Tuesday 15th August 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.

This talk will describe the range of new technologies being developed based on the physics of quantum mechanics involving interactions at the fundamental level of single photons, atoms, ions and superconductivity. These developments are part of a large government investment in quantum technologies with the objective of growing new companies and enhancing national security.

Speaker: Dr Rhys Lewis

Dr Rhys Lewis is the Head of the Quantum Metrology Institute at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) a government-owned laboratory applying science in support of UK industry. He is responsible for NPL’s strategic direction in quantum and for leading NPL’s programme as a partner in the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme. The NPL Quantum Programme involves establishing test and evaluation capabilities for quantum timing, quantum communications, quantum sensors, quantum materials and quantum computing. NPL also delivers projects in collaboration with the Quantum Technology university hubs, and with many industry partners. Dr Lewis joined NPL in 2007 as an operational Division Head. Prior to NPL his career was in leading new product development in manufacturing companies in the Oxford and Abingdon area.

Tuesday 18th July 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.

Domestic work is critical to health and well-being. Societies cannot function without regular meals cooked, clothes and homes cleaned, and people cared for.

It is also very time consuming and generally shared unequally within and between households.

Women continue to do more unpaid domestic work than men in the majority of households, though the extent of gender inequality when it comes to domestic work varies between societies.

Historically, technological advances – such as the rise of domestic appliances  in the 1950s – have been associated with women’s increased participation in the labour market. The rising female employment and intensification of family (especially parenting) responsibilities for both men and women means there remains a large unmet demand for help with domestic work. Household robots (vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, etc.) outnumbered all other types of robots in terms of units sold from as early as 2010. Sales of household robots have since accelerated dramatically.

In this talk Dr Hertog will explore the potential for a further transformation of unpaid domestic work with the rise of AI-powered technologies, expert predictions about the future of housework and care work, individual attitudes to using smart digital technologies to replace their own domestic work, and how this varies cross-culturally.

Speaker: Associate Professor Dr Ekaterina Hertog

Fusion – Powering the Future

Tuesday 20th June 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.

With climate change the top of everyone’s agenda, the hunt for alternative sources of energy has never been more important. In the middle of rural Oxfordshire in the UK, over one thousand scientists and engineers are working for the UK Atomic Energy Authority, to develop a new source of low-carbon, safe and abundant electricity – Fusion Energy.

The fusion of hydrogen nuclei is the process that powers the Sun – and at the European JET project, operated by the UK Atomic Energy Authority at it’s Culham Science Centre HQ, these processes are being replicated. By heating a gas of hydrogen-like fuels to 150-200 million℃, the JET tokamak has demonstrated the fusion of these nuclei and a subsequent release of energy. Indeed, recent results have demonstrated a world record 59MJ of fusion energy released.

JET continues to lead the worldwide effort towards commercial fusion power – ensuring the next step international device ITER (located in Cadarache, France) will show much higher and sustained production of fusion power when it comes into operation in the mid 2020s. UKAEA are also increasingly developing key technologies (robotic maintenance, fuel cycle, materials etc.) required for the first fusion power stations.  

UKAEA are now leading a major UK project to design and build a more compact fusion power plant at West Burton, Nottinghamshire around 2040 – the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP).  

The first fusion power stations should be starting up in the next 30 years – harnessing the power of the Sun for all of us here on Earth!

Speaker: Chris Warwick

Chris Warrick is the Outreach and Student Placement manager at UKAEA. After graduating with a degree in Physics from the University of Wales, Chris joined Culham in 1990 working as an experimental physicist on various fusion devices until 2001. He then joined the Communications team – with particular responsibility for education and public outreach, before leading the group in April 2010, becoming head of stakeholder engagement in 2020 and moving to his new role in 2021.

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.