Lunch Hour Lectures - Spring 2011 - Audio

To mark LGBT History Month, Professor Michael King will look at why homophobia has existed in nearly every society throughout history, and what motivates the hatred of gay people around the world.

This lecture has a sign language interpreter.

During World War II, Portugal was frantically trying to hold on to its self-proclaimed wartime neutrality, but was increasingly caught in the middle of the economic, and naval wars between the Allies and the Nazis. To complicate matters further, thousands of refugees, many of them Jewish, flooded into Lisbon seeking a passage to the United States or Palestine. This talk will present the little known, and yet vitally important history of the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, during World War II.

This lecture marks Holocaust Remembrance Day.

In many poor countries the Millennium Development Goals for improvements in nutrition and health, especially of mothers and children, will not be met by the target date of 2015. This talk will review progress towards these targets and consider critical obstacles to success. New strategies will be considered to improve nutrition and to accelerate reductions in death and fertility rates so that the global population will be stabilised by mid-century.

Model building is one of the oldest scientific activities and is essential for allowing us to understand the complex reality of nature. Modern computers have allowed scientists to develop models of unprecedented accuracy and detail, and this lecture will explore and illustrate some aspects of the contemporary field, using examples ranging from cosmology and geosciences to engineering and materials sciences. The power of modern visualisation techniques will also be illustrated.

This lecture marks 2011 as the International Year of Chemistry.

Professor Alan Penn will describe the way that architects use space to sell you things. He shows how space creates patterns of movement and this brings you in contact with goods. In IKEA though, the story gets more interesting, here the designers deliberately set out to confuse you and in this way draw you into buying things that were not on your shopping list.