There is increasing recognition over the last decade that conservation, while conserving biodiversity of global value, can have local costs. Understanding these costs is essential as a first step to delivering conservation projects that do not make some of the poorest people on the planet poorer. Using examples from Madagascar and Bolivia, we explore the challenges of quantifying the impact of conservation on local wellbeing.
Julia Jones is Professor in conservation science at the School of Environment, Natural Resources and Geography, Bangor University. Julia is interested in how people interact with natural resources and how incentives can be best designed to maintain ecosystem services; for example the growing field of Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) and how schemes such as REDD+ can effectively deliver global environmental benefits while also having a positive impact on local livelihoods. She also has a strong interest in the design of robust conservation monitoring using different types of data, and in analysing the evidence underpinning environmental policies and decisions.

Telegraph writer Helen Yemm brings her column Thorny Problems to life by answering your gardening conundrums and dispensing invaluable advice in the picturesque setting of the Botanic Garden.

Leopold Eyharts flew on the Atlantis Shuttle to the International Space Station in 2008. Part of his mission included the installation of the Colombus Space Laboratory, the main contribution of Europe to the International Space Station. In 1998, Leopold flew
on a Soyouz Space Shuttle to the Russian MIR station. Engage in a conversation about his adventures and the future of manned exploration of space. Chaired by Valerie Jamieson, Editorial Content Director, New Scientist.

Astronomers have discovered that the Universe is full of potential homes for life, with planets around the vast majority of stars, yet the skies remain disappointingly free of swooping starships, visiting aliens or radio signals from space. Chris Lintott
looks at the evidence for life in the Universe, explains how you can help and tries to argue that the truth is out there somewhere.

Bookseller and chef turned food writer for The Telegraph, Xanthe Clay shares her tips for successful food writing whilst demonstrating a recipe from The Contented Cook.

Join Great British Bake Off winner, Frances Quinn, as she demonstrates how to decorate gorgeous Confetti Cupcakes with beautiful Marzipan Bees while talking about her design background and Quinntessential Baking cookbook. Save up your questions during the demonstration and join in with a Q&A in which Frances will chat about all things baking and perhaps spill some Bake Off secrets along the way!

Award-winning chef and restaurateur specialising in Italian, vegetarian and seafood cuisine discusses some of his favourite Italian dishes.

How did the Universe begin? We are now on the hunt to find signals from the Big Bang itself, looking for ripples in space-time put in at the beginning of time. Engage in a fascinating conversation with cosmologist Jo Dunkley, and find out how new telescopes in Chile and the South Pole might give us the answer!

Date/Time: Saturday 25 June, 16:30
Venue: Story Museum, Pembroke Street, Oxford
Admissions: £5/£4(conc.)/£16(fam.)
Suitability: 16+
Book here:
http://www.oxfordshiresciencefestival.com/sat-opening-weekend.html

Apocalypses and politics go hand in hand as University of Oxford physicist Fran Day takes a break from studying particles that probably don’t exist to take to the stage in
a stand-up comedy spectacular that is witty, irreverent and occasionally surreal. Equipped with bundles of laughs, what better way is there to spend your Saturday afternoon?

How to create in the lab the process taking place at the heart of the stars? How to harvest this energy to power the world? Nuclear fusion is arguably the hardest technical challenge humanity works on at the moment. The UK significantly contributes to this world-wide research effort with the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy. Get insights from the lab, and learn everything you need to know about nuclear fusion!

Book here: http://www.oxfordshiresciencefestival.com/sun-opening-weekend.html

Britain’s most famous mathematician explores the limits of human knowledge, to probe whether there is anything we truly cannot know. Are there limits to what we can discover about our physical Universe? Is time before the Big Bang a no go arena? Are there ideas so complex that they are beyond the conception of our finite human brains? Are there true statements that can never be proved true? Prepare to be taken to the edge of knowledge to find out what we cannot know.

Ludo, snakes & ladders and draughts are all popular pastimes, but in the past couple of decades a new generation of board games from designers with backgrounds in maths and science has begun to break the Monopoly monopoly. Perhaps the most successful of these is multi award winning Reiner Knizia, who joins mathematician Katie Steckles and board game lover Quentin Cooper to discuss how you develop a game which is easy to learn, hard to master and fun to play time after time. With a chance to have a go at some of Reiner’s latest creations and other top games afterwards.

Book here: http://www.oxfordshiresciencefestival.com/tuesday.html

In one hour flat, Jim Baggott tells the story of our universe, from the Big Bang to the emergence of humans as conscious intelligent beings, 13.8 billion years later. Physics, cosmology and biology all combine in his unique fast-paced exposition of current scientific knowledge. This is the story of the origins of everything: space, time, energy, mass, light; galaxies, stars, our Sun, our Earth, complex life, ourselves. Myths and religions all have their accounts of how we came to be. Jim Baggott tells ‘the scientific story of creation’.

Join us for a sensational evening of cabaret – an alchemy of acts delivered by Science Oxford’s network of creative science performers. If you love science, stage and stand up, you’ll be in your element with our periodic table-themed cabaret including science presenter and geek songstress Helen Arney and compered by award-winning science communicator Jamie Gallagher. See the everyday elements that make up the world around us in a new light, watch in disbelief as gold is created before your eyes, and learn about their origins and how they behave inside our bodies. Get your tickets now – once they are gone they argon!

