This talk is part of the 2025 ATOM Festival of Science & Technology.
In 1918, an influenza pandemic killed more people than the First World War. The disease was called the Spanish Lady, among many other names, because nobody had more than a vague idea of what caused it. The Spanish Lady’s descendants are still with us, causing the annual ‘winter flu’ that empties workplaces, filling hospitals and stuffing noses.
Now we know the influenza virus down to the most intimate molecular detail but we’re still locked in an ongoing tussle with it. Science, medicine and our own immune systems can limit the damage it does but every year, influenza is involved in thousands of deaths across Britain.
The story of the influenza virus circulating today is intertwined with the story of how science came to know it. Both stories are still being written.
David Miles is an infectious disease immunologist who has worked mostly on diseases of childhood in Africa and the vaccinations that protect against them. He now lives in London and tutors on the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s online MSc course. His first popular science book, How Vaccines Work, was published in March 2023.
Website: https://www.variolator.com/
Twitter: @Variolator
Bluesky: @variolator.bsky.social
Note: This talk will be preceded by a short AGM.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the largest telescope ever launched into space, has transformed our view of stars galaxies in the early Universe.
Over the first two years of operations, JWST has raised a swathe of new questions about how stars and galaxies formed in the early Universe.
In this talk, Dr Cameron will review some of the major findings about galaxies in the early Universe from JWST. In particular, he will focus on how JWST is showing that the properties of stellar populations (especially massive stars) may have been very different in the early Universe.
Dr. Alex Cameron is an astronomer in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford.
He did his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Melbourne, before moving to Oxford as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant in 2021. He is a member of the JWST/NIRSpec instrument team and had some involvement in the commissioning process after the launch of JWST. His research interests involve trying to understand how the first galaxies formed and what evolutionary processes have shaped galaxies over the last 13 billion years until the present day.
Superconductors are incredible substances that allow very large electrical currents to flow through them, with zero resistance. They also exclude magnetic fields, or only allow them to penetrate in peculiar ways. Both of these properties are the result of macroscopic quantum phenomena which emerge when the material is cooled to very low temperatures (-190 °C at least), and can be exploited in a large range of extremely useful high tech devices, such as extremely powerful superconducting magnets (in MRI machines, or the Large Hadron Collider for instance), MagLev trains, and very low loss power transmission. One of the most important practical things that one must be able to do with a technologically useful superconductor is to join it seamlessly, with minimal loss of superconductivity to another piece of superconductor. This is a mature technology in conventional, low-temperature superconductors, but we have been developing ways to do so for newer, and more powerful high-temperature superconductors, as well as exploring jointing between dissimilar types of superconductor. This is an essential step to the next generation of ultra-high field magnets, as well as useful superconducting power transmission. It is my hope that I can introduce listeners to the incredible world of superconducting technology, and show how we stand at the brink of a true revolution.
Petr is currently a doctoral student at the University of Oxford at the Centre for Applied Superconductivity, under Professor Susie Speller, where his main focus lies on persistent-grade (i.e. extremely low resistance) joints between superconductors, with particular emphasis on Bi2Sr2Ca1Cu2O8 (Bi-2212) high-temperature superconducting round wire. He studied at the University of Bath for his undergraduate and masters in Natural Sciences, where he majored in Physics and minored in Chemistry, and completed a research project on slit-tape REBCO magnets with Professor Simon Bending. 
During his undergraduate studies, he completed a research internship at Siemens Magnet Technology in Eynsham, where he was originally inducted into the dark arcane arts of superconductivity. Before that, he completed his GCSEs and A Levels in Gibraltar, where he spent his high school years climbing rocks and taunting the monkeys. Originally from the Czech Republic, he was born in a small town in the north-east of the country, and grew up hiking and frolicking on the western foothills of the Carpathian Mountains.