University of Cambridge

Michael Head, Manager of the Infectious Disease Research Network at University College London, reports on an exhaustive survey examining how infectious disease research is being funded in the United Kingdom.

Biological Sciences Symposium - Michael Head

Daniel Marovitz, Chief Executive Officer of Faculty of 1000, discusses an alternative publishing platform for scientific research.

Biological Sciences Symposium - Daniel Marovitz

Ha-Joon Chang talks about his latest book Economics: A User's Guide, which questions the idea that economics is a science and addresses the failures in economics thinking that he says led to our current predicament. Ha-Joon Chang teaches economics at Cambridge University. His book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism was a number one bestseller and was called by the Observer "a witty and timely debunking of some of the biggest myths surrounding the global economy". He is a popular columnist at the Guardian, and a vocal critic of the failures of our economic system. - See more at: http://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/fully-booked-economics-users-guide#sthash.tOMqZoaV.dpuf

Economics: a user's guide

In this talk Tony Hey, Vice President of Microsoft Research, will explore the origins of computers and of ‘computational thinking’. The story begins with the key contributions of Alan Turing and John von Neumann and the twin concepts of universality and hierarchical abstraction. As an illustration of the importance of abstraction, the ‘File clerk’ model of Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman computing will be described. Our examination of computer hardware takes us from logic gates to the microprocessor and Moore’s Law. On the software side, our discussion of algorithms begins with Euclid’s algorithm for the Greatest Common Divisor and ends with a description of PageRank, the ‘billion dollar’ algorithm that launched the search giant Google. An account of the origins of the personal computer, the Internet and Web then brings us up to the present. We end the talk with a look to the future with the rise of AI and Machine Learning and Butler Lampson’s ‘Third Age of Computing’. - See more at: http://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/computing-universe-origins-computational-thinking#sthash.ErQvP1BH.dpuf

The computing universe: origins of computational thinking

The UK’s national academy for the Humanities and Social Science, the British Academy, elects 42 Fellows annually; in 2013, 9 of these were at the University of Cambridge. Join Hans van de Ven, Professor of Modern Chinese History, Christopher Page, Professor of Medieval Music and Literature, and Usha Goswami, Professor of Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience, who will introduce us to their ground-breaking work. - See more at: http://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/cambridge-stars-big-ideas-2#sthash.S5KOB9hT.dpuf

Cambridge stars:Usha Goswami, Professor of Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience

Saturday 21 March; CSF@the Cavendish Laboratory

Saturday 21 March; CSF@the Centre for Mathematical Sciences

In frog spawn in a pond, each egg is able to turn itself into a tadpole and eventually a frog, with no help or guidance from a parent frog or from anything else in the pond. The single egg will have no resemblance in any respect to what it will turn into. We now begin to understand how this extraordinary transformation takes place. Eggs of frogs and other animals have another remarkable property. If a single cell from adult skin is transplanted into an egg, the skin cell will be made to go backwards in development to become an embryo cell from which another adult can be formed (repeating the process of normal development). In this way it is now possible to replace aged or diseased cells of an adult with rejuvenated cells from their skin. This is opening the possibility of cell replacement in humans.

Biography
John Gurdon was judged at school to be wholly unsuited to science having come bottom in a class of 250 in Biology. However, he was able to take up science at Oxford University, where he also did a PhD. His work led to the concept that an egg has the ability to rejuvenate the nucleus of an adult cell, and hence to the current prospect of replacing aged and diseased cells in humans with new cells derived from other body cells such as skin. In mid career he moved to Cambridge where he still works in the University. He is an Honorary Fellow of Christ Church, Oxford, and of Magdalene and Churchill Colleges in Cambridge. He served as Master of Magdalene from 1995-2002. He has received a number of awards including the Copley Medal of the Royal Society (2003), the Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (2009), and the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (2012). 

Reprogramming Animal Development - Professor Sir John Gurdon

Discover from Dr Alex Kogan the insights that can be gleaned about people's beliefs, values, and personalities from small bits of their Facebook data. Learn how these insights are beginning to transform the fundamental approach social scientists take to understanding human nature and societies.

10 March 2015 What Your Facebook Says About You

Suppose we have six people at a party. Any two are either friends or strangers. Can we always find three of them who are either mutual friends or mutual strangers? Professor Imre Leader introduces the mathematical theory of ‘order out of chaos’ - we can view the unknown pattern of friendships among the six people as`chaos', the three mutual friends/strangers as a patch of ‘order’ in this chaos.

11 March 2015 Order Out Of Chaos

Although there is enormous success in the use of robotic arms for the automation industry, robotic
legs are very challenging to be engineered and used in our daily lives. Dr Fumiya Iida discusses why
legs are so special, and whether we will see robots running around any time soon.

13 March 2015 Searching For Intelligence In The Legs - Robots That Walk, Run And Dance

For as long as we have had secrets we have had secret messages.Dr James Grime looks at the fascinating history and mathematics of codes and code breaking - from ancient Greece to the present day - including a demonstration of an original WWII Enigma Machine!

Dr James Grime is a speaker and maths populariser. He has toured the world with his code-breaking talk. In his spare time, James creates videos about maths for Youtube."

14 March 2015 Engima And The Secret World Of Code Breaking

Professor Sir Colin Humphreys and his team in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy have developed a way of growing a remarkable man-made material – gallium nitride (GaN) – which is being used by British manufacturer Plessey Semiconductors to make light-emitting diodes for home lighting.