Ian Shipsey, Particle Physicist and Professor of Physics, Oxford University, has been profoundly deaf since 1989. In 2002 he heard the voice of his daughter for the first time thanks to a cochlear implant. These implants have instigated a popular but controversial revolution in the treatment of deafness. Learn the physiology of natural hearing, the function of cochlear implants, and experience speech and music heard through a cochlear implant. Ian Shipsey was one of the leaders of the experiments that discovered the Higgs particle in 2012.

Join engaging physicist and Guardian science blogger Jon Butterworth in a lively and fun science adventure about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Share the excitement of the discovery of the Higgs boson, and the latest developments in the investigation
of the fabric of the Universe!

Join us for Star Men – a film about space, discovery and meaning. Four of the world’s leading astronomers celebrate 50 years of work and friendship on a road trip through the south-west of America, recounting each other’s influences on the most exciting time in astronomy’s history. Between them they have helped to build the world’s biggest observatories and have made revolutionary discoveries about the evolving universe. Now in old age, they reflect on how their profound work in astronomy has affected them as individuals, influencing their sense of religious faith, their thoughts on how life may have purpose and what is knowable and unknowable.

Following the film, there will be a short discussion with Becky Smethurst and the chance to do some stargazing of your own in the school grounds with the Abingdon Astronomical Society.

Stargazing is weather dependant so keep your fingers crossed for clear skies!

Becky is an astronomy PhD student at the University of Oxford and Galaxy Zoo researcher. Having been one of those kids that wanted a telescope rather than a scooter for her birthday, she is now a keen science communicator, was shortlisted for the Institute of Physics Early Career Physics Communicator Award and named Audience Winner of the UK National Final of the FameLab 2014 Competition.

PG

Join us as we cook up a feast for Edward Jenner and explore the culture of eating and drinking in Georgian England. In this talk, food historians Marc Meltonville, Elena Griffith-Hoyle and Sarah Warren will examine the links between food and politics, society and the economy in the eighteenth century. There will also be a chance to sample a Georgian delicacy.

Martin Barker (Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at Aberystwyth University, Director of the Global Hobbit Project) will be visiting Oxford to discuss the results of the landmark Global Hobbit Project, a research initiative examining the popular reception of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Film trilogy.

Synopsis:
“Tolkien aficionados may have disagreed somewhat among themselves about the value and achievements of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. But any frustrations – or celebrations – over the 2001-3 films were nothing compared to the overwhelming sense of let-down occasioned by the Hobbit trilogy. But your disappointments are, I am afraid, grist to the mill of an audience researcher like me. In 2014 I led a consortium of researchers in 46 countries across the world, to gather responses to Peter Jackson’s second trilogy. We managed to attract just over 36,000 completions of our questionnaire. Of course, when we conceived and planned the project, we couldn’t know what the films would be like, or what range of responses and debates they might elicit. In this presentation I will (briefly) explain why and how we carried out the research, and offer some of its major findings. These can act, I hope, as a kind of mirror to the depths, and also the significance, of the sense of disappointment experienced by even the most hopeful and forgiving viewers. And they open an important agenda about the changing role of ‘fantasy’ in our contemporary culture.”

Please join us at 7pm on Thursday of 7th Week (November 24th) for a presentation by Daniel Castro Garcia and Thomas Saxby on their recent publication ‘Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015–2016’.

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“The photographs are a protest against those who so
readily attack refugees and migrants entering Europe
without taking into consideration the dangers faced
during the journey.” (Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015–16 by John Radcliffe Studio www.johnradcliffestudio.com)

For more information please read the press release below:

‘Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015–2016’, is a photography book that documents the lives of people at various stages of their migration to Europe. The book is divided into three sections, focusing on migration to Italy from North Africa, migration to Greece and through the Balkans from the middle east, and the migrant camp in Calais known as ‘The Jungle’. Alongside the photography, written texts serve both as a context, and a means to share the stories of the people we met during the project.
The book was created in response to the imagery used in
the media to discuss the issue of migration, which we felt was
sensationalist, alarmist and was not giving people the time and
consideration they deserved. We wanted to approach the subject from a calmer perspective, using medium format portrait photography as a means of meeting the people at the centre of the crisis face to face – and of learning something about their lives.

John Radcliffe Studio is the creative partnership of Thomas Saxby and Daniel Castro Garcia. We specialise in photography, film and graphic design and have spent the last year documenting the refugee and migrant crisis in Europe.

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The Moser Theatre is fully accessible, with access to gender netural toilets, and the event will be **FREE** to attend. Oxford for Dunkirk will be collecting donations before and after the event in aid of La Liniere Refugee Camp, Dunkirk, France: please see our page for more details! (www.facebook.com/oxfordfordunkirk)

BIOMOD (http://biomod.net/) is an annual bionanotechnology competition for undergraduates. Students from all over the world and from many different fields take part. Over the summer, teams design and carry out their own research projects¬, and present them at a ‘jamboree’ in October. Next year’s event will be hosted in San Francisco. Each team designs and builds simple machines and structures out of the basic molecules of life – DNA, RNA and proteins. BIOMOD is a student-driven initiative that offers a complete and authentic scientific experience – from designing a research project to conducting experiments and presenting your work to your peers.

