CPS Journals donated to Darwin College

CPS Journals by Darwin's sons donated to Darwin College archive.

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Image:Humanity’s quest to discover the origins of life in the universe

06 March
2023

Humanity’s quest to discover the origins of life in the universe

Dr Emily Mitchell, Assistant Professor and Curator of Invertebrates in the Department of Zoology, Cambridge and previous Henslow Fellow recently gave a talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting in Washington DC on the Origins of Life: Humanity’s Quest to Discover the Nature of Life in the Universe.

Image:Scientific treasures shown at the Wren Library

24 November
2022

Scientific treasures shown at the Wren Library

Following on from our summer visit to the National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) on Bletchley Park, CPS visited the Wren Library at Trinity College Cambridge. The tour was kindly hosted by Dr Nicolas Bell, Librarian at The Wren.

Image:Explosion of Life: The Origins of Animals

16 May
2022

YouTube

Explosion of Life: The Origins of Animals

Dr Emily Mitchell from the Department of Zoology, along with Professor Simon Conway Morris and Dr Alex Liu, both from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge discuss their research into the Ediacaran and Cambrian periods and the techniques used to collect fossil data in the field. 

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03

02

To Bend or to Break?  — new views on the hardening of metals

Professor Lindsay Greer

  • 18:00 - 19:00 Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre Lent Term G.I. Taylor Lecture

Kipling’s “Iron‒Cold Iron‒is master of them all” captures the familiar importance of metals as structural materials.  Yet common metals are not necessarily hard; they can become so when deformed.  This phenomenon, strain hardening, was first explained by G. I. Taylor in 1934.  Ninety years on from this pioneering work on dislocation theory, we explore the deformation of metals when dislocations do not exist, that is when the metals are non-crystalline.  These amorphous metals have record-breaking combinations of properties.  They behave very differently from the metals that Taylor studied, but we do find phenomena for which his work (in a dramatically different context) is directly relevant.

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02

Why there’s no such thing as “the” scientific advice

Professor Stephen John

  • 18:00 - 19:00 Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre Lent Term

During the Covid-19 pandemic, U.K. policy-makers claimed to be "following the science". Many commentators objected that the government did not live up to this aim. Others worried that policy-makers ought not blindly "follow" science, because this involves an abdication of responsibility. In this talk, I consider a third, even more fundamental concern: that there is no such thing as "the" science. Drawing on the case of adolescent vaccination against Covid-19, I argue that the best that any scientific advisory group can do is to offer a partial perspective on reality. In turn, this has important implications for how we think about science and politics. 

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