falk, Warwick Museum, Keeper of Natural History

Hand axes some half a million years old have been found in what is now the Princethorpe area of Warwickshire, in the bed of an ancient river that (before the Ice Ages completely re-formed the British landscape) once flowed to East Anglia. Who were these first Warwickshire people? What were their origins and what is their relationship to us? 

Monday 16th October 2006

Mismatch: why our world no longer fits our bodies

Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson

Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson discuss their forthcoming book. 

Monday 18th September 2006

Bending minds - can technology change who you are?

Martin Westwell

Martin will talk about the mind, the brain and how pills to make you smarter, pills to make you forget, electrodes inserted into the brain and devices to let you control computers just by thinking are technologies that are either with us now or just around the corner. How do these technologies and the new experiences they bring transform and bend the human mind? How are we going to harness them to maximise the potential of individuals without sacrificing their individuality? What roles do scientists play in deciding how they are to be implemented?