Lunch Hour Lectures - Spring 2008 - Audio UCL

Between the early 1980s and the late 1990s, syphilis had essentially been eradicated in the UK. There is now an outbreak of syphilis with more diagnoses each year than at any time since the 1940s. This lecture will outline the nature of syphilis and its importance. Why is syphilis still so common worldwide when it is easy to diagnose and cure? How was syphilis eradicated in the UK? Why did it return and what does this say about the sexual health of the UK?

Cancer of the mouth and face affects our swallowing, our speech and more importantly our self-perception and self-esteem. Therefore, reconstructive surgery of the mouth and face touches on the deepest human feelings about identity. The surgery offers the promise of allowing patients to eat, drink and communicate again through the wide variety of facial expressions and mannerisms that most people take for granted. In a ten-hour procedure, the patient’s cancer will be removed, and a new facial “flap” will be attached to the recipient’s blood vessels and nerves. The tissues are matched for colour and type and function. In the procedure the patient’s compliance and contribution to recovery is as important as the surgery itself.

To even suggest there are sex differences in cognitive abilities is anathema to many. Academics have been sacked for suggesting that there may be group differences in general or specific intelligence. This paper examines estimated intelligence showing evidence from 25 studies in as many countries, that females tend to give significantly lower estimates than males, around five IQ points. This coincides with current estimates of the actual difference in IQ scores. The many implications of this research area will be explained.

Not all colours in nature originate from pigments. Colour can also emerge if the microstructure of a material is fashioned into an optical diffraction grating. In nanotechnology, this capability of ‘structural colour’ is now within our grasp, and it is easy to imagine how it can be intelligently integrated into jewellery and artwork, vehicles and buildings. Beyond ‘static’ structural colour is a ‘dynamic’ form that could enable a full colour display where one material provides an infinite range of colours, security devices for identification and authentification, and military vehicles with active camouflage. Opportunities for intelligent colour are truly boundless.

Several space missions of planetary exploration are currently underway, including Venus Express and Mars Express to our planetary neighbours and Cassini-Huygens to Saturn. In this talk, we will look at some of the results from these missions. Remarkably, these distant bodies can also tell us more about our own planet. Will the greenhouse effect run away here as it has at Venus, or might severe climate change happen as at Mars? Does Titan really show us what prebiotic Earth was like? We will also look at possible future space missions to these bodies.

The lecture looks at how cells in emerging multicellular organisms have evolved ways of communicating with each other. The basic ‘yes’ and ‘no’ signalling was probably mediated by release into the extracellular space of substances which were available in abundance inside the cells – purine nucleotide ATP (molecule charged with energy – excitatory Yang) and its breakdown product adenosine (molecule devoid of energy – inhibitory Yin). The lecture will use examples from current research demonstrating how this dual system of conveying information from one cell to another has been preserved during evolution. Both substances are important modulators of cellular functions still playing often opposing roles in the peripheral tissues as well as in the central nervous system.