LED bulbs have much longer working lives than any other forms of artificial lighting – LED light bulbs in the home would probably have to be changed only once in a person’s lifetime – and they use less energy than other forms of lighting.

Meanwhile, the researchers are continuing their work with what Humphreys describes as a “truly remarkable” material. A new £1 million growth facility funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has been installed in Cambridge, where the researchers are adjusting minute aspects of the growth process to improve the efficiency of light emission.

The benefits of increased efficiency could go far beyond home lighting, and the researchers are now looking at applications that extend from biomedicine to power electronics.

16 March 2015 Out Of The Red And Into The Blue - Making The LED Revolution Cost - Effective

How can we prevent the rise of resistance to antibiotics? This is the topic chosen by the public to be the challenge of Longitude Prize 2014. But why? The World Health Organisation estimates that antibiotics treatments add an average of 20 years to all of our lives. But in the 80 years since the discovery of penicillin, our overuse of antibiotics has put pressure on bacteria to evolve resistance, leading to the emergence of untreatable superbugs that threaten the basis of modern medicine.

Our expert (and entertaining) panel consists of:

Prof Clare Bryant- Professor of Innate Immunity
Prof Dame Athene Donald FRS -member of the Longitude Committee and Professor of Experimental Physics
Prof Andres Floto- Professor of Respiratory Biology
Dr Mark Holmes- Senior Lecturer in Veterinary Preventive Medicine

17 March 2015 Preventing The Rise Of Antibiotic Resistance

Vitamin D and light: a close relationship with a lot of controversy. Diet is insufficient in providing vitamin D; however, to make Vitamin D ourselves, we need sunlight, which tends to be in short supply in the UK. The EPIC-Norfolk study observed that participants who had a higher blood vitamin D concentration had a lower risk of developing lung disease, heart disease and fractures. Prof. Kay-Tee Khaw will discuss these findings and shed some light on the question: To D or not to D?

12 March 2015 Vitamin D: To D Or Not To D

Fred Sanger (1918-2013) was one of Cambridge’s most illustrious sons, yet his name and achievements are not as well known as many other famous scientists who have made momentous discoveries. Partly this is because of his modest self-effacing manner and partly because he was interested in developing methods. Methods are sometimes ephemeral and get improved whilst discoveries endure. In his recent book on Fred Sanger, Professor George Brownlee will explain how his persistence and imagination allowed him to solve two basic problems in Molecular Biology -problems seen by others as unsolvable at the time he embarked on them. He worked out how to sequence proteins by 1955, gaining a first Nobel Prize in 1958, and then turned his attention to sequencing RNA and DNA for which he obtained his second Nobel Prize in 1980. He is the only British scientist to achieve such a distinction.

19 March 2015 Fred Sanger: Sequencer And Double Nobel Laureate

In this year's Linacre Lecture at St John's, Professor Sharon Peacock discusses a potential tool that could be used to control bacterial resistance to antibiotics. The Linacre Lecture is an annual presentation on a medical topic that has been given at the College since 1524.

Antimicrobial Resistance In The Genomic Era

Lydia Rutherford, an A-level student from Lodge Park Academy (Corby), interviews Professor Trevor Robbins, Head of Psychology at Cambridge University about drug abuse and dependence.

Lydia Rutherford & Professor Trevor Robbins on drug addiction

Noel Fombanu, an A-Level student from Lodge Park Academy (Corby), interviews Dr David Franklin from Cambridge University's Dept of Engineering about the role that neuroscience has to play in robotics.

Noel Fombanu & Dr David Franklin

Dr Denis Alexander talks to Eleanor Puttock about the new technique of human embryo gene editing, the science behind it, its implications as well as a theological view point. 

To find out more about Dr Denis Alexander go to: http://bit.ly/1T0g7sO

To find out more about The Faraday Institute go to: bit.ly/1AAhTXq

To read the original article "CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing in human tripronuclear zygote" in Protein & Cell go to: http://bit.ly/1EedsFn (subscription required) 

To read the article in Nature "Ethics of embryo editing divides scientists", referred to by Dr Alexander, go to: http://bit.ly/1LM7GQL (subscription required) 

Denis Alexander discusses human embryo gene editing

Hello and welcome to my SoundCloud profile; thanks for taking the time to check it out! :)

I live in a sleepy little village nestled in the shadow of a ruined castle on the stormy shores of Scotland in the British Isles. I'm a theoretical & mathematical physics research student reading quantum cosmology, and slowly on my way to an academic career as a mathematical physicist. Unfortunately, I've had a slight setback in the form of a spinal injury that's left me with severe disability, chronic pain, and on morphine, for well over a decade now. Such is life.

I re-share a lot of science and technology podcasts, but I also adore open-source culture and I'm a self-confessed audiophile and filmscore fanatic. I'm not a musician, so all sounds are just re-shares of music I like. A lot of the music I re-share is by the awesome composers and artists on SoundCloud, with many works [legally] downloadable.

Genres I'm especially fond of include: instrumental, classical, contemporary classical, minimalism, ambient, and cinematic soundtracks. I'm also interested in experimental, fractal, mathematical, algorithmic, emergent and AI-generated music – but more from an academic perspective, so I don't usually re-share those on SoundCloud.

For my favorite composers, musicians and music, see my SoundCloud likes, re-sounds and playlists, as well as Last.fm profile. For more info about me, please see my About.me profile page, which has links to most of my other web profiles.

Thanks for visiting my SoundCloud profile :)

University of Cambridge

AndrewGKing