Legitimate Idleness: Victorian Travel for Health

Tuesday 16th May 2023 from 19:00 for 19:30
Abingdon United Football Club (Northcourt Rd, OX14 1PL, Abingdon)

Please note our move to the third Tuesday of the month for 2023.

Middle-class Victorians had always travelled in Europe, but from the 1860s there was a huge rise in the numbers travelling in winter explicitly for their health. In this talk Professor Shuttleworth focuses on the ‘invention’ of Mentone, on the Riviera, and Davos, in the Swiss Alps, as winter health resorts. According to James Henry Bennet, the ‘creator’ of Mentone as a health resort; the British should take their cue from the swallows and travel south for the winter. Sufferers from consumption, clergyman’s throat, or general over-work and the pressures of modern life followed his siren call. Yet by the 1880s Mentone was supplanted as the health destination of choice by the rise of Davos. Basking in the sun in a natural winter garden was to be replaced, one commentator grumbled, by the refrigeration of invalids. This talk will explore the medical and cultural dimensions of these developments, as well as the lives of some of the more famous invalids who wintered there; from Robert Louis Stevenson and John Addington Symonds, to the charismatic preacher Charles Spurgeon and the decadent artist Aubrey Beardsley.

Speaker: Professor Sally Shuttleworth

Professor Sally Shuttleworth is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, where she was previously Head of the Humanities Division. She works on the inter-relations of medicine, science and culture and between 2014-19 ran the large ERC research project; Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives and also an AHRC project on citizen science; Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries. Her most recent books are the co-authored Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2019) and Science Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Constructing Scientific Communities. She is currently working on a book on travel for health.

Science and Archaeology – How Chemistry Can Tell Us About the Human Past

Thursday 20th April 2023 from 19:15 for 19:45
Northcourt Centre (Northcourt Rd, OX14 1NS, Abingdon)

Please note this event is on the third Thursday and will be held at the Northcourt Centre NOT at the football club. It is also slightly later than our usual time with doors opening at 19:15 for a 19:45 start.

This is a joint event with the Abingdon Area Archaeology and Historical Society.

“Chemistry and Archaeology… how does that work?” is a common response when I tell people that I do research in archaeological chemistry. To answer this question, this talk will present some of the insights that scientific techniques can reveal into life in the past, with a particular focus on reconstructing what people were eating and where they lived at various points in their lives. The early medieval cemetery excavated in Milton, south of Abingdon, in 2015 provides an interesting local case study, revealing insights into the people living in Oxfordshire more than a thousand years ago.

Speaker: Dr Amy Styring

Dr Amy Styring is Associate Professor of Archaeological Science at the University of Oxford. As an archaeological chemist, she is interested in advancing scientific methods that reveal a direct and detailed picture of everyday life in the past, particularly in relation to how people produced their food and the impact that this had on the environment.

‘Elusive’ – Peter Higgs and the 50 year quest for the God particle

Saturday 11th March 2023 at 19:00
The Amey Theatre, Abingdon School

This event is being held as part of the ATOM Festival which runs from 11th – 14th March 2023.

The ATOM Festival welcomes back Professor Frank Close OBE FRS to give the definitive account of the Higgs boson story. After 33 hours of phone conversations with Higgs during the pandemic, Professor Close wrote the award-winning science bestseller, Elusive, which was chosen as one of 2022’s Science Books of the Year by The Times and Sunday Times, The Guardian, Economist, Nature and the Times Literary Supplement.

This is preceded by a fascinating introduction to the concept of Fame Lab and how this can be used to promote science education and science communication in our schools. Founder, Kathy Sykes, an Abingdon resident will give a short talk especially useful for anyone involved in science education in the Abingdon area.

More details about this talk and the speaker can be found on the ATOM Festival site here.

Speaker: Professor Frank Close OBE FRS

Professor Frank Close lives in Abingdon and is one of the founders of the ATOM Festival. He is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and a former head of the theoretical physics division at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. He is the author of several bestselling books including ‘Half Life’ (the true story of Harwell physicist Bruno Pontecorvo), ‘Trinity: The treachery and Pursuit of the Most Dangerous Spy in History’ about the life of Klaus Fuchs and “Elusive”, the story of the Higgs boson which was selected as a science book of 2022 by The Times and Sunday Times, The Guardian, Economist, Nature and Times Literary Supplement.

He has won the Association of British Science Writers award three times, was vice president of the British Association for Advancement of Science and won the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize for Science Communication. He is also an experienced eclipse-chaser who has seen over a dozen eclipses – and in 2016 wrote ‘Eclipse’ published by Oxford University Press.

From Darwin to DNA, Studying Evolution in the 21st Century

Tuesday 21st February 2023 from 19:00 for 19:30
Abingdon United Football Club (Northcourt Rd, OX14 1PL, Abingdon)

Please note our move to the third Tuesday of the month for 2023.

When we think of evolution, the first person that springs to mind is Charles Darwin. In The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin presented evidence supporting evolution, proposed the metaphor of an evolutionary ‘tree’, and suggested a mechanism: natural selection acting on variation. But there were still some very big questions, such as the shape of the tree (who is more closely related to whom?) and the nature of the inherited variation (what are variants or mutations?). In this talk, I will explore how animal evolution is studied in the 21st century, with a focus on remarkable new insights we are gaining from molecular biology and genome sequencing. The talk will be accessible to a general audience.

Speaker: Professor Peter Holland

Peter Holland is the Linacre Professor of Zoology at the University of Oxford. After an undergraduate degree in Oxford and PhD in London, he held academic posts in Oxford and Reading before taking up his current post 20 years ago. He has published over 200 scientific papers on genetics and evolution, and an introductory book ‘The Animal Kingdom: A Very Short Introduction’. Peter Holland was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society in 2003 and has received several awards for his research contributions. These include medals from the Zoological Society, the Genetics Society and the Linnean Society, and most recently the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society.

The Ever-Changing Brain

Tuesday 17th January 2023 from 19:00 for 19:30
Abingdon United Football Club (Northcourt Rd, OX14 1PL, Abingdon)

Please note our move to the third Tuesday of the month for 2023.

Our brains adapt whenever we practice a new skill, such as playing a musical instrument or learning to juggle. Our brains also adapt as we get older, or following damage such as stroke. Changes in our lifestyle, like taking up exercise or altering our sleep patterns, can also affect our brains and can influence risk of cognitive decline or dementia. Understanding how the brain adapts to change can help us to design new rehabilitation treatments, to promote healthy ageing, or to enhance learning.

This talk will discuss how brain scanning technology is used to investigate how the brain changes with experience, learning and recovery from damage. Such investigations shed light on the possibilities and limits for changing the brain and help inform design of novel clinical treatments and diagnostics for brain disorders.

Speaker: Professor Heidi Johansen-Berg

Professor Heidi Johansen-Berg is a Wellcome Principal Research Fellow and Director of the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (WIN), based at the University of Oxford. WIN is a multi-disciplinary research facility that uses brain imaging to bridge the gap between laboratory neuroscience and human health, by performing multi-scale studies spanning from animal models through to human populations. Heidi originally studied Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Oxford, before specialising in Neuroscience. She has been primarily based in Oxford throughout her career but has spent time as a visiting researcher at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and the University of Oslo in Norway.