Monday 16th January 2017 starting at 7.0 pm.

Dr. Frank Ratcliff and Dr. Catherine Mercer of Genomics England, a company wholly owned and funded by the Department of Health, will be talking about the 100,000 Genome Project.

The 100,000 Genomes Project will sequence 100,000 genomes from around 70,000 people.

Participants are NHS patients with a rare disease, plus their families, and patients with cancer. Significantly, this is currently the largest national sequencing project of its kind in the world.

The aim is to create a new Genomic Medicine service for the NHS, transforming the way people are cared for. As a result of the project, genetic diagnoses will be made for some patients where this hadn’t previously been possible. In time, there is also the potential for new and more effective treatments for diseases with a genetic basis.

The project will also enable new medical research. Combining genomic sequence data with medical records is a ground-breaking resource. Researchers will study how best to use genomics in healthcare and how best to interpret the data to help patients. Using the 100,000 Genomes Project as a foundation, the aim is also to realise the potential of the UK genomics industry. This talk will explore the project, and ask the question; “Would you have your genome sequenced?”

Monday 14th November starting at 7.0 pm.

Dr. Jon Whitehurst will be talking about ‘Bats, Maths and Maps’.

He will explain how ecology today is a cross discipline subject using his work on bat monitoring as an example.

Here is some information that Jon has supplied about himself and the talk:

What do bats, maths and maps have in common with systems engineering you ask yourself? The answer in this case lies in developing repeatable methodologies for the accurate prediction of bat habitat suitability using non-invasive survey methods.

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.

Lecturer Background
Dr Jon Whitehurst is a chartered engineer by profession and fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, working in the area of complex system architecting and implementation onto naval ships by day.

He is the Operations Officer for the Isle of Wight Bat Group and architect of “The Parkhurst Forest Bat Project” and the currently running “Isle of Wight Bat Project”, and has lectured at national level on the topics of bat habitat suitability modelling and acoustic woodland bat survey methods, and also worked with Leeds University on computer recognition of bat echolocation calls in support of the DEFRA woodland bat survey protocols programme.

Monday 10th October starting at 7.0 pm.

Professor Mary Edwards from the Geography Department at Southampton University will be talking about The Big Thaw: a warming, changing Arctic

Mary Edwards considers the fragility of Arctic systems, drawing upon examples from Alaska, where she lived for several years, and Siberia, the largest northern land area affected by warming.

The Big Thaw: a warming, changing Arctic
We are rapidly becoming aware of the fragility of the Polar Regions in the face of climate warming. While global average temperatures have increased by half a degree or so over recent decades, the change in the Arctic has been much greater. I will draw upon examples from Alaska and Siberia to illustrate arctic warming and its consequences. Currently, much of the far north is affected by permafrost—permanently frozen ground—and landscapes and vegetation reflect the condition of the ice that underlies the surface. Responses to changes in permafrost are often dramatic. Warming-induced loss of ice from both land and sea has a range of consequences that not only affect the Arctic region but can be world-wide in their impact. The lifeways of indigenous people are being changed, there are new technological challenges, and the cycling of carbon between arctic lands and the atmosphere is being altered. Learning from the past, especially past warm periods, can help understand current changes. They are not necessarily novel, but they are taking place extremely fast, and whether arctic nations can adapt to them effectively is a critical question for the coming decades.

Professor Mary Edwards
Mary Edwards is Professor in Physical Geography at the University of Southampton and Visiting Professor at the University of Tromso, Norway. Her interests are centred on global environmental change: understanding climate-driven changes in landscape, vegetation, and ecosystem processes over a range of timescales. Her main geographic area of interest is the boreal-arctic region, and recent work relates to boreal forest dynamics, including fire disturbance, thermokarst, and hydrological change.

Monday 26th September starting at 7:00 pm

A members’ discussion evening.

Two topics:

1. Hinkley Point – Is it a viable solution for base load electricity?

2. Human evolution – New evidence on a theory of human origin that suggested that our ancestors began their existence alongside water. These were two programmes given by David Attenborough on Radio 4 last week in the morning. If you were unable to hear them they are now on the BBC website under the title ‘The Waterside Ape’. Worth listening to.

Hope you can come along and make it a stimulating evening. (Hopefully a donation of £1 towards room hire will be sufficient instead of the usual £3).

Cafe Sci are going on tour!

We are sponsoring one of the talk at the upcoming HookeFest

Saturday 23rd July starting at 7 pm

We’re luck enough to get Professor Adam Scaife of the Meteorological Office / Exeter.

He’ll be talking about ‘The Climate in Hooke’s Era: the Little Ice Age and extreme winters’.

The Mediaeval warm period was followed by the tendency for colder winters and cooler, wetter summers from approximately 1450 to 1850 and occurred on a global scale. Though we are now concerned about global warming, the climate is unpredictable and anomalies can occur, e.g the eastern Antarctic appears to becoming colder.

Venue
The Planetarium, Fort Victoria Country Park, Westhill Lane, Freshwater. As usual, no need to book, just turn up.

Verdi’s Cafe at Fort Victoria will be prepared to stay open until before the talk, but you must book in advance for a meal. Tel: 761777.

Professor Scaife has very kindly provided this biography which you may find interesting, and you will find a pdf poster for the event at the end of this email.

Prof. Adam Scaife – Head of Monthly to Decadal Prediction
Adam leads research and production of long range forecasts at the Met Office. His group issues climate forecasts on a regular basis and carries out world leading research to improve forecasts for adaptation to climate variability and change.

Adam’s personal research is focused on climate variability. He has published more than 100 peer reviewed articles on the predictability, mechanisms and computer modelling of climate variability. His research group recently made an important breakthrough in seasonal forecasting for winter which allows many new applications of long range forecasts for Europe and North America.

Adam was recently awarded the Royal Meteorological Society’s Adrian Gill prize, the Met Office LG Groves prize for meteorology and the Lloyds of London Science of Risk Prize in the Climate Change category.

On Monday 14th March, 2016 starting at 7pm.

Dr. Richard Crowder from Southampton University, Department of Computing and Electronic Engineering, will be talking about ‘Termites, Bees and Robots.’

Over the last ten years the direction of robotics research has changed significantly, the trend is to exploit biological inspiration to inform the design and applications.

Many early robots tended to have as anthropomorphic configurations, including multi-fingered grippers. However, the development of swarm robotics has allowed us to develop strategies that allows us to explore how bees forage or termites build their nests.

Richard will bring a number of swarm robots, so that the audience can see real hardware.

February meeting CANCELLED due to the bad weather.

Instead it is being rescheduled to be held on Monday 11th April starting at 7pm.

Dr. Chris Warrick from the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy will be talking about “What is Fusion Energy and the latest Developments.”

More details to follow.

The first talk for 2016 will be 11 January 2016 starting at 7pm.

Dr Jeremy Lockwood, Chairman of the Friends of Dinosaur Isle Museum and Research Associate in Vertebrate Palaeontology at Southampton University, will give a talk on: “Dinosaurs and Sex”.

This is a very entertaining, but informative talk on a subject most people don’t know anything about.

You will never look at Dinosaurs the same way again, especially ducks!