Lunch Hour Lectures - Autumn 2011 - Audio UCL

Mammals are characterized by lengthy maternal care, and this has been linked to manifold attributes of this successful and charismatic group that includes our own species. However, living mammals display remarkable diversity in reproduction, from egg-laying monotremes, to pouch-bearing marsupials, to long-gestating placentals. The obvious differences in species numbers, geographic breadth, ecological and anatomical diversity across these three groups begs the question of how much their divergent reproductive strategies are responsible for their success, or lack thereof.

Sir Peter Cook and his CRAB STUDIO have two new University buildings under construction in Austria and Australia. He designs from the experience of more than 40 years' teaching and weaves 'stories' in and out of the designs. The title can also be read as designing the curriculum... which he sees as being very similar to designing a building. The lecture will be illustrated by drawings and cartoons.

Recombinant DNA technology has been in widespread use since the 1980s. It has allowed the engineering of viral genomes to produce a number of safe and useful medicines. To mark World AIDS Day, this lecture will discuss the development of engineered viruses, such as HIV, to treat rare genetic disorders – “gene therapy”- and the use of these engineered viruses as vaccines.

This lecture marks World AIDS day.

There is more to the Sun than meets the eye. Observations from spacecraft have, over the last 50 years, revealed a dynamic and active behaviour to our Sun that cannot be seen from the Earth. Recent reports have given seemingly contradictory information that the Sun is entering a period of high activity but also that in the coming decades the overall solar activity will significantly decline, and could stop altogether. This talk will discuss the science behind this activity, or lack of, and show the latest images of the Sun taken by telescopes in space provided by the European, American and Japanese space agencies.

In this lecture Professor Attanasio will talk about the recent interest in child development in developing countries, through intervention in early years, and will describe a pilot intervention programme that his research team has been developing in Colombia and India. Early years intervention has proved to be very effective in having long lasting impacts on individual development, and this lecture will discuss the challenges of identifying modalities that can be delivered at low cost and therefore scaled up in developing countries, and understanding the mechanisms through which these interventions work.

A hundred and fifty years ago the first shots of the American Civil War were fired. It was a war that was to result in the deaths of perhaps three quarters of a million people. Yet the United States in 1861 was the world's first modern democratic nation - a place in which virtually all white men could vote and in which mass political parties vied for votes in noisy and hotly contested elections. What was the relationship between the coming of the war and this kind of democratic politics? Contrary to the assumptions of International Relations specialists who have posited that democracies do not go to war with one another, was this a war made more likely, and, once it started, more bloody, by the principles and practice of popular sovereignty?

This lecture marks 2011 as 150 year anniversary of American Civil War.