Tuesday 21st April 2026 from 19:00 for 19:30
Abingdon United Football Club (Northcourt Rd, OX14 1PL, Abingdon)

Trains are one of the safest ways to travel, but it hasn’t always been like that. In this talk Dr Wilson will introduce the basics of railway signalling, and look at how it has evolved over time – often in response to accidents and near-misses. You will find out how a single stray wire caused an accident that killed 35 people, why leaves on the line cause such a problem for the railways, and how signalling systems are designed to deal with the inevitable human error. Working from the early days of the railway to the present (and future), the talk will take you through a number of accidents, their causes and the improvements that were made after the accidents.

Speaker: Dr Robin Wilson

Robin is an expert in satellite imaging, having won the Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society’s PhD Prize for his thesis in 2014.  Afterwards he worked in academia but is now a freelance geospatial software engineer, working for clients ranging from small community groups to multi-national corporations to store, process and visualise geographic data such as satellite images and maps.

Website: https://rtwilson.com
Twitter: @sciremotesense
Bluesky: @robintw.bsky.social

Tuesday 17th March 2026 from 19:00 for 19:30
Abingdon United Football Club (Northcourt Rd, OX14 1PL, Abingdon)

This talk is part of the 2026 ATOM Festival of Science & Technology.

Three quarters of a billion years ago the first simple animal evolved. It probably looked like a small sponge, but no fossils of it have been found. A couple of hundred million years later, ocean chemistry changed, and this allowed simple animals to make hard parts: teeth, skeletons and shells. Once these had evolved, animals had the means to eat one another and so began arms races between predators and their prey that have played out ever since. These arms races have shaped life on earth, even making us human. Tim Coulson takes us on this gripping journey through half a billion years of life-and-death struggles between hunter and hunted. From ancient shark leviathans to lions on the African plains, from the rise of Homo erectus to our own role as the planet’s most dangerous killer, this talk explains how predation shaped the very fabric of life and could yet save humanity’s future.

Speaker: Professor Tim Coulson

Professor Tim Coulson is a British zoologist and evolutionary ecologist. He holds the title of Professor of Zoology at University of Oxford and is a Professorial Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. His research explores how changes in predator populations influence ecology and evolutionary dynamics across systems. His field sites include Yellowstone National Park, the freshwater streams in Trinidad and oceanic islands off Australia. He earned his BSc in Biology from University of York and his PhD from Imperial College London. Tim is also a science communicator, podcast co-host and author of a popular science book.

Tuesday 17th February 2026 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: Zoe 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.