94 results found for ,18-22-year-olds

Mark Cutkosky is Fletcher Jones Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford. Here he discusses climbing robots and how they can take their cue from nature.

Professor Ray Goldstein FRS is the Schlumberger Professor of Complex Physical Systems at the University of Cambridge. Here he describes a biological example of topological inversion, with relevance to engineering problems in human technology.

Stanislav Gorb is Professor of Zoology at the University of Kiel, Germany, with an interest in functional morphology and biomechanics. Here he discusses clustering as a form of self-assembly, and applications in adhesion.

The human genome sequence has been available for more than a decade, but its significance is still not fully understood. While most human genes have been identified, there is much to learn about the DNA signals that control them. This lecture describ....

Proteins are the action molecules of all cells, and to function properly, protein chains must fold and assemble correctly. But each chain of every protein runs the risk that it will combine with one or more identical chains to form nonfunctional aggr....

The architect John Soane became an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1795, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1796 and, finally, a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1821. All three were then housed in Somerset House. Soane was an avid collector a....

James Gleick shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality - the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world. The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanished ....

For the great theoretical physicist Paul Dirac FRS, the importance of mathematical beauty was 'like a religion'. Although his first papers on quantum mechanics showed an acute aesthetic awareness, he first set out his principle of mathematical beauty....

Panel discussion involving Tracey Brown, Professor Angela McLean FRS, Professor Andrew Stirling and chaired by Professor David Spiegelhalter OBE FRS.  How can we make decisions that affect our health when scientific advice is never 100% sure?   Wha....

Professor Ada Yonath, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.  To facilitate instant recovery of active life once bears wake up from their winter sleep, nature provides ingenious mechanism based on periodic packing of their ribosomes, the cellular ma....

Dr Sarah Teichmann is based at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge.  In the post-genomic era, high-throughput methods are providing us with a deluge of data about genes and proteins. What knowledge about biology do....

Dr Julian Allwood is leader of the Low Carbon Materials Processing Group in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge.  One third of the world's carbon emissions are emitted by industry. Most industrial emissions relate to produci....

Based on new international research undertaken with IPSOS Mori, the British Council's Trust Pays report considers questions such as How trusted is the UK? Does cultural exchange shape opinions of Britain? Does the level of trust have an impact on tra....

The early years of the twentieth century saw one of the most ferocious controversies in the whole history of biology, over Gregor Mendel's experiments in pea hybridization and their significance for the scientific study of inheritance. On one side, t....

The prime numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17... are those whole numbers with no factors, numbers that divide evenly into larger numbers, other than themselves and 1. They are the building blocks of arithmetic and have fascinated mathematicians for millen....

World leading in quality and impact, UK research is helping us to identify new sources of energy for a more sustainable future and to seek cures for deadly and delibitating diseases.  New and profound insights allow us to unearth the secrets of our ....

How does the brain store and recall memories? A critical neural component of memory is the synapse, a specialist junction where one nerve cell releases a transmitter chemical to influence the excitability of another. Memorable events are thought to i....

When the decade-long argument between Johannes Hevelius, the Danzig astronomer, and Robert Hooke about the respective merits of plain and telescopic sights for astronomical instruments reared its head again in 1685, the resulting controversy threaten....

The visible universe has edges, known as event horizons, which surround a black hole or a region of space speeding away faster than light.  Event horizons are governed by a strikingly simple set of quantum laws which imply that black holes are at on....

A disagreeable side effect of longer life-spans is the failure of one part of the body – the knees, for example – before the body as a whole is ready to surrender. The search for replacement body parts has fueled the highly interdisciplinary fiel....

Nevil Maskelyne, 5th Astronomer Royal and Fellow of the Royal Society, is today best known as the villain of Dava Sobel’s Longitude. This talk will, however, look further back and examine how Maskelyne has fared since his death in 1811, attempting ....

Plastics pioneers had great aspirations for their new materials. Roland Barthes called plastics “a miraculous substance . . . a transformation of nature”. Serendipity, careful experimentation and entrepreneurial skills have all played significant....

What does it mean to be human, and what makes us so? Does our brain, how we evolved, how we communicate, or how we interact make us human? Are we really so different from the other animals? 

An exploration of the boundaries of human nature, chai....

There are two rules for making an optical microscope; the lenses must be small, since defects of colour and focus increase with lens size, and the lenses must capture light from the object over as wide an angle as possible to record fine detail. This....