Pint of Science Taster

Chosen as ‘Breakthrough of the Year’ by Science Magazine in 2013, cancer immunotherapy has become a hot topic inside and outside of the scientific community. Utilizing different aspects of the body’s immune system, various therapeutic drugs have now been FDA approved for a wide range of cancers and continue to gain momentum. This talk will encompass a brief history of immunotherapy in cancer leading up to a few examples currently in the clinic and trials.

Maxwell’s theory describes how electrically charged particles create and interact with electromagnetic fields. But there is no mention of magnetically charged particles, or monopoles, nor have they ever been observed.
In the search for monopoles, a whole new model has been developed. It includes a parameter related to the particle’s magnetic moment, a characteristic showing how the monopole behaves in the presence of electric and magnetic fields. This gives experiments such as the MoEDAL at CERN a new tool in their searches for the mystery particle.

Blowflies are marvellous pilots that are good at flight manoeuvre, especially, collision avoidance. They heavily rely on visual inputs to control their flight motor outputs. We’ve developed a recording platform on a two-wheeled robot which can collect visual neural signal, e.g. from H1-cell, while the blowfly was moving. We’ve learnt that the H1-cell is able to process optic flow information generated from rotation and translation combined for estimating wall distance. A brain-machine interface was built for the blowfly to drive a robot in performing collision avoidance.