Date:

15th February 2010

Title:

Synthetic Biology, Hope and Hype

Speaker:

Derek Woolfson

Description:

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.  Dek Woolfson will explain his work, its promises and drawbacks, and expect questions and discussion covering the full spectrum of your interests and responses.

Derek Woolfson is Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry in the School of Chemistry at Bristol University.

Date:

18th January 2010  

Title:

Organic Photovoltaics: a viable renewable way of producing energy?

Speaker:

Rafaello Da Campo, EPSRC Research Fellow, Warwick University

Description:

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.

The conversion of solar radiation into electricity is one promising method of supplying energy; and the abundance and intensity of such radiation make solar energy a highly suitable and widespread source.

Rafaello’s talk will cover some basic concepts behind the physics of organic semiconductors and their applications for converting light into electric current.

You don’t have to know anything about organic photovoltaics to benefit from this evening of explanation and enquiry. Raise your queries and concerns in the open-ended discussion after the talk: understanding and engaging with research crucial to tackling impending environmental disaster involves all of us!

Date:

Monday 21^st December 2009

Title:

Christmas Quiz

Speaker:

Kevin Byron

Date:

16th November 2009

Title:

The human body clock

Speaker:

Russell Foster

Description:

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. Body temperature drops, blood pressure decreases, tiredness increases in anticipation of going to bed, whilst before dawn, metabolism is geared-up in anticipation of increased activity. The past decade has witnessed remarkable progress in understanding the mechanisms that generate circadian rhythms and sleep, and in parallel, an appreciation of the severe consequences of ignoring the impact of these rhythms on our health and quality of life. The presentation will consider how circadian rhythms are generated and why internal time must be taken into consideration in both medical treatments and in our increasingly 24/7 society.

Russell Foster is Professor of Circadian Neuroscience and  Chair of the Nuffield Laboratory of Ophthalmology at the University of Oxford. He is a Senior Kurti Fellow at Brasenose College and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2008. With his co-author Leon Kreitzman, he has published "Rhythms of Life" and "Seasons of Life" to much critical acclaim.

Date:

19th October 2009

Title:

Britain’s Forgotten Pandemic

Speaker:

Mark Honigsbaum

Description:

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.

Mark Honigsbaum is an author and journalist specializing in the history and science of infectious disease. Based at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, his work appears in the Guardian, the Observer and the Financial Times.  His books include The Fever Trail: In Search of the Cure for Malaria, and Living With Enza: the Forgotten Story of Britain and the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918, which was longlisted for the 2009 Royal Society science book-of-the-year award.

Date:

21st September 2009

Title:

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

Speaker:

Jo Neill and Kay Marshall (Bradford University)

Description:

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.

Date:

Monday May 18^th 2009

Title:

Paradoxical Nature of the Human Genome

Speaker:

Frank Ryan

Description:

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.

Frank Ryan believes there is now overwhelming evidence for a much more comprehensive explanation of evolution which still respects Darwinian natural selection, yet has major implications for medicine and society. 

Frank promises his talk will be challenging, unfamiliar - even startling - but also rewarding.

Frank Ryan is a consultant physician with Sheffield PCT and Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Evolutionary Biology, University of Sheffield.

Date:

Monday April 20^th 2009

Title:

Polymaths – who needs them?

Speaker:

Alasdair Beal

Description:

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.
Alasdair Beal challenges this view and discusses the achievements of some of history's great polymaths, including the Italian Leonardo da Vinci and the Englishman Thomas Young.

Date:

Monday March 16^th  2009

Title:

Robots with Biological Brains and Humans with Part-Machine Brains

Speaker:

Kevin Warwick

Description:

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.

His emphasis is on practical scientific studies, past and on-going, and he will chiefly focus on the use of electrode technology, where a connection is made directly with the cerebral cortex and/or nervous system. He will consider the future in which robots have biological, or part-biological, brains and in which neural implants link the human nervous system bi-directionally with technology and the internet.

Date:

Monday February 16^th  2009

Title:

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

Speaker:

Ulrich Schmutz

Description:

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.

As everybody has to eat, and many grow their own food and even have some farming links, Ulrich is hoping for a lively discussion - as some of his organic-scenario thinking will demand personal lifestyle changes!

Ulrich Schmutz worked at Berlin University in Germany and as farm business consultant in East Germany before joining the HDRA research charity (new name - Garden Organic) at Ryton as an environmental economist seven years ago. He has been working on research projects with various UK Universities (including Warwick University’s organic research facility at Warwick HRI Wellesbourne). He is also visiting Professor for Organic Farming at Bolzano University, Italy.

