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....