Soil regeneration is the theme of Prof. Karen Johnson’s opening talk in the 2021 Orkney International Science Festival. Since industrialisation, two-thirds of all global greenhouse gas emissions have come from fossil fuels. And remarkably, the other third has come from the land. ...

Blocks of seabed leased for offshore wind represent a massive proportion of the UK’s future electricity demand, with some 19 GW (around one-fifth of current demand) within 100 kilometres of Orkney harbours. Could Orkney become a service base for the new offshore wind ...

Speakers bring the latest news from pioneering projects that are opening possible ways to decarbonise Orkney’s ferries and planes. We’ll hear how Kirkwall airport is being used as a testbed for low-carbon flight alternatives, and on the progress of plans to trial hydrogen technology on MV Shapinsay.

The so-called Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918/19 infected around a third of the world’s population in four lethal waves. Many people thought there was little that could – or should – be done to prevent it. Manchester’s Medical Officer thought differently.

Have you ever wondered how bees carry pollen back to a hive? Or how their wings work together to enable them to fly? We need to take a closer look to explore these and other aspects of the fascinating lives of these amazing insects! See them live, and close ...

Technology has enabled the mass media to homogenise our world, with older languages pushed to the margins. But there is growing recognition of the richness of culture and tradition and worldview that a language contains, and next year will see the start of the UN’s Decade of Indigenous Languages. And in some places technology is ...

Remnants of a square tower and ramparts are all that survive of Cubbie Roo’s Castle on Wyre, with the name linked to a legendary giant and to a figure in 12th-century Norse Orkney, Kolbein Hruga. The search for his origins reveals a picture of the wealth and power of Norse Orkney, and insights into Sweyn Asleifsson, and clues to the ancestry of the Flett family of today.

Rising sea levels with coastal flooding and population movements inland, over-exploitation of resources like water and biomass, increasing pollution and sediment discharge … How do we cope? Look for nature-based solutions, says Roger Crofts, see the coast as part of a bigger system and plan holistically ...

The Atlantic voyage from Stromness, plus the harsh environment, could cause serious health problems, such as scurvy, for Hudson’s Bay Company workers. They had doctors and apothecary chests but, as Dr Winona Wheeler of the University of Saskatchewan ...

It’s 100 years since a Scotswoman with a love of Orkney went to teach English in the then recently established University of Ljubljana in modern Slovenia. She was Fanny Copeland, daughter of Scotland’s 3rd Astronomer Royal. Her visits to Orkney ...

Schooners, brigantines and barques, and the clippers which could reach speeds of over 17 knots – the tall ships sailed the world’s oceans, carrying cargoes from one continent to another, the fastest of them sometimes covering several hundred miles in a day.

John Hedges transformed our view of Orcadian prehistory. His discoveries of buildings around the broch at Howe led to a much wider understanding of Iron Age Orkney. His work, together with more recent work on brochs in Orkney and Shetland is described by archaeologist Dr Beverley Ballin Smith.

Born 300 years ago in Kirkwall, Robbie Strang loved to draw and dreamed of going to sea, and went to the grammar school, where the master was Murdoch Mackenzie, later to become the great mapmaker. Then came apprenticeship to an engraver in Edinburgh, and a romance which led to him joining the army of Bonnie Prince Charlie and etching a plate ...

The great Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who established the nature of light and laid the foundations for much of modern physics, came from a glitteringly talented family. His great-great-grandfather was Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, lawyer and judge, architect and landscape gardener, and accomplished composer ...

James Clerk Maxwell’s discovery of the nature of light led to radio waves and modern telecommunications as well as laying the foundations for much of modern physics. It was on Maxwell’s new foundations that Einstein rebuilt Newton’s work on motion, and the three are widely regarded together as the greatest physicists of all time. ...

Can public bodies cope with the biggest challenges of today? Yes they can, says Prof. Iain MacLeod of the Institution of Engineers in Scotland, if they put in place an ethos of critical thinking – constantly challenging and revising proposed solutions and approaches. He gives examples of organisational ...

With the signs of global warming ever more evident and little international agreement on action, the time has come, says Prof. Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University, to switch to a new approach – to develop technology to remove the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide ...

Humans have been keeping track of time for millennia, to regulate aspects of daily life. Prof. Helen Margolis of the UK National Physical Laboratory looks at how we reached the era of atomic timekeeping and what technological advances this has ...

Prof. Björn Kurtén, who died in 1988, was one of the world’s finest evolutionary paleontologists. In his native Finland, a country with almost no fossils, he created a paleontology tradition. He studied the great Ice Age mammals, the mammoth and the bison, the sabre-toothed tiger and the cave bear, and he built a picture of their origins and patterns ...

Live from the Inverness darkroom: a demonstration of the early photographic process – the Cyanotype. The process involves placing objects on paper soaked with iron-based chemicals, for gradual exposure in the sun’s ...

In this centenary of the birth of George Mackay Brown, whose father was a postman in Stromness, Prof. Tom Stevenson, whose mother ran the Quoyloo Post Office for fifty years, looks at the history of the postal service in Orkney. He tells of the early days of the Penny Black and Twopenny Blue stamps, the development ...

The development of heat engines in the 19th century brought the concept of energy to the fore. It effected changes in the states of matter – solid, liquid and gas – breaking down the ordered solid states into the more disordered states of liquids and gases. The idea developed of entropy – a measure of disorder – as a core concept, ...

Bowhead whales travel thousands of miles every spring to feed on the rich plankton concentrations of Disko Bay, West Greenland. But why do the plankton concentrate there, and what does Arctic ice melt mean for their future? Dr Neil Banas of Strathclyde University ...

It matters where whisky is made: distilleries highlight the influence of local climate, sea air, soil and terrain. But at the heart of the production process are the cells of yeast, which at the start would have been wild yeasts appearing naturally. Could they too have an effect on flavour and aroma? And could that give ...