Date:

Monday January 19^th  2009

Title:

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

Speaker:

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

Description:

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'. The last 30 years have seen psychologists come at the question from the other end, and so the 'perception-action' approach asks three basic questions, in this order:
1. What, exactly, is it you are trying to do in a given task?
2. What resources do you have available? (e.g. perceptual information about the world)
3. How might you use those resources to control your actions?
Andrew will sketch out how perception-action researchers use this basic scheme to drive their research programme about skilled movements (like walking, driving & intercepting things) by talking about an everyday example - how do baseball outfielders catch a fly ball (or indeed, how that cricketer catches the deep shot to square leg)?

Date:

Monday December 15^th 2008

Note: This meeting will take place at St Patrick's Irish Club, off Adelaide Road, Leamington. The club is just north of Adelaide Bridge, opposite Dormer Place

Recognising the challenge posed by this time of year, we aim to marry scientific enlightenment with scientific creativity ...

7.30 – 8.15

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.  Among other things you can hear about Graham’s part in delaying the Channel Tunnel, and the secret German coffee pot proposal.

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 Paul will set you quirky questions, terrible tasks and 'orrible ordeals to sort out collectively - all in the name of comedy. Or science. Or, ideally, both.

Date:

Monday November 17^th  2008

Title:

Into the heart of matter - the Large Hadron Collider

Speaker:

Helen Heath

Description:

Helen Heath is a member of the Particle Physics Group in Physics Department at the University of Bristol and rejoices in the unwieldy job title of Reader in Teaching and Learning - Physics. She writes:  

“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. I hope to be able to explain why one of those physicists has worked on the project for over 10 years. Given the timing of this talk I should be able to share the excitement of observing the first events at the LHC but may find myself with some explaining to do instead.”

Date:

Monday October 20^th  2008

Title:

Letting others into your genes

Speaker:

Richard Trembath

Description:

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.
Professor Trembath is a medical consultant in Clinical Genetics and a Senior Investigator of the National Institute for Health Research. He is the Director of the NIHR Comprehensive Bio-Medical Research Centre at Guy's and St Thomas' Trust and King's College, London.

Date:

Monday 15th September  2008

Title:

Brain surgery - a beginner's guide

Speaker:

M.C. Choksey

Description:

Everything you wanted to know about brain surgery but were too afraid to ask.  Mr Choksey, a neurosurgeon at UHCW*, will take you on a journey through his 25 years of travels through other people’s brains.  No volunteers required (probably).

*University Hospitals, Coventry and Warwickshire

Date:

Sunday 20th July  2008

Title:

Special Summer Event

Speaker:

Description:

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.

Date:

Monday 16th June 2008

Title:

Embryos, eggs & ethics - the history of infertility treatment

Speaker:

Jack Cohen

Description:

Date:

Monday 19th May

Title:

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

Speaker:

Alec Cassells

Description:

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 my blood test in Warwick after three months, and has no expectations of ever receiving them?

Alec Cassells has worked in the Information Technology industry for 40 years.  Most of his work has been with engineering and manufacturing companies such as Volvo, ABB, Ericsson and Airbus.  Most recently, he has been a guest lecturer at UK universities in departments of engineering, telecommunications and computer science and has worked for several years with the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in support of their Manufacturing Excellence awards.

Date:

Monday 21st April 2008

Title:

A brief history of infinity

Speaker:

Brian Clegg

Description:

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.

Brian has a degree in Natural Sciences from Cambridge, an MA in Operational Research from Lancaster and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He spent 18 years at British Airways but since 1994 has run his own company, Creativity Unleashed. He began writing books at the same time and has come to specialise in popular science with titles including Light Years (an exploration of humanity’s fascination with light), First Scientist (a life of Roger Bacon), A Brief History of Infinity, The God Effect (on quantum entanglement), The Man Who Stopped Time (a biography of the moving picture pioneer Eadweard Muybridge) and The Global Warming Survival Kit. Brian has spoken at the Royal Institution in London, at science festivals including the Cheltenham Festival of Science and at Cafés Scientifiques and schools across the country.

Date:

Monday 17th March 2008

Title:

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

Speaker:

Jean Knox

Description:

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.

One of the major fields where this kind of collaboration has been particularly fruitful is that of trauma. Knox’s view is that the most productive and exciting fields of study are attachment theory and the early emotional relationships that are the essential foundations for the development of mind. She will explain the background and elaborate on her position, reached through many years of therapeutic practice, as well as academic research.

