Educational

Diet and health

Cambridge Science Festival 2015

health

S C I

NARRATOR:
In the early fifteenth century, artists and intellectuals in Italy came to realize that the time they lived in was very different from the centuries before.  There was a revival of interest in the achievements of classical antiquity -- in the art, literature, and architecture of the ancient Greeks and Romans.  They came to see the previous medieval period as a time of darkness after the glories of the classical past, and their own era as a new age in the arts.  

In the 16th century, Giorgio Vasari, an Italian painter best known as the biographer of artists, used the term rinascità—meaning rebirth -- to describe this change in the artist’s vision of the world around him.  Later historians coined the term Renaissance from the French word for rebirth.

The focus of the Middle Ages had been the spiritual world, and the major patron of the arts the Roman Catholic Church.  Painted altarpieces and frescos conveyed the church’s teachings in a form that could be understood even by those who could not read.  During the Renaissance, the Christian religion continued to play an important role in art.  But the masters of the 15th and 16th centuries, like Greek and Roman artists before them, looked to man as the measure of all things.  They based even their spiritual images not on an imaginary world, but on the world around them.  In Italy, the remains of numerous ancient sculptures and monuments, still visible after more than a thousand years, inspired many of the great Renaissance artists whose work is on view here at the National Gallery – including Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. 


Renaissance Overview-English

This lecture will review just some of the extensive evidence from ancient civilisations – mainly China, Mesopotamia and Greece – that helps to throw light on four interrelated questions that form my principal agenda: (1) What items were the subjects of prediction? (2) How were predictions made: on what basis did people think they could foresee the future? (3) Why were they interested in doing so? (4) How is foresight related first to divination and prediction in general, and then to wisdom and prudence? The subjects on which predictions were attempted (Q 1) can be used to reveal the concerns and values of the groups in question. While hundreds of different techniques were tried out (Q 2) that will lead me to examine the ways ancient theorists evaluated them and to a discussion of the growth of scepticism. The aims and motives of ancient investigators (Q 3) include influencing policy and advising rulers as well as building up their own prestige (when they got it right). Most important is Q 4 . What were the resources available in antiquity to learn to make more prudent and wiser judgements about what to do, and to that end do we not still need all the resources available to us to do the same?

Biography

Geoffrey Lloyd is Professor Emeritus of Ancient Philosophy and Science at Cambridge, where he was Master of Darwin College from 1989 to 2000. He is now based at the Needham Research Institute, whose Trust he chaired from 1992 to 2002. He has held Visiting Professorships in Europe (France, Spain, Italy, Germany) in the Far East (PRC, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Singapore), Australasia, and North and South America. He has published 25 books, initially concentrating on ancient Greek philosophy and science and then embarking on detailed comparative studies with ancient Chinese thought. His three most recent books, which tackle the underlying philosophical problems of such comparisons and related issues in cognitive science, are: Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind (2007: the subject of a special number of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews in 2010), Disciplines in the Making (2009) and Being, Humanity and Understanding (2012, all from Oxford University Press). He has been translated into12 different languages. He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1983 and an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995. He was awarded the Sarton medal for History of Science in 1987, and the Kenyon Medal for Classical Studies in 2007. He holds Honorary Fellowships at King’s, Darwin, and Tembusu College Singapore, and Honorary Doctorates from the Universities of Athens and Oxford. He was knighted for ‘services to the history of thought’ in 1997.

Foresight in Ancient Civilisations

An introduction by the editor, Lesley Brown of Somerville College, Oxford to this seminal work. 

Why read the Nicomachean Ethics?

"Caffeine is to energy like credit cards are to financial health." - Yuri Elkaim

If you enjoyed this episode, find show notes and more at www.lewishowes.com/podcast/yuri-elkaim.

On iTunes

EP 116 How to Double Your Energy (The HEALTHY Way)

"Greatness is impact and impact is service." - Keith Ferrazzi

If you enjoyed this episode, check out the videos and show notes at www.lewishowes.com/118.

EP 118 How to Become the Person Everyone Wants to Know

Professor Wallace Arthur takes us on a trip from the starting point of familiar animals of the here and now to unfamiliar ones of the past and possible ones on other planets. Along the way, he'll ask a series of questions, including: What exactly is an animal? When did the first animals live? How did animals become more complex over time? Which animals have survived space travel – not inside spacecraft but outside them? Are there animals on exoplanets – either the 2000 or so discovered so far or the millions that we haven’t found yet? And how many different species of animals are there on Earth?

9 March 2015 Animals In Time And Space

Meteorites are fragments of ancient material, natural objects that survive their fall to Earth from space. Some are metallic, but most are made of stone. They are the oldest objects that we have for study. Almost all meteorites are fragments from asteroids, and were formed at the birth of the Solar System, approximately 4570 million years ago. They show a compositional variation that spans a whole range of planetary materials, from completely unmelted and unfractionated stony chondrites to highly fractionated and differentiated iron meteorites. Meteorites, and components within them, carry records of all stages of Solar System history. The Earth, along with the other planets, was formed at the same time, but none of the original material remains: over the years it has been changed and recycled through geological activity. It is only by studying meteorites that we can learn about the processes and materials that shaped the Solar System and our planet.

10 March 2015 Space On Earth

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

We are busy people living in a competitive world with stresses from commuting on crowded trains to unpleasant and dangerous news events. How do we remain optimistic and resilient? Professor Barbara J Sahakian (University of Cambridge Department of Psychiatry and MRC/Wellcome Trust Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute), Dr Jennifer Wild (University of Oxford) and Allison Pearson (The Telegraph) show how to manage stress, get the most out of work and home life and how to successfully overcome problems of anxiety or depression.

12 March 2015 Get The Best Out Of Life - Resilience And Stress Management Organiser

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

Myin Nay Khwint Lay Pay

Speaker(s): Professor Sadik Al Azm | Al-Azm, one of the Middle East's most notable contemporary thinkers, will reflect on the effects of the Arab uprisings on Arab nationalism and Islamist movements. Sadik Al Azm is emeritus professor of modern European philosophy at the University of Damascus. Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:30:00 GMT

Arab Nationalism, Islamism and the Arab Uprising [Audio]

Speaker(s): Professor Barry Smith | This lecture will explore the philosophy and neuroscience of taste and what it tells us about perception. Barry Smith is professor of philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London and director of the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Thu, 1 Dec 2011 18:30:00 GMT

Perspectives on Taste – Philosophy and Neuroscience: the nature of tastes and tasting [Audio]

Lifestyle changes, weight loss, SMART goals, long-term goals, strategize, start small, fringe benefit, measure, losing inches, diets fail, support, accountability, lasting approach, success, manage weight, weight, change, positive outlook Be sure to visit our site for more information, http://yalehealth.yale.edu.

How can I be successful managing my weight? November 2012

Dan Harris, Anchor and Correspondent for ABC News, and Kelly Brownell, Director of the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity, discuss mindfulness, happiness, and eating. Visit the Rudd Report website for more information: http://www.yaleruddcenter.org/.