243 results found for royal-society

Sir David Attenborough delivers the 2003 Michael Faraday Lecture entitled: Perception, deception and reality

An evolutionary development of perception is suggested - from passive reception to active perception to explicit conception - earlier stages being largely retained and incorporated in later species. A key is innate and then individually learned knowl....

Professor Hopper considers the vital role that the study of plant taxonomy and systematics has played in plant science. He considers, in particular, how these fields are transforming to meet the needs of 21st Century science as we address the challen....

Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities, a surprise Christmas bestseller, is now accompanied by his Hoard of Mathematical Treasures. Both books are mathematical miscellanies for the general public, ranging from one-liners to mini-essa....

Human evolution can be divided into two main phases. Evidence points strongly to Africa as the major centre for the genetic, physical and behavioural origins of humans, but new discoveries are prompting a rethink of some aspects of our evolutionary o....

Cognitive enhancing drugs are used to treat neuropsychiatric disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. These drugs improve the quality of life and wellbeing for patients and their families.

It seems that most of the universe is made up of mysterious ingredients which we cannot see directly. Dr Bridle describes in pictures 'gravitational lensing', the bending of light by gravity, which is predicted by Einstein's General Relativity. Dr Br....

Five years ago this summer (in 1999), the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering issued a report on Nanoscience and nanotechnologies: opportunities and uncertainties. The report had been commissioned by the Government, and has been widely....

For many problems involving multi-fracturing solids and/or particulate media, the system response is governed by the presence of an additional phase, either gaseous, liquid or both, or by the need to consider other physical phenomena, such as thermal....

The last few years have seen the emergence of remarkable connections between fluctuation statistics in complex quantum systems and some long-standing and important problems in number theory, such as the distribution of the primes. They are still myst....

Dr Cristina Lazzeroni, a Royal Society University Research Fellow from the University of Birmingham, reveals the secrets of the world's largest accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider and how the LHC experiments hope to answer big questions about the ....

Almost half of the UK 's energy is used in buildings to provide a safe, healthy, comfortable, productive and fun environment. Most future low carbon scenarios assume significant reductions in carbon emissions associated with the built environment ove....

Flowers are such a ubiquitous and familiar part of our modern world that it is easy to take them for granted. But as Darwin recognized, the exquisite details of their structure and appearance have been shaped by evolutionary processes over millions o....

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....

They were the words that scientists everywhere wanted to hear and President Obama couldn't have been clearer, promising to 'restore science to its rightful place'.

Urban congestion is a serious problem in many cities, so the creation of underground space and in particular the development of underground transport is environmentally essential. How can tunnels be built in ground sometimes as soft as toothpaste? Wh....

Professor J.E.N Veron, the former Chief Scientist of the Australian Institute of Marine Science and widely regarded as the world's leading authority on coral reef ecosystems, presents the effects that climate change is having on coral reefs.

How does doing mathematics and writing stories compare? What role is mathematics playing when it is used in literature? Are stories important to understanding mathematics? Do writers have eureka moments? Marcus du Sautoy and Mark Haddon discuss the f....

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....

Although it seems that knowing what will make us happy is easier than getting it, research in psychology and behavioral economics tells a different story. People not only have trouble predicting the future, they have trouble predicting how much they ....

n this lecture, Eric R Kandel considers the neural systems and molecular mechanisms that contribute to learning and long-term memory and discusses how our insights into memory storage are allowing us to understand various forms of age related memory ....

Symmetry is all around us. Our eyes and minds are drawn to symmetrical objects, from the sphere to the swastika, from the pyramid to the pentagon. Of fundamental significance to the way we interpret the world around us, this unique phenomenon indicat....

After an interplanetary journey of 7 ¬ years, the ESA's probe Huygens landed on the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Professor Zarnecki describes the journey of the probe as well as its final dramatic plunge to the surface and presents the r....

Professor Ramachandran examines problems that lie at the interface between neurology and psychiatry. He explains how phantom limbs may be used as a probe to understand brain functions and will also discuss synesthesia, a condition in which sounds and....