Dr Jean Knox is a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst. She is a Training Analyst of the Society of Analytical Psychology, a Senior Member of the British Association of Psychotherapists and Consultant Editor of the Journal of Analytical Psychology. She has written extensively on the relevance of attachment theory and developmental neuroscience. Her book Archetype, Attachment, Analysis: Jungian Psychology and the Emergent Mind was published in 2003.

Date:

Monday 18th February 2008

Title:

Science on the stage: some plays and perspectives

Speaker:

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

Description:

Kirsten’s Shepherd-Barr’s recent book Science on Stage (2006) provided 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. Kirsten will give a sense of the ways science and scientists have figured in the theatre in the past, and then focus on some very recent examples, including an exciting but as-yet-untranslated Italian play. Her talk will raise questions about the relationship of science to ‘culture’, the role of science in our lives, and how ethical considerations in science may best be explored.

Date:

Monday 21st January 2008

Title:

A mingled yarn: questions, meaning and models in science

Speaker:

Nigel Sanitt (The Panteneto Press)

Description:

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. 

Date:

Monday 17th December 2007

Title:

Christmas Crackers: a chemical demo evening

Speaker:

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

Description:

Date:

Monday 19th November 2007

Title:

Science and Un-common sense!

Speaker:

Kevin Byron 

Description:

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.

Four hundred years later, are we any less prone to this illusory kind of thinking? Is science really the pursuit of the rational?  If so, why does so  much of it make no sense at all?  Why do children find science hard?

Answers to these questions will be explored in this presentation through a discussion of the nature of intuition and counter-intuition. Throughout the presentation you'll be invited to make intuitive guesses to some scientific questions to demonstrate these ideas in action. There will even be a working demonstration of a counter-intuitive machine - so come along and be confounded. 

Kevin Byron received his PhD in Physics from the University of Hull and  pursued a career in research for some twenty-five years. During this time he has been an honorary visiting lecturer at the University of Glasgow and a visiting Fellow at the University of Salford and was elected to Fellowship of the Institute of Physics. Whilst in industry he published over fifty patents, some eighty   papers in peer-reviewed journals and co-authored two specialist books. He is a  NESTA fellow and senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He is currently researching scientific creativity and has written a monograph on counter-intuition due for publication later this year.

Date:

Monday 15th October 2007

Title:

Sustainable energy

Speaker:

Matthew Rhodes (Encraft, Leamington)

Description:

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? Matthew will outline the issues, the technical state of play, and touch on the way other countries have approached the same problem.

Date:

Monday 17th September 2007

Title:

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

Speaker:

Brian Thomas (Warwick HRI, University of Warwick Wellesbourne) 

Description:

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?

Brian will discuss how the risks to agricultural food production due to extreme weather can be predicted. Some of the potential impacts and how production may adapt will be discussed, including in the context of international food production and supply chains.

Date:

Sunday 12 August 2007

Title:

Summer Picnic and guided tour of Birmingham Botanical Gardens

Speaker:

Date:

Monday 18th June 2007

Title:

New planets: new thinking about aliens?

Speaker:

Jack Cohen

Description:

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!

Jack Cohen’s more recent books – and he may bring copies along for sale – include the very popular Science of Discworld 1, 2 and 3 – co-written with Terry Pratchett and Ian Stewart – used as 'bite-sized science' for general studies in many schools; and (also with Ian Stewart) Evolving the Alien (aka what does a Martian look like?) which probably relates more closely with this talk. He has also written ‘a couple of s-f novels and several popular (New Scientist) articles’.

Date:

Monday 21st May 2007

Title:

Biotrash: traffic in medical garbage in a globalised India

Speaker:

Sarah Hodges, Warwick University

Description:

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?

Dr Sarah Hodges, lecturer in twentieth-century history at Warwick University, is currently undertaking research in Chennai (formerly known as Madras), one of India's fastest-growing IT hotspots, to assess how science and technology are changing everyday lives in South India.  She examines the relationship between highly-trained scientists and technicians, the ‘New Wealth’, bio-medical research (and waste disposal) practices, the economy of garbage re-use, and environmental concerns.

Private umbilical cord blood-banking services are marketed and aggressively taken up; this is just one of a number of developments where the promise of improved health becomes linked with traffic in hospital waste, both legal and illegal. More generally, garbage provides a source of income for many, as IT provides increasing opportunities for its exploitation, and there is a visible proliferation of new forms of techno-science.

Date:

Monday 16th April 2007

Title:

Nuclear fusion: powering the future?

Speaker:

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

Description:

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?

Nuclear fusion is the process that powers the sun, joining light atomic nuclei to form heavier atoms like helium.  Here on Earth, future fusion plants will imitate the sun, fusing deuterium and tritium atoms at temperatures over 100 million °C, releasing energy that can be used to generate electricity.  The fuel for this fusion is found in water, one of the most abundant substances on the planet and therefore the world can be provided with fusion energy for billions of years.

