Posts Tagged ‘Life’

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!

Dr John Baruch spoke at Leeds Skeptics a few years ago and I found the talk both enjoyable and fascinating. Therefore I asked him to give a similar talk at West Yorkshire Humanists and earlier this month he obliged. The evening saw double the turnout we had in February.

The latest meeting of Leeds Skeptics saw Dr Bruce Turnbull from the School of Chemistry at the University of Leeds present a talk on “Synthetic Biology – A Brave New World?” It was an incredibly informative talk that offered a peak into one of the most exciting areas of science at the moment. Not one to be missed if you get another opportunity to see it!

Earlier this year we announced the creation of a new fund designed to support public of understanding of science. The idea was to provide funding for an annual lecture on such a topic, hosted by a local group. The first of which took place this Tuesday at the University of Leeds.

Hosted by, Leeds Atheist Society, the first annual Worfolk Lecture was presented by Dr Terrence Kee on the subject of “did life on Earth originate on Earth?”

Dr Kee delivered a fascinating talk, discussing just how resilient and hardy some bacteria are – some can survive extreme cold (such as space), some can survive extreme heat (such as entry into an atmosphere), some can take being crushed, some can survive exposure to high levels of radiation – it’s very, very hard to kill some bacteria! it is therefore conceivable that some may have traveled through space in meteors before making this planet their home.

Much discussion was provoked with almost an hour of questions and answers taking place after the talk – not one to have missed! You can see more photos from the event on our Facebook page.

Having done a lot of this over the years it seems somewhat tearful to think that this could well be my last blog from DEC-10. It’s been like a home to many of us, particularly those of us who have spent more time in here than our actual homes (I wish I was joking lol).

While my room is very noisy with the hum of computers and climate control devices I’ll miss the quiet hum of DEC-10, the endless late nights we spend in here coding. I hadn’t really been dwelling on the idea of one chapter coming to a close and another beginning but sitting here is really making me think. And we all know that is a bad road to go down :P.

Having finished my FYP I was hoping I could relax a little. But instead I find my timetable full because I’m having to trail everywhere and re-arrange my timetable so I can do all these job interviews.

And the constant phone calls from recruitment companies. I mean, every week, usually multiple times a week.

Meanwhile there is a lot of stress in trying to throw together film nights so I can relax in front of my huge wall size screen with my 600w sound system.

Not to mention the number of neck turns I have to make when looking at all three of my different monitors. And keeping my 12 computers and servers patched up is just a mission.

And deciding what car to buy, in cash. What a headache.

Yep, life is hard.