Lunch Hour Lectures - Spring 2013 - Audio

Despite five decades of research into the harms of smoking and numerous successful public health campaigns, many people take up and continue with the habit. Cigarette sales remain high as tobacco companies excel at marketing. In the United States, more than $8 billion was spent by the tobacco companies on marketing and advertising in 2011-12, compared to $457 million spent by the government in preventing or reducing tobacco use. This lecture will explore what has been learnt from 50 years of research, including the benefits of quitting at any age, and plans for future policies.

Whatever people think about the rapid pace of change of technology, our most fundamental categorization of stuff on the planet has not altered: there are living things and there is non-living stuff. As a result of our greater understanding of matter, this distinction is now becoming blurred and is likely to usher in a new materials age. Bionic people with synthetic organs, bones and even brains will be the norm. Just as we are becoming more synthetic, so our man-made environment is changing to become more lifelike: living buildings, and objects that heal-themselves are on the horizon. This lecture reviews the changes to the material world that are coming our way.

Scandinavian crime fiction has in recent years enjoyed surprising success world-wide. The region, with its universal welfare states, is most commonly considered a very peaceful place, with low rates of corruption and crime and the highest levels of reported wellbeing in the world. Scandinavian crime fiction offers a bleaker and more complex image of life in these countries. This lecture will explore to what extent 'Nordic Noir' tells the story about the end of the Nordic Model in a global age.

Is a culture of infallibility holding back our engineers by celebrating the avoidance of failure rather than the achievement of success? Do we really want our engineers to live their lives by the mantra ‘Avoid failure and you too can be a success’? This lecture will offer a wholly upbeat alternative: re-wiring the engineering mind to be optimistic, life-enriching and mind-blowing, arming itself to do amazing stuff.

Greater understanding of how genetic differences influence disease susceptibility and drug response has potentially important healthcare applications. This lecture, marking Heart Awareness Month, will focus on some of the opportunities and challenges of using genomic information to improve personal and public health, using cardiovascular disease as an example.

Almost every song lyric can be misunderstood: famously, Jimi Hendrix’s 'Kiss the Sky' is often heard as 'Kiss This Guy'. Why does this happen? While slips of the tongue are well-known, slips of the ear have received far less attention. Professor Nevins has developed a database of 4000 naturally collected examples where the hearer is the source of miscommunication. Looking into recurrent slips reveals that our expectations can bias what we mishear, but within limits: the actual utterance and the misheard message must be phonetically close enough to allow our ears to deceive us.

It has been known for some time that moderate dietary restriction can extend healthy lifespan in a variety of organisms. By experimenting on fruitflies, we are uncovering that only very small changes in specific nutrients are required for this effect. Importantly, these effects appear to be evolutionarily conserved, meaning these new discoveries could be applied to benefit human ageing.

There was plenty of scepticism among economists about the likely success of a common currency in Europe. The immediate problem is that peripheral countries have seen their public sectors incur large deficits and incautious private sectors incur large debts. In addition, wages in the Southern economies have grown more rapidly, and productivity more slowly, than in the North. This lecture will set out the risks this poses to full political union and explore whether there is a solution.

In recent years, there has been much discussion of the influence of classical Arabic science on the Western scientific tradition. Yet these achievements have been variously ignored, overlooked or occasionally overstressed. This lecture discusses the impact that scholars from the Islamic world have made in the fields of medicine, astronomy, optics, geography, mechanics and many other disciplines. What role did the Arabic world have in the history of science? And how did Baghdad, Cairo and Islamic Spain preserve and expand the scientific tradition?

Within theoretical physics the gravitational force is the odd one out. It is much weaker than the other forces, its mathematical formulation is different and we are struggling to understand it. In this talk Dr Boehmer will outline a new approach to understanding the gravitational force which is motivated by ideas from material sciences and in particular the study of crystals.