Date:

Monday 6th September  2010

Title:

CERN: an overview

Speaker:

Andrew Makin

Description:

(Provisional - please check website beforehand for possible change)

Andrew will give us a gentle introduction to the operation of the Large Hadron Collider and the work carried out at CERN using information that he gleaned on the 4-day course he attended there.

Date:

Monday 11th October 2010 (NOTE: NOT 1st MONDAY)

Title:

Rock guitar in 11 dimensions

Speaker:

Mark Lewney   

Description:

What causes the revolutionary, history-changing sound of rock guitar, and how does it help us to understand the nature of the stuff we’re made of?

Famelab winner Dr Mark Lewney explains the physics of rock, playing riffs from Vivaldi to AC/DC, revealing the secret of the Stradivarius, and showing how string vibrations might lie at the heart of the Big Questions about the universe.

Date:

Monday 1st November 2010

Title:

Pharmacogenetics

Speaker:

Bill Newman

Description:

Bill is a consultant in clinical genetics, based at St Mary's in Manchester. He also carries out a lot of research in the new field of pharmacogenetics, which seeks to explain the relationship between the effectiveness or side-effects of drugs and the genes of the patients taking them.

Date:

Monday 6th December 2010

Title:

The work of Asthma UK

Speaker:

Peter Brown

Description:

Peter is a research volunteer for Asthma UK. He'll tell us about some of the very interesting submissions made by the scientific community seeking grants for research funding.

Date:

Monday 10th January 2011 (NOTE: NOT 1st MONDAY)

Title:

Metamaterials and particle accelerators

Speaker:

Becky Seviour, Lancaster University

Description:

Metamaterials are materials artificially structured at a molecular level, which can have unique electromagnetic or optical properties. They are currently causing a great deal of excitement across the scientific community. Professor Seviour will talk about the physics of these materials and their relevance in solving some of the major issues facing society.

Date:

Monday 7th February 2011

Title:

When the lights go out

Speaker:

Maxwell Irvine, Manchester University

Description:

Professor Irvine is a government advisor on energy supply. He'll give us a detailed analysis of the UK electricity situation, which leads him to conclude that electricity will be rationed in the UK by 2020!

Date:

Monday 7th March 2011

Title:

Bugs and drugs

Speaker:

David Allison, Manchester University

Description:

It is both a cliché and a truism that antibiotic resistance has been around for as long as antibiotics have been used to treat bacterial infections. However, while early treatment failures did not represent a significant clinical problem, because different types of antibiotics were available, the emergence of multiple resistance is causing major problems in clinics today. Resistance is costly both in patient health and expense for the NHS. Several factors have led to this situation, including the misuse and abuse of antibiotics, the failure to identify novel bacterial targets and the underestimation of how cunning bacteria can be in fighting back.

Dr Allison will examine the nature of bacterial infections, how they should be treated and how responsible individuals can help reduce the spread of infection.

Date:

Monday 4th April 2011

Title:

Our high resolution Sun: a new view of our closest star

Speaker:

Robert Walsh, University of Central Lancashire

Description:

With an impressive set of instrumentation, solar astronomers are now examining the Sun in greater detail than ever before. Professor Walsh will show some of the latest images and movies of our dynamic star and demonstrate that our basic understanding of the solar atmosphere is more challenging than thought previously.

Date:

Monday 9th May 2011 (NOTE: NOT 1st MONDAY)

Title:

Stem cell research

Speaker:

Alex Smith

Description:

Alex is a post-graduate researcher at Manchester University. He will be telling us about his own research, current advances in this field and potential consequences of the use of stem cells.

Date:

Monday 6th June 2011

Title:

Experimenting with extreme cold

Speaker:

Rich Haley, Lancaster University 

Description:

The pursuit of extreme cold is a never-ending quest towards the 'infinity' of absolute zero (a very chilly -273.15 Celcius). The element helium plays a pivotal role in this conquest. Discovered as a mystery spectral line in the Sun (Helios), it was later isolated as a rare gas on Earth and first liquefied, just over a hundred years ago, at 4 degrees above absolute zero. When cooled further by forced evaporation of the liquid itself, a miraculous discovery was made. Rather than solidifying, a completely new state of matter appeared. The helium had undergone a phase transition from a regular liquid into one that flows without any friction, later named a superfluid.

Professor Haley's research covers three broad strands: the development of cooling technology, now achieving temperatures around a few millionths of a degree; investigating the exotic behaviour of superfluid helium and using the superfluid as a medium in which to perform experiments that simulate sometimes far-removed physical phenomena. These experiments include studies of turbulent flow, one of the last great problems facing classical physics and of phase transitions that bear remarkable similarities to those thought to have taken place in the early Universe, shortly after the Big Bang.