To learn about how policy, science, and markets get food to the shops, I went along to last week's Brighton Cafe Sci. It featured Prof. Erik Millstone talking on the science and politics of food security.   Highlights: Good news: because bacteria in food make you ill quickly, the food industry does a good job of using...

I'm still stunned that regular human beings, who somehow aren't super famous, can get on a stage and make such perfect sounds together. Without amplifiers screwing up the sound.  This was at a BPO concert at the Dome. A two parter, with a trumpet concerto in part one. I don't count myself as a fan of the trumpet, but...

We were at another Think Again! event, which is a "live psychology panel show". I recommend you try sometime. It's part lecture, part stand-up, part Q&A.  We learned, amongst other things: Dogs laugh (play pant); All the popular tells to spot a liar are junk; and Laughter may have evolved because it's more efficient...

Emily Thrift is doing some beautiful work. She's looking at the microplastics in the natural world—including in hedgehogs and in hedgehog food—and by pulling on that thread she's illuminating the mess we've created. She spoke at Cafe Sci in Brighton and described how microplastics (MPs) are found in soil, water, plants,...

On Thursday I tuned into the Royal Society's live YouTube broadcast celebrating 75 years since the publication of what we now call the Turing Test.Out of those five hours, I'd highlight Professor Sarah Dillon on a panel discussion (58 minutes in). She pointed out that Computing Machinery and Intelligence is "really...

On Wednesday night there were eight short talks on data-ish things at BDF lightning talks event. The ones that caught my eye:Naked Energy build rooftop water heating systems which look very cool. The data problem is detecting leaks from pressure readings.Anjani Sharma spoke about her history in automating jobs, and...

The answer is “yes”, if we have free will. This was Kevin J. Mitchell and Anil Seth chatting about free will. Are we programmed to inevitably act the same way based on some stimulus, or do we have a free choice? The problem, right from the start, is what “we” means in “do we have free will?”. After all, looking at the...

I dropped in to The Language Puzzle: How We Talked Our Way Out Of The Stone Age, a talk by archaeologist Prof. Steven Mithen. He’s a very compelling speaker, and gave a tour of how he believes language got started. In outline: there was gradual word adoption, but a change in brain structure enabling a fully modern...

There’s a scene in 2010: The Year We Made Contact that has stuck with me all this time. One character, Dr Chandra, is talking to a machine (SAL), and SAL responds in an interesting way about the meaning of a file name.It’s from 1min 50sec in this clip: Chandra: I, er, would like to open a new file. Here is the name for...

I was 50:50 about going to this event last night on “how quantum physics could help decode human behaviour”. My worry was that it’d be total woo-woo and a waste of time. It was not that: it was about the curious findings that some human behaviour can be modelled by the maths of quantum physics. There are some results in...

The two main kinds of drug discovery projects I’m familiar-ish with are small molecules (e.g., oral drugs) and antibodies. There are others, and proximity therapeutics is one I know nothing of. I know a bit more now, after attending a one-day single-track conference on this topic at The Francis Crick Institute on...

Yesterday I was at UCL for a presentation called “Target 2035: A 2000-protein experiment to ligand the human proteome”. It’s a project from the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC, which UCL has just joined). The aim is to create large and open dataset for drug discovery Thinking of the success of AlphaFold in...

My niece sent us on a tea blending workshop: tea cocktails, learning about tea, blending tea. This was at our local tea store, which was apparently their first store, and drew a couple of serious tea fanatics. They had very nice tea-themed tattoos. At the end of the 2.5 hours of tea, tea, tea we mixed our own blends....

Tonight I was at Async for James talking about uniffi-rs. It’s a tool to generate bindings to Rust code from various other places: Javascript worlds, Python, Kotlin, Swift, others, and now—thanks to James—React Native too. This one slide nicely shows the idea: This is all new to me. It means you can: package up core...

Today at Brighton Astro Louis and Russ described their project launching a balloon from their back garden to some insane height (30km?). They recovered some great images, as you might imagine. The part I was particular taken with is that you can predict the path of these things really well. They used  launched during...