Hidden Planet Earth

Douglas Adams (creator of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - in all its forms - and author of the Dirk Gently books) was responsible for many ideas which have entered the popular consciousness, such as the Babel Fish, Vogon poetry and that the Meaning of Life is 42. In his fiction he played with many ideas around how evolution works, and how we should view it. This talk explores the intersection between Douglas Adams’s ideas and evolution in deep time, a field which relies on evidence from the fossil record and molecular biology.

Conservation practices and fisheries management are usually strange bedfellows. However, as I will discuss, there is an increasing global push to develop conservation planning that is inherently aligned with resource management – in this respect the uses of traditional management or co-management practices are becoming more de-rigueur within the conservation world. Such practices strive to work with traditional owners, building strong community partnerships to manage and sustain vital coral reef fish resources.

I work on microbes that eat carbon monoxide to provide energy and carbon. This not only reflects the biochemistry of how life has started 4 billion years ago but is used to make  biofuel from industrial waste gas, turning waste into valuable products.  As microbes they are very much hidden to our eyes and due to their special energy needs, were for a very long time hidden to us scientist and have only fairly recently been discovered