What's the catch?  How far off is a world that is powered by fusion reactors and is large-scale energy production truly feasible?

Date:

Monday 19th March 2007

Title:

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

Speaker:

David Shuker

Description:

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!

David Shuker is a member of the UK Government Advisory Committee on Carcinogenicity of Consumer Products. He was appointed chair of Organic Chemistry at the Open University in 2000, later becoming Head of the Chemistry Department.  Awarded a Royal Society European Exchange fellowship in 1986, he worked at the WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon to pursue his research interests in diet and cancer, before returning to Britain to the MRC Toxicology Unit in Leicester.  Here, his research group gained a major contract with the UK Food Standards Agency to develop biomarkers of dietary exposures. As well as publishing over a hundred scientific papers, David has been the academic consultant for all five series of the BBC's Ever Wondered about Food?

Date:

Monday 5th March 2007

Title:

Science Pub Quiz

Description:

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.

This is strictly NOT for boffins only!  Boffins are extremely welcome, however, particularly if they offer to join less-scientifically-competent teams; we hope everyone will be able to engage on some level, and score a point or two on science fiction perhaps, on films or music, or food or history….  and expand their knowledge a bit during the evening, too.

Come alone, bring a friend or bring a whole team.  The more the merrier.  £1 at the door.  7.30 for an 8.00 start.

The Jug and Jester is right beside the bus stop, outside Leamington Parish Church, and a mere 5 minutes from the Station.  The function room is at the far end of the pub, in Bath Street.

Download a flyer for this event here (pdf).

Date:

Monday 19th February 2007

Title:

Who's afraid of avian flu?

Speaker:

Nigel Dimmock, virologist

Description:

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?

•          144 different flu viruses peacefully coexist with wild birds as harmless intestinal infections.

•          Only three have become established in people (causing pandemics in 1918, 1957 and 1968), and evolved to the well-known respiratory infection. Will this happen again? If so, when?

•          Previous pandemics caused widespread human illness and mortality, killing 1-50 million worldwide in about one year. Can we expect the same level of mortality – or even worse?

•          What, if anything, can we do to protect ourselves?

The virologist, Nigel Dimmock, will give his opinion, based on forty-five years' research, on these and related issues.

Nigel Dimmock is a virologist who has spent over forty-five years researching influenza and other viruses, including the common cold and HIV. He has worked in Australia, Canada, Germany and the USA, but most of the time he has been at Warwick University, where, for over thirty years, he has been taught generations of wannabe virologists and immunologists.  He is now an Emeritus Professor.

His has published nearly 200 articles; very recently the 6th edition of the text book ‘Modern Virology’ appeared.  In 2006, he chaired the Independent Government Review on Bird Quarantine, and is currently seeking financial backing to market a revolutionary new treatment for influenza. 

Date:

Monday 15th January 2007

Title:

Nano-technology in developing countries

Speaker:

David Grimshaw, Practical Action

Description:

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.

This talk will highlight specific examples of technologies that are capable of redressing major inequalities in the world and discuss the conditions that are necessary to make this happen.

Guardian readers will have been following the work of Practical Action, one of the Guardian's two featured Christmas Charity choices.

David is one of Practical Action's international team leaders and is focussing at the moment on developing technologies for purifying polluted and salt water for drinking.

Date:

Monday 18th December 2006

Title:

The alchemy of wine: an evening of theory and practice

Speaker:

Steve Smith, Coventry University

Date:

Monday 20th November

Title:

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

Speaker:

Steven Falk, Warwick Museum, Keeper of Natural History

Description:

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? Illustrated by items from the Warwickshire Museum, the Senior Keeper of Natural History, Steven Falk, will take us on a six-million year journey, from Africa to the human race we are today.

Download a poster for this cafe (pdf).

Date:

Monday 16th October 2006

Title:

Mismatch: why our world no longer fits our bodies

Speaker:

Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson

Description:

Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson discuss their forthcoming  book. More details here.

Date:

Monday 18th September 2006

Title:

Bending minds - can technology change who you are?

Speaker:

Martin Westwell

Description:

Martin Westwell is Deputy Director of the Institute for the Future of the Mind at Oxford University and an award-winning science communicator, named Scientist of the New Century by The Times and Novartis in 1999.

Martin started out in organic chemistry at Cambridge University and then moved to Oxford, where he discovered neuroscience, the biotech industry and a number of science and society projects, including helping to found Cafes Scientifiques in Oxford in 2000 and at the Photographers' Gallery in central London in 2005.

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?