Talks 2023

What really causes the northern lights? Plasma physicist and explorer Dr Melanie Windridge describes an Arctic journey of discovery through Scandinavia, Canada and Svalbard, interweaving the underlying science with background history, folklore and landscape – and spectacular images of the Northern Lights.

Fossil hunters Neville and Sally Hollingworth with the story of their discovery of the remains of five Ice Age mammoths that led to the documentary Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard. They describe too the ancient world in which the mammoths and their hunters lived.

Modelling plankton with origami is surprisingly similar to doing so with scientific computer simulations, says ecologist and origamist Neil Banas - and it can open up fresh approaches to picturing the richness of life in the oceans. Composer and crochet artist Emily Doolittle joins him to explain.

Dr Tom Flett, born 100 years ago, took his PhD at Cambridge under the supervision of one of the greatest mathematicians of the time and went on to become professor of mathematics at Sheffield. But he is better known across Scotland as the co-author with his wife Joan of the classic book Traditional Dancing in Scotland. Their daughters Jane Harrison and Lindsay Smith tell the family story, and mathematician Dr James Cranch from Sheffield University looks at the mathematical background.

It was the world's first grid-connected wind turbine, located at Costa Head to catch the full force of the wind. As the 50s went on, the world's thoughts turned away from wind. But it showed what could be done and led the way for subsequent wind developments in Orkney and elsewhere. Neil Kermode of EMEC looks at its story and significance, while archaeologist Dan Lee traces the clues from the remains.

Join regenerative gardener Elizabeth Woodcock as she takes the latest scientific research and applies it to growing our own food in our own gardens. “The best way to make our gardens more fertile,” she says, “is to restore the teaming web of life, and this in turn sequesters carbon into the soil.”

The genome of human herpesvirus 6 (HHV-6) can integrate into the human genome – and thus be inherited. Prof. Ruth Jarrett’s group at the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research is using DNA sequencing to try to find when and where this has happened in the past - including in Orkney.