The drive to publish first, even the order of the authors and the choice of the journal; the collegiality and the brutal competition; grantsmanship; the still existing glass ceiling for women; Schadenfreude, even Nobel lust - these are the soul and b....

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....

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....

People Sense refers to the remarkable capacity of humans to sense and have a commonsense understanding of others' affective-cognitive states and behaviors. The ability to understand and predict people's behavior varies from person to person and even ....

Recent underwater images show that the deep sea realm of the British Isles is nothing like the monotonous expanse of mud that many people imagine. Spectacular coral reefs, once thought to be restricted to the tropics, are now known to occur in the ch....

The LHC is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built. It is capable of recreating the very energetic conditions last seen in the universe a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, and allows particle physicists to study the fundamental ingr....

As part of the celebrations for International Polar Year, Paul Rose takes us on an insightful science journey to the Antarctic and the Arctic. What really are the challenges facing scientists as they work in the remotest field sites on earth?

The basic sources of Islam - the Qur'an and the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad - place a great deal of importance on science. So, theoretically, the relationship between Islam and science is both close and very deep. It was this relationship that....

NASA Administrator Mike Griffin's address applies certain lessons learned from one of the Royal Society's greatest explorers to the endeavours NASA is carrying out today in exploring the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets of our solar system and o....

The information for synthesizing the molecules that allow organisms to survive and replicate is encoded in genomic DNA. In the cell, DNA is copied to messenger RNA, and triplet codons in the messenger RNA are decoded in the process of translation to ....

One of the biggest challenges faced by pathogens in their bid for survival is the host immune response. Within an infected individual, pathogen populations face direct attack by the different processes of the immune system; at a community level, immu....

In 1959, Richard Feynman proposed a variety of new nano-tools including the concept of atom by atom' fabrication. In the intervening decades, many of these predictions have become reality. Andrew de Mello assesses the current impact of lab-on-a-chip ....

Research into ageing has been rejuvenated by the discovery of mutations in single genes that extend the lifespan of laboratory animals. Some of the signalling pathways involved, particularly the insulin/Igf-like pathway, have effects on lifespan acro....

Historians bring to thinking about science policy a very particular understanding which should be central to policy: historians are trained to know in their bones that the future is unknown and to understand the power of the cheap futurism which char....

Practical mathematical models are becoming an accepted part of most medical and scientific disciplines. A few of the more unlikely applications are justifying intertribal warfare, the benefits of cannibalism, how the leopard gets its spots and demons....

We will look at the role of pictures and images in the development of science. From the first graphs and illustrated books to Molscript, the influence of the first pictures of spiral galaxies on Van Gogh's 'Starry Night', to the artistic resonances o....

Our capacity for complex speech and language remains one of the most intriguing aspects of being human. It has long been suspected that some answers to this enigma will be found buried within the genome. With recent advances in genetic technologies, ....

Historically memory research has focussed on the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain's temporal lobes. Damage to the hippocampus is known to have a devastating impact on the ability to form new memories as well as compromising recollection of ....

Devices are now reaching the realm where individual structures are made up of only a few atoms so that quantum mechanics, the theory of the very small, is playing a crucial role. The inevitable quantum fluctuations produce noise which was initially e....

Organisms of all kinds use signals comprising minute amounts of natural chemicals. The exploitation of semiochemicals is demonstrated with dramatic success in the management of pests and parasitic weeds in resource-poor East African cereal farming.

Siƒn Ede looks at the work of a number of leading artists who have engaged with contemporary science, whether robustly or subtly, in order to reflect a different and sometimes bizarre take on new ideas.

The normal proteins which circulate in human blood are either known or presumed to have beneficial functions. However normal immunity and inflammation proteins can cause or exacerbate disease in addition to helping to resist infections.

Raman spectroscopy is a light scattering technique primarily used in the characterisation of vibrational modes of molecules and therefore in assessing the structure and composition of materials.