Earth, A Rescue Mission: Saving Our Home

For the last 50 years or so, we have been manufacturing, using and throwing away ever-increasing amounts of plastic materials. Low cost and easy access to these “wonder materials” has lured us into a mindset of careless use and disposal. Concern has been increasing about the environmental impact of this behavior. In particular, there is rapidly-increasing awareness of the threat caused by small microplastic particles. These tiny pieces of plastic come from a wide variety of sources and our planet is probably irreversibly contaminated with them. Should we be worried?

Fuels are everywhere in modern societies: cooking, heating and transport all use fuels and much of our electricity supply comes ultimately from consuming fuels too. The problems of supplying this ever-increasing demand with fossil fuel is common knowledge, so the real question is therefore not 'if' we replace fossil fuels, 'but how we do it?'
To understand the challenges, we need to think about what a fuel really is, what chemistry we can do to create them and where the energy for these new fuels will come from

Volcano eruptions and earthquakes are natural phenomena that quite literally shake our entire world when they hit. By monitoring and studying when, how and why these incidences occur we can begin to predict for future scenarios so that we are better prepared, so we can engineer our buildings better and so we can understand more about the planet we live on. Jessica’s talk delves in to this subject in an accessible and non-scientist friendly way