This BIOMOD information session will raise awareness and answer questions about starting a team to represent Oxford University.

Jenny Josephs & Why eating insects might soon become the new normal

By 2050 the global population will reach 9 billion and this will put ever increasing pressure on food and environmental resources. It will be a challenge to ensure global food security without further damaging the environment with intensified farming practices.

One UN backed solution is to focus on alternative sources of protein, such as insects for food and animal feed. About 2 billion of us already include insects in our diets, though it is still a growing trend in the west.

Insects are described as having a variety of different flavours, from mushroomy to pistachio or pork crackling. They are comparable to beef in protein and contain beneficial nutrients like iron and calcium. Their environmental impact is also minimal, requiring far less water and feed than cattle, and releasing fewer emissions.

During this talk, Jenny will explain how insects might replace some of the meat in our diets and also give some tips on how to cook them. You will be invited to sample some tasty bug snacks after the talk!

Bio: After completing a PhD in Visual Cognition at the University of Southampton, Jenny changed course and started The Bug Shack – a business promoting and selling edible insects. Jenny is a regular speaker at Skeptics events and science festivals and she recently returned from a trip to research attitudes towards eating and farming insects in Thailand and Laos.

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7.30PM start at St. Aldates Tavern, and entry is free, although we do suggest a donation of around £3 to cover speaker expenses. We tend to get busy, so arrive early to make sure you get a seat. Come along and say hello! All welcome. http://oxford.skepticsinthepub.org/Event.aspx/8101/Why-eating-insects-might-soon-become-the-new-normal

Join the Facebook event and invite your friends: https://www.facebook.com/events/1317127301666085/

A twenty minute talk to introduce the topic, followed by Q&As and about an hour’s discussion. All welcome.

Einstein’s theory of general relativity is possibly the most perfect intellectual achievement of modern physics. For almost a century now, physicists have been delving into Einstein’s theory, seeking an understanding of the history of the universe, the origin of time, and the evolution of solar systems, stars, and galaxies. Professor of Astrophysics Pedro Ferreira (University of Oxford) will tell us about the expanding universe, black holes and gravitational waves, and how general relativity has allowed scientists’ imaginations to take flight with new possibilities, revealing a universe that is much stranger than anyone ever expected.

This is a free event with no pre-booking required.

British Science Association Oxford Branch
http://www.oxfordscibar.com/
twitter @oxfordscibar
facebook ‘British Science Association Oxford Branch’

This talk will introduce the need for patent protection of ideas and give some of the very basic background and issues that inventors need to be aware of. Examples will be drawn mainly from the areas of ink-jet and 3D printing. There will also be comments and discussion about the way that new technologies develop.

Prof. Peter Dobson OBE was the Founder and Director of Oxford Begbroke Science Park which accommodates new laboratories for Univeristy research groups as well as 24 start-up companies.His research interests cover most aspects of nanotechnology, and embrace biotechnology, environmental technology, energy, and materials science, especially in application to medicine. He was the Strategic Advisor on Nanotechnology to the Research Councils and sits on several EPSRC panels and committees. Currently he is a Principal Fellow at the Warwick Manufacturing Group.

His research led to the creation of three spin-out companies:
Oxonica plc, which specialises in making nanoparticles for a wide range of applications ranging from sunscreens to fuel additive catalysts and bio-labels;
Oxford Biosensors, which make hand-held device based on enzyme-functionalized microelectrode arrays;
Oxford NanoSystems that develops nanocoatings to refine longstanding heat transfer techniques for industrial, transport and electronics platforms.
There will be a networking session after the talk. Light refreshements are served.

RSVP: https://www.facebook.com/events/732600076903276/

Nearly 30 per cent of the world’s population is overweight and ‘diabesity’ is an increasing problem: diabetes, brought on by obesity, which in turn causes damage to the brain, heart, nerve and kidneys. So what can we do to prevent it or is it too late? Join ‘fat controller’ Ashley Grossman, professor of endocrinology, as he discusses potential ground-breaking medical techniques to lose weight effortlessly and what it may mean for the future of the human race. Ashley will be chatting to science broadcaster (and his daughter) Emily Grossman

Lord Browne of Madingley is presently Chairman of L1 Energy, the Chairman of Trustees of both the Tate and the QEII Prize for Engineering, and Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University.

Professor Vlatko Vedral, Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Bio-Inspired Quantum Technologies will explore the possibility of basing quantum technologies on organic molecules, namely using natural systems to support quantum bit for quantum computation.

Guest Speaker: Professor Charles Spence

We all think that we can taste what is on the plate or in the glass, but a growing body of research suggests otherwise. Chefs and restaurateurs are increasingly focusing on ‘off-the-plate’ dining, and the insights gained there are now being applied to enhance the food and drink we experience in the air, in hospitals, and in the home.