The economist explains his theory that oxytocin drives our morality and is responsible for trust, empathy and other feelings that build and help maintain stable societies.
Cardiff series 1: Geo-engineering – Plan B or Pandora’s Box?
Event 26 • •
Venue: Hay on Earth Stage
From tiny particles reflecting sunlight to giant machines capturing carbon, technological fixes might be the answer to climate change. But such manipulation is riddled with social, ethical and legal problems.
The Director of the Institute for the Future of the Mind explores the Neuroscience of Identity. As the physical brain adapts exquisitely to the environment, and our environment changes in unprecedented ways, are we facing correspondingly unprecedented changes to our identity?
Dolphins, elephants, UFOs, even Alfred Hitchcock and Andy Murray…they’re all here in this beautiful, hilarious collection of clouds photographed around the world by members of The Cloud Appreciation Society. Selected and introduced by the winner of Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books.
If you travelled back in time and killed your grandfather, you would not have been born and would not therefore have killed your grandfather. For starters... Chaired by Ariane Koek.
Our annual science lecture is given this year by the 1962 Nobel Laureate, the author of The Double Helix, who in 1953 discovered the structure of DNA with Francis Crick. It will be chaired by Ian McEwan.
Ethics and prudence set limits to how our scientific knowledge can be applied. And there are constraints on the amount of research we can afford. But are there some aspects of the universe, or of life, that we’ll never understand because they’re beyond human brains and that must await post-human intellects?
Survivors - The Animals and Plants that Time has Left Behind
Event 158 • •
Venue: Llwyfan Cymru – Wales Stage
The paleontologist takes us on a journey across the globe in search of traces of evolution in creatures that have survived from long ago, from algal mats dating back two billion years to the hardy musk oxen, the last vestiges of Ice Age fauna.
The Train in the Night - A Story of Music and Loss
Event 159 • •
Venue: Big Tent
An account of one man’s struggle to recover from the loss of his greatest passion in life - and to go one step further: to restore his ability not only to hear but to think about and feel music.
100 Essential Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know About Sport
Event 227 • •
Venue: Sky Arts Studio
How fast could Bolt run? How are the many scoring systems designed? Why did Fosbury flop? What’s the effect of those skintight swimsuits? The Gresham Professor of Geometry gives us the skinny on the Olympics to come.
100 years after Scott and Amundsen’s race to the pole, the writer weaves science, natural history, poetry and epic history to give An Intimate Portrait of the World’s Most Mysterious Continent.
Curiosity is often said to drive science, but until the seventeenth century – the age of the so-called Scientific Revolution – it was regarded with suspicion and condemnation. What happened to liberate curiosity? Why did no question seem too vast or trivial to be ruled out of bounds? And what does the freedom to be curious really mean for science today?
What was once an insult used to marginalize those curious people and their obsessive interest in science has increasingly become a badge of honour. And it’s a high ambition to entrench scientific thinking more deeply into politics and society.
