Dear All,

Today I was expecting talks on food but was most inspired by the talk ‘Snake Bites’. The talk was introduced by Mark Maslin (UCL Department of Geography) and in doing so he let it be known that he had helped to choose the speaker, David Warrell.

‘Snake Bites’ was paradoxical in nature as the snake is full of contradictions. It is on the one hand a beautiful creature admired and even venerated by some and yet causes a strong and sometimes irrational fear in others.
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Dear All,

My first Cheltenham festival day of lectures seemed full of fears for the future. Mark Maslin (head of the Department of Geography at UCL) chaired ‘The Limits of Our Planet’ and the closely related ‘Acid Acidification’, and then Andrea Sella (UCL Department of Chemistry) was the experimental star of ‘Endangered Elements.’

‘The Limits of our Planet’ highlighted that we have already passed the sustainable limit of our planet in terms of the rate of biodiversity loss, climate change and the nitrogen cycle. More than 100 species for every million become extinct at the moment, which in my mind is 100 above the ‘acceptable level’, but the experts have put the ‘acceptable level’ at 10. Climate change was measured on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which gets enough media attention for everyone to know that it needs reducing. The nitrogen cycle is less well known and the amount of nitrogen that humans take out of the atmosphere to use as fertiliser is at 121 million tonnes per year compared to the sustainable level of 35.

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Hi everyone, my name is Andrea Pochylova and I am MA student of Politics and Security at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies at UCL. As a politics student I am most interested in inequality between people.

You may think what is a politics student doing at Cheltenham Science Festival? I have to tell you, I am quite excited to explore completely new academic fields closely. I am intrigued to learn more about migration, and the ageing  population as well as to understand how young minds work, a lecture by UCL neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore. I am especially looking forward to the laughter workshop.

I am glad to see I am not the only first time blogger and I will do my best to share my Cheltenham experience from a little different (not exactly scientific) perspective.

Looking forward to share my foray into science world.

Hi, I’m Jenny, a first-year PhD student in the UCL Energy Institute, and I’ll be blogging from the Cheltenham Science festival in the next few days.

I’m looking forward to the Cheltenham science festival because the people presenting are trained to adapt their subject to whatever audience happens to present itself before them. It won’t be patronising, it won’t be a repeat of what people learned at school; it’ll be up-to-date research.

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