C60+ in space – a 28-year detective story about the Diffuse Interstellar Bands – Part 4
The early (mid 1990s) work on the electronic spectroscopy was carried out by John Maier's group, trapping C60+ in a neon matrix in this apparatus.
More details | Watch nowC60+ in space – a 28-year detective story about the Diffuse Interstellar Bands – Part 3
John Maier's team at the University of Basel solved the riddle of C60+ in 2015. In this brief view Colin Byfleet looks at the unique apparatus used in John's work.
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 nowThe Square Kilometre Array
Rosie Bolton describes the importance of this huge project and some of the interesting problems which needed to be solved in its planning and implementation.
More details | Watch nowThe Enlightenment is Under Threat and Lindau Alumni for Humanitarian Action (LAHA) Can Save It
Kant, in possibly his most celebrated essay, defined the Enlightenment as: Man’s emergence from his self-imposed period of immaturity. This immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. Without the freedom t....
More details | Watch nowGravitational waves and the early universe
Mark Hindmarch talks about our understanding of how we explain the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang.
More details | Watch nowThe Rev. Stirling and heat engines
Roy Darlington explains the attractions of the remarkably simple Stirling engine
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Is there life in your PC?
How do we keep things from deteriorating?
Norman Billingham talks to Jonathan Hare about the science and ethics of preservation and conservation.
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Fixated on Nitrogen
Sussex University has always supported unusual, interdisciplinary and innovative faculties. A good example of this was the Nitrogen Fixation Centre. Jeff Leigh was part of this exceptional work who's aim was to discover how nature uses nitrogen to cr....
More details | Watch nowBioinspired genotype–phenotype linkages
Florian Hollfelder is based in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge. He is interested in mechanism in chemistry and biology. Here he describes using principles of natural selection to make functional proteins.
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Directrice de Recherche Patricia Bassereau, Institut Curie Centre de Recherche Laboratorie Physico-Chimie, France, speaks on bioinspired membrane-based systems for a physical approach of cell organization and dynamics: usefulness and limitations.
More details | Watch nowCrystals: animal, vegetable or mineral?
Stephen Hyde is Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and the Research School of Physics and Engineering at the Australian National University in Canberra. Taking the popular children's game as a starting point, he asks whether crystalli....
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Yuru Deng is an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore with a background in dentistry. Here she discusses the enigmatic functions of biological cubic membranes.
More details | Watch nowBioinspiration: something for everyone
George Whitesides is the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University. Best-known for his work in NMR spectroscopy, organometallic chemistry, molecular self-assembly and nanotechnology, here he introduces sof....
More details | Watch nowCuckoos and their victims
The sight of a little warbler feeding an enormous cuckoo chick has astonished observers since ancient times. It was once thought that cuckoos were unable to raise their own young because of defective anatomy and behaviour, and so other birds were onl....
More details | Watch nowBacterial cell walls, antibiotics and the origins of life
The cell wall is a crucial structure found in almost all bacteria. It is the target for our best antibiotics and fragments of the wall trigger powerful innate immune responses against infection. Surprisingly, many bacteria can switch almost effortl....
More details | Watch nowTackling the great challenges of the 21st century
Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society and Lord Stern, President of the British Academy, discussed the new opportunities – and need – for collaboration between the traditional academic disciplines to respond to the big issues of our time,....
More details | Watch nowEbola: inside an epidemic
Find out what we have learnt from the outbreak so far (March 2015) and what is being done to ensure continued resilience to epidemic scenarios.
More details | Watch nowWomen writing science
Join us as we celebrate International Women’s Day by exploring the history of women writing about science. How did early women scientists use writing in order to further their careers? In which ways were they limited by their gender? What influen....
More details | Watch nowThe Long Road to the Higgs Boson – and Beyond
The discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN’s LHC accelerator in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations was the culmination of a decades-long search that had started in 1964 with the proposal of this unique particle, a signature of the origin of the....
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 nowIs chemistry really so difficult?
Chemistry has progressed in a way few outsiders appreciate. It underpins many other sciences; from genomics and molecular biology, food and sports science, through to cosmology and planetary science. Why hasn't the public impression of chemistry evol....
More details | Watch nowCan nanocrystals stop the climate change?
Fossil resources are limited and their CO2 emission strongly contributes to the global warming which is mainly responsible for the increasing appearance of natural catastrophes. Renewable biomass which can be converted into various forms of usable en....
More details | Watch nowGreen Fluorescent Protein: Lighting up Life
The accidental discovery of this wonderful tool has changed the face of biology.
More details | Watch nowThe End of Disease
Understanding the Cell cycle
The biology of Striga
One of the major parasites is striga, a weed that sucks the juice and nutrients from cereal crops such as millet, sorghum and maize and causes great yield losses. A single striga plant can produce hundreds of thousands of seeds. The seeds are so tiny....
More details | Watch now‘Witch Weed’ – breaking the spell
Striga (witchweed) is a parasitic weed that seriously constrains the productivity of staples such as maize, sorghum, millet and upland rice on some farms in Uganda. Kilimo Trust supported this initiative to try and control its spread.
More details | Watch nowC60-Buckminsterfullerene: Not just a Pretty Molecule
Amongst the Nobel Laureates lecturing in Lindau, Sir Harold Kroto would probably earn the award for the most unusual and characteristic way of presenting. This lecture, which is the first he ever gave in Lindau, is no exception. Kroto`s way of presen....
More details | Watch nowCréativité Sans Frontières
Children are not the only ones who instinctively appreciate the elegant beauty of highly symmetric structures such as the soccer ball and “play” with them. Artists, architects, scientists, mathematicians and engineers are also fascinated by elega....
More details | Watch nowStatistical and causal approaches to machine learning
This talk introduces the basic ideas of machine learning, and illustrates them with application examples. It argues that while machine learning and "big data" analysis currently mainly focuses on statistics; the causal point of view can provide addit....
More details | Watch nowhyperfine interactions
30-minute lecture about the physics of hyperfine interactions, and about how to calculate hyperfine interactions by the WIEN2k DFT code
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