From Waste to Wealth Using Green Chemistry
The world faces the fundamental problems of increasing waste and decreasing resources as it tries to cope with the increasing consumption of a growing population. It is clear that these challenges can only be met through a fundamentally different a....
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A Greenhouse-Gas Experiment
A medicine cabinet in your garden?
Professor Monique Simmonds talks about the use of plants and fungi as sources of sustainably harvested medicines
More details | Watch nowA nano-sized gas sensor 6
Sensotran are the industrial partner in the nano2hybrids project. A small family firm based just outside Barcelona in Spain, they are experts in commercial production of gas sensors for a range of industries, notably for detecting dangerous gases pro....
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What will happen in Africa as water demand increases? Robert Dewar is the recently retired UK High Commissioner to Nigeria and former Ambassador to Ethiopia. Robert drew on his considerable experience of working and living in ....
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The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was not the first of its kind, according to research in Nature. Two groups of scientists have found sedimentary evidence for possible predecessors to the 2004 event in...
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Philip Shlenoff, recent high school graduate, gives a presentation of his work and opportunity at the Florida State University Dept. of Chemistry. Under the supervision of Zaki Estephan, Philip has actively participated in research that targets canc....
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Are environment, or genetics, more to blame when a human being turns to a life of crime? What does it mean to be criminally insane? And how effectively can a criminal tendency be treated with drugs? What different lights can literature and science sh....
More details | Watch nowBiological Evolution in the Context of Cosmic Evolution and of Cultural Evolution
After reconsidering the very long time periods in cosmic evolution, we will focus our attention to the evolutionary development of living organisms on our planet Earth. The genetic variants (mutations), which are occasionally produced, are alteratio....
More details | Watch nowC60+ in space – a 28-year detective story about the Diffuse Interstellar Bands – Part 1
John Maier, Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Basel, describes the journey from the prediction of C60+ in 1987, through tentative assignment of its electronic spectrum by Radioastronomy, measurement in a neon-matrix and finally, in....
More details | Watch nowCanoeing in the Arctic, a Scientist’s Perspective
As scientists, our livelihoods are supported by teaching and research, but we also have the opportunity to make observations beyond our usual confines and share these with non-scientific citizens. Growing up in my native state of Minnesota, I have al....
More details | Watch nowCatalysis at Surfaces: From Atoms to Complexity
Catalysis by solid surfaces is, among others, of importance for the chemical industry (e.g. the Haber-Bosch process) as well as for environmental chemistry (car exhaust catalyst). Surface physical techniques enable investigation of the underlying e....
More details | Watch nowChemistry: A Key to Human Progress
Basic research in science has greatly increased our understanding of nature, expanded frontiers of inquiry, shown us how little we know, triggered creative waves of invention and innovation, and prompted technological breakthroughs that were inconcei....
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Chemistry is not merely a science of making observations in order to better understand Nature. Our science is creative and productive, generating substances of very high value from almost nothing. Chemists already have made enormous contribution to....
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Today countless protected areas for biodiversity are maintained at huge public and private expense. The question we must consider is whether our protection strategies actually protect when the real threats are related to the current climate change. M....
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Observations from around the Earth suggest that even the gloomiest predictions of climate change from the 2007 IPCC report may underestimate the seriousness of the changes due this century. In this lecture, Professor James Lovelock discusses the cons....
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Nature reporter Anjali Nayar hiked for 21 days in Northern Bhutan to find out how this tiny Himalayan nation is dealing with rapidly melting glaciers.
More details | Watch nowClimate change: space and our own planet.
Dr Maggie Aderin develops instruments that monitor climate change. Find out about these and other missions that are making science count in the battle against climate change. With practical experiments to show how climate change works Maggie shows ho....
More details | Watch nowClimate change: The two-degree target
In December 2009, policy makers meet in Copenhagen, Denmark to thrash out a new global deal on climate change. The aim is to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures. We sent three young climate researchers along ....
More details | Watch nowClimbing the Everest Beyond the Everest
The challenges associated with pursuing ribosomal crystallography can be described as a series of Everest climbing. At each step, when reaching the summit, a taller and more difficult one became exposed. Snapshots of this story will be described.__....
More details | Watch nowContinental loss: the quest to determine Antarctica’s contribution to sea-level change
For over 50 years scientists have been working to understand Antarctica’s contribution to sea level. For much of this time there has even been disagreement about if this massive ice sheet is growing or shrinking. In 2012, advances in data analysis....
More details | Watch nowControlling Photons in a Box and Exploring the Quantum to Classical Boundary
The founders of quantum theory assumed in 'thought experiments' that they were manipulating isolated quantum systems, obeying the counterintuitive laws which they had just discovered. Technological advances have recently turned these virtual experi....
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