10/2025: Use of Nanobodies in Disease Prevention – Dr. Lauren Eyssen
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09/2025: Oxfordshire Dinosaur Tracks – Dr. Duncan Murdock
Tuesday 16th September 2025 from 19:00 for 19:30
Abingdon United Football Club (Northcourt Rd, OX14 1PL, Abingdon)
Speaker: Dr. Duncan Murdock
07/2025: Destroyer of Worlds – Professor Frank Close
Tuesday 22nd July 2025 from 19:00 for 19:30
Abingdon United Football Club (Northcourt Rd, OX14 1PL, Abingdon)
Please note the change this month from the 3rd Tuesday to the 4th Tuesday.
Was Marie Curie really the greatest female physicist of the early 20th century? Could the atomic energy contained in a kilogramme of radium really drive a ship across the Atlantic? Did a traffic light near the Royal Institution really give Leo Szilard his idea of the chain reaction? And was Oppenheimer really the “father of the atomic bomb”? This talk reveals how Henry Becquerel’s accidental discovery, in 1896, of a faint smudge on a photographic plate sparked a chain of discoveries which would unleash the atomic age and reveals some of the myths that have grown around this saga.
Based on Frank Close’s new book, Destroyer of Worlds, the talk is the story of how pursuit of this hidden nuclear power source, which began innocently and collaboratively, was overwhelmed by the politics of the 1930s, and following devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki opened the way to a still more terrible possibility: a thermonuclear bomb, the so-called “backyard weapon”, that could destroy all life on earth – from anywhere.
Speaker: Professor Frank Close OBE FRS
Frank Close OBE FRS is Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at Oxford University and Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford.
He is a particle physicist who recently made his 16th appearance on Melvyn Bragg’s ‘In Our Time’.
The author of several popular science books he is the only scientist to have
won a British Science Writers Prize on three occasions
06/2025: Space Sweepers Get Set to Clean the Orbital Highway – Zoé Tenacci
Tuesday 17th June 2025 from 19:00 for 19:30
Abingdon United Football Club (Northcourt Rd, OX14 1PL, Abingdon)
One of the first companies in the world to focus on space sustainability, Astroscale has been working for over a decade on developing technologies to remove space debris and enable a circular economy in space. This talk will present how they go about removing debris from Earth’s orbits and creating a safer and more sustainable space environment, along with the latest technology and mission developments that Astroscale has been flying and working on.
Speaker: Zoé Tenacci
Zoé is a senior engineer at Astroscale, who has been working for the past 5 years on space debris removal missions, developing concept of operations and spacecraft design for rendezvous and proximity operations. She previously worked on Earth observation missions at Airbus.
05/2025: LASERS – The Incredible Power of Light – Professor John Collier
Tuesday 20th May 2025 from 19:00 for 19:30
Abingdon United Football Club (Northcourt Rd, OX14 1PL, Abingdon)
If asked to talk about a laser, many of us would speak of light shows at concerts or night clubs, maybe laser pointers, or for those close to our speaker’s generation; maybe the famous ‘laser scene’ from James Bonds’ Goldfinger! But from quite humble beginnings since its first demonstration in 1960, lasers have grown to become some of the most important generic tools that have ever been invented. Today, lasers underpin much of what we consider to be modern society, modern economies, modern science, modern technology. In this talk we will explore some of these areas, give a basic explanation of how lasers work and highlight some of the pioneering research and development that is taking place in laser-based science in Oxfordshire on the Harwell Campus. This includes, for example; sophisticated systems that look for new solutions to cancer, climate change, new energy technologies, through to the development of compact plasma-based accelerators for industrial and medical imaging and ending in the construction of the world’s most powerful laser – potentially powerful enough to perturb the vacuum. The talk will not be technical or complex, rather a celebration of some of the wonderous and very likely unknown ways that lasers are continuing to shape our future.
Speaker: Professor John Collier
Professor Collier is the Director of the UK’s Central Laser Facility (CLF), based at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory at Harwell, Oxfordshire and part of the UKRI Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). A laser scientist by training, Professor Collier initially joined the CLF as a research scientist from CERN (where he was a Research Fellow), a position from which he has grown to become its Director 15 years ago. Professor Collier has played a central role in building the CLF into one of the world’s leading research centres for multi-disciplinary science and innovation using lasers and establishing the CLF at the heart of major international programmes. He is Executive Director of Laserlab-Europe AISBL, a consortium of all the major laser facilities throughout Europe, a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales and he won the Institute of Physics Glazebrook Medal in 2020.