Earlier this month Professor Liane Benning presented a talk on life in extreme environments at Leeds Skeptics.
This collided with two unfortunate events. Firstly, due to the rare day of hot sunny weather, turn out was down. Second, due to time commitments I had not brought the video camera to record the talk as it takes a long time to process, edit and publish it. These were both big mistakes as Professor Benning presented one of the most interesting talks we have had.
It turns out that she has spent much of the last decade going to Svalbard and testing Mars rovers for NASA and ESA. Officially she is a biogeochemist and moved effortlessly between different scientific disciplines. By the end of the talk I was sitting there feeling like I had wasted my life while GabrielÄ— was trying to sign up to go on the next expedition.
I know Headingley Cafe Scientifique were trying to poach her to speak at their group too. if they do book her and you have not seen the talk, I highly recommend attending!
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Tags: biogeochemistry, Leeds Skeptics, Life, mars rover, space, space exploration, svalbard
This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2014 at 10:11 am and is filed under Foundation, Humanism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.