So... will we get to see a comet this week?

Hello, friends!

Quite the bumper crop of talks and events this week, including a live rocket launch, a once-in-80,000-years comet, and a science cabaret. Let’s go!

🍿 online lectures and events 🐧

NB: All times are BST.

Tuesday 8 October

Ada Lovelace Day Live!, hybrid event by the Royal Institution, 19.30, pay what you can: The annual science cabaret in honour of Ada Lovelace, often recognised as the first ever computer programmer, returns with a line-up of women in STEM sharing their leading-edge research. We’ll find out where the maths is in fashion, whether radioactivity can cure cancer, and why cats are evolutionarily perfect.

The psychology of cats, hybrid event by Seed Talks, 19.30, from £11.12: Speaking of cats, in this talk vet Dr Jon Bowen invites us to peer into the mind of the feline (😱), discussing why they go from attention seekers to aloof posers, how they manipulate us, and where they go when they leave the house.

Wednesday 9 October

Much ado about numbers: Shakespeare’s mathematical life and times, hybrid event by Gresham College, 18.00, free: Rob Eastaway explores the surprising ways Elizabethan mathematical innovations turn up in the works of Shakespeare, showing that the playwright was as creative with numbers as he was with words.

Thursday 10 October

The science of why we exist, online talk by the University of Oxford’s Department of Biology, 15.30, free: Come with us now as zoology professor Tim Coulson takes us on a 13.8-billion-year journey through time, culminating in evolution of the human mind.

NASA’s Europa Clipper launch, stream starts 16.30, liftoff slated for 17.31 BST, free: The Europa Clipper spacecraft is due to start its journey to Jupiter’s icy moon, and NASA invites you to see it off. See their live event from last week for a discussion of whether Europa could support life.

How medicines can be tailored to African populations, online event by the Royal Society, 18.30, free: Professor Kelly Chibale describes efforts to develop medicine discovery in Africa, and R&D approaches to tailoring medicines to historically neglected African populations.

Plants and medicine, online talk by Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum, 19.00, free: Professor Julie Hawkins discusses how methods from evolutionary biology have helped us understand the different ways people have used plants as medicine across different times and cultures.

🔭 in a sky near you… ☄️

Comet alert: Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) will make its closest approach to Earth on Saturday (12 October), but we might be out of luck in UK latitudes when it comes to getting a live look.

HOWEVER the friendly folk at the Virtual Telescope Project will be livestreaming their observation from Italy tomorrow (Wednesday) from 6pm. Tune in for a chance at a glimpse of this newly discovered comet, which data suggests orbits the Sun just once every 80,000 years.

Track the comet’s live location on The Sky Live (which is set to a view from Greenwich by default, but can be changed to your specific position on Earth).

👀 closer to Earth 🦢

See if you can spot several swans-a-scramming(?) as it’s migration season. About this time of year, Bewick’s and whooper swans start flying south to winter in the UK. (Resident mute swans – the bruisers hanging at your local pond – tend to stay at home all year round.)

Their aerial calls are quite different from the sounds they make on the ground – blogger Bug Woman has collated a few in this post.

Birds fly in a V-formation to save energy. When large birds, like swans and geese, flap their wings, they create a vortex of air – the air under the wing moves down, while the air at the wingtip moves up. The next bird back takes advantage of this lift.

🤔 until next week…

What, logically, should come next in the following sequence?

cells in a protozoan, legs on an arachnid, percentage of the Universe that comprises dark matter (to the nearest whole number. And I’m fine with you looking this up)

Answer comes next week. See you then! x