243 results found for royal-society

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....

Florence Nightingale disliked having her portrait taken as much as she hated being a celebrity, yet it was largely through the visual representations of her face and person in the press that she gained iconic status in Victorian England. Used as a mo....

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....

From the moment of their discovery, each of the chemical elements has embarked on a journey into our culture. Over millennia and decades, they have gained meaning through encounter and manipulation. Those long known, such as gold, silver, iron and su....

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....

Roger Boscovich (1711-1787) was a true polymath, making original contributions in science, technology and the humanities. He was born in Dubrovnik but spent much of his working life in Rome, at the Collegium Romanum. This lecture will introduce his l....

Meteorites provide us with laboratory samples from distant bodies including asteroids, comets, the moon, Mars and even ancient stars. Witnesses to the extraordinary event when one is seen to fall from the sky, or anyone finding a sample on the ground....

In the early years of the Royal Society an acrimonious dispute broke out between John Wallis and William Holder as to which of them had been successful in the ÔexperimentÕ of teaching the deaf child Alexander Popham to speak. Using evidence from th....

Building upon the knowledge of others over many generations, currently referred to as cumulative cultural evolution, is arguably unique to humans and widely thought to be responsible for our success in colonising virtually every terrestrial habitat o....

Where do the pandemic influenza viruses come from and why did experts fail to predict the severity of the 2009 pandemic? However to date, the 2009 H1N1 pandemic influenza has been much less severe than the 1918 Spanish influenza.

The Web and associated technological and social networks provide both mathematical challenges and opportunities. How do we model the evolution of these networks taking into account both observed features and incentives?

Rigid interfaces force people to present or look at information the wrong way. We need a new generation of flexible Web tools that help people gather the information they want from wherever it is, organize it however they like, create the interaction....