Seagulls are not picky eaters

Hello, friends!

In case you’ve not seen it yet, I recommend spending some time with the citizen science project Gulls Eating Stuff. The data set provides a colourful record of the gullsters munching their way through all the food groups, including beach scran, bread, and vomit. (HT BL!)

Now I’ve whet your appetite, let’s see what’s on this week! We’ve got talks on:

• 🧠 how brains can inspire more efficient AI

• 🍌 what bananas have to do with the fabric of spacetime

• 🌕 a lunar landing… live!

Let’s go!

🍿 online talks and events 🐧

All times are GMT.

Monday 24 February

A scientist’s guide to health, ageing and death, hybrid event by the Royal Institution, 19.00, free: Could we live forever? To work that out, we have to understand what happens when we age. Immunologist John Tregoning talks us through the ways things go wrong in our bodies, and shares the results of his “slightly ill-advised self-experimentation” in pursuit of a longer life.

The road to zero carbon cement, hybrid lecture by the Cambridge Society for the Application of Research, 19.30, free: Did you know that every week, we use enough concrete to build an area the size of Paris? This is massively polluting – concrete making accounts for 8% of global emissions. Dr Cyrille Dunant discusses his technology that aims to make cement and concrete construction more circular.

Tuesday 25 February

Metamaterials, invisibility and perfect lenses: a new world for electromagnetism, hybrid lecture by Imperial College London, 17.30, free: Metamaterials have remarkable properties not seen in nature, which could let us create new technologies in 5G/6G, advance biological imaging, even let us create Hawking radiation in the lab. Sir John Pendry talks us through the latest research in the area.

Data: A love story for the ages, hybrid lecture at Gresham College, 18.00, free: Data the “new oil”? Pah! It’s far more useful than that. Over the centuries, it’s let us hold on to knowledge and make sense of the world, through maps, databases and taxonomies. Professor Victoria Baines tells its (love) story.

Wednesday 26 February

Botanical University Challenge, 14.00, free: It’s time for the quarter finals of Botanical University Challenge! In case you’ve taped it to watch later, no spoilers here, just a few more of those brilliant team names: The Fun-guys (University of Reading), HOT TO GROW! (Trinity Dublin), Vine and Dandy (University of Salford), and Taxon, Taxoff (Aberdeen).

How physics made AI possible, and how it can make it more efficient, hybrid lecture by Imperial College London, 17.30, free: AI is hugely power-hungry – data centres consume 3% of global energy output, and this is climbing. But we know of a far more energy efficient data cruncher: the brain. Physics professor Will Branford explores the potential of a brain-inspired systems in this lecture.

The biggest cosmic map, hybrid lecture by Gresham College, 19.00, free: For more than 10 years now, the European Space Agency’s Gaia has been creating a 3D map of almost 2 billion objects in the Milky Way and beyond in exquisite detail. Professor Chris Lintott outlines the new and dynamic history of our galaxy provided by Gaia, and what’s to come.

Thursday 27 February

Giant bananas spinning in space: A beginner’s guide to gravitational waves, virtual lecture by the Royal Observatory Greenwich, 18.00, free: LIGO detected gravitational waves for the first time in 2015, 100 years after Einstein predicted these ripples through the fabric of spacetime. Dr Deepali Lodhia of the UK Space Agency talks us through these phenomena, including what they are, how we detected them, and what they can tell us.

Friday 28 February

Ramadan moonsighting live, online event by the Royal Observatory Greenwich, 17.45, free: Join the observatory and the New Crescent Society as they search for a glimpse of the new crescent Moon, which marks the start of the holy month of Ramadan. New Crescent Society’s Imad Ahmed and Royal Observatory astronomer Jake Foster will discuss the links between astronomy and Islam in this live show.

Do we have a standard model of cosmology?, hybrid event by the Royal Institution, 19.20, from £5: We’ve meticulously defined the standard model of cosmology – comprising inflation, cold dark matter and dark energy – using data from the Planck satellite. But do we fundamentally understand this model yet? Cosmologist George Efstathiou looks at how the field of cosmology has transformed in recent decades, and whether we’ll see a paradigm shift in the next few years.

Saturday 1 March

SPHEREx and PUNCH launch, official NASA broadcast, 02.15, free: (Bit of an early/late one, I know, but I’m given to understand people stay up for the Super Bowl and stuff, and that doesn’t even have rockets in it.) Tune in to watch the launch of NASA’s SPHEREx, which will create a 3D map of the sky in 102 colours, and PUNCH, which will observe the Sun.

Sunday 2 March

Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 1 lunar landing, official NASA broadcast, 07.30, free: NASA invites us to watch the Blue Ghost lander touch down on the Moon for the first time. Blue Ghost will be dropping off 10 experiments and demonstrations to help us learn more about the lunar environment before we start sending astronauts again.

An Evening of Unnecessary Detail, hybrid event by the Royal Institution, 19.00, from £5: The cabaret of nerdery is back. On the guest line up we’ll have climate scientist Sammie Buzzard, who’ll be busting some myths about penguin wee, mathematician Aoife Hunt, who’ll be taking us through her research on the maths of crowd movement, and physicist Robin Hayward, who’ll tell us what happens when animals meet particle accelerators… in song.

🔭 in a sky near you…

Views from KFS HQ, London. See Stellarium for a personalised view of your night sky after setting your location and time.

📐 Trace out the Winter Triangle: When looking up this week, see if you can find the Winter Triangle. It’s an almost equilateral triangle marked out by three of the brightest stars in the night sky: Betelgeuse (the orange star in the constellation Orion), Procyon (of Canis Minor) and Sirius (of Canis Major, the brightest night sky star, which we spotted last week).

Look to the southern sky at about 8pm and find the three stars that make up Orion’s belt. You’ll find Betelgeuse just a little above. That’s one. Then trace the belt down to Sirius, a good handspan away (at arm’s length). That’s two. Find Procyon by following the top two stars of Orion, Betelgeuse and Bellatrix, off to the left and slightly down. Triangle complete.

The Winter Triangle is only visible in these here latitudes from December to April – by then, it will have dipped beneath the horizon.

👀 closer to Earth

🌼 Lorra lorra daffs: They’re here! They’re here! (At least where I am.) Just in time for St David’s Day on Saturday, look out for the most cheerful of spring harbingers: the daffodil.

And keep your eyes peeled for unusual varieties – earlier this month, Plant Heritage and the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) asked for the public’s help finding the rare and missing daffodil varieties at risk of being lost to history and science.

Lost varieties include the Sussex Bonfire, which hasn’t been seen for at least 20 years, the Mrs R O Backhouse, which has a salmon-pink trumpet, and the Mrs William Copeland, which looks like a burst of white tissues emerging from a nana’s sleeve.

RHS scientist Dr Kálmán Könyves has said that mapping where which daffs grow will help us work out how they’re responding to climate change.

💫 we need answers

Last week I asked:

The answer is… “something”. The supercomputer is Deep Blue, which beat chess world champion Garry Kasparov at his own game for the first time in 1996. Add “something” and you get Deep Blue Something, whose Breakfast at Tiffany’s tore up the UK charts in the same year. (And is going to be in my head for the rest of the day now.)

🤔 until next week…

Here’s another one from the archives:

What everyday object comprises elements including a glass globe, argon gas and a length of tungsten?

Answer comes next week. See you then! x