Dr. Sarah Duddigan, a Research Fellow in the Geography and Environmental Department at Reading University gave a talk on about ‘ Soils’.

She covered the subject of soils pointing int out that “It’s not just dirt”, but in fact vital to the success of humanity, reminding the audience that it is a “non-renewable source”.

The current problems of soil degradation that tend to be masked by the emphasis on climate change – in a connected point, highlighted that soil stores three times more carbon that trees. Sarah told the audience that Soil Health is another looming problem for the planet.

The talk cover much more ground than that, going from the basics of what soil is made up from (a balance between Clay, Sand and Silt), the Tea Bag Index that she was involved with, the impact of urbanisation on soil and emerging threats to soil.

(We are awaiting slides from Sarah, but as some people weren’t able to make it to Cafe Sci this week, we’re releasing the audio while we await them.)

Dr. Sarah Duddigan’s spoken presentation

Dr. Sarah Duddigan’s audience Q&A

Dr Michelle Hale, Head of the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Portsmouth University, gave a talk about the importance of marine phytoplankton in controlling climate change.

She illustrated this with a lot of pictures from research she has conducted whilst at sea in the Arctic and elsewhere.

Dr Michelle Hale: Presentation

Presentation

Q&A with the audience

Dr Catherine Mercer gave a background into how she came to genetics over ten years ago – and how much testing has changed over that time. It used to take three months to get the sequence of a single gene back, now the whole Human genome can be sequenced in 48 hours.

Catherine explained how the 100,000 Genome Project came about and how the structure of the UK’s NHS is uniquely placed to do a project like this.

There are two types of patients involved, those with Rare diseases (defined as less than 1 in 2,000 of the population having it – totalling 6-8,000 Rare diseases in total) and separately, those with cancer.

The process
Using the skills of an observant doctor combined with the analysis of the patient’s genomes, patterns are detected with the aim of identifying the genes that are responsible for the Rare diseases – or cancer.

Further detail was gone into, then Dr Frank Ratcliff ran through a number of case studies of people in the programme, including interviews with their family members.

During his presentation, two not inconsiderable bound books were passed around the audience. Each contained the sequencing of the single Genome 21 – the most simple we were told. As you can see from the photo, the pages were filled with a stream of the four characters that make up DNA, tightly printed four point font.

All round a very interesting insight into this important project.

Unsurprisingly, after the break, many questions were raised by the audience.

Dr Catherine Mercer & Dr Frank Ratcliff: Presentation

Dr Frank Ratcliff and Dr Catherine Mercer: Presentation slides

Q&A with the audience

Dr. Jon Whitehurst is quite a whiz during the day building technology to keep the country safe.

In his spare time he’s built up an amazing knowledge about bats (his passion since his youth) and utilises his data analysis skills to accurate prediction of bat habitat suitability using non-invasive survey methods. He’s carried this out extensively at the Isle of Wight’s Parkhurst Forest.

The talk he gave on 14th November 2016 was well attended and detailed. The way he described it was:

“The intent of this lecture is to show the extent to which cross discipline working is exploited within modern day ecology and to demonstrate that the ecology research in the 21st century is not just about fieldwork, recording and subjective assessment.

The specific example presented is bat habitat suitability modelling and the lecture will cover the end-to-end process of mapping predictive bat habitat use and describe the contributions to this process from across a wide range of scientific disciplines that enable field observations and digitised habitat features into fully quantifiable predictions of bat habitat use.”

Dr. Jon Whitehurst: Presentation

Dr. Jon Whitehurst: Presentation slides

Q&A with the audience