Making planets & Lasers fighting cancer

The creation of a planet starts with a dust grain, millions of years and a dream. We follow the journey of dust from the death of a star to the ground beneath your favourite bar using some of the most advanced telescope arrays currently in operation. Further to this, we will discuss the potential challenges of planet formation through protostellar jets and winds using the James Webb Space Telescope. Sit down, sup up and enjoy the dusty journey.

Can we grow human organs in a lab? Before a cancer drug is given to patients in a clinical trial, it must pass ‘preclinical’ testing. Normally, this requires use of animals. With therapies relying on human biological information, animal testing is progressively less useful. We need more advanced test systems made from human cells known as organ-on-chips, allowing to grow human organs in the lab! Join us to learn how we are developing a vascular model to test anti-cancer drugs which travel through the bloodstream.

Laser light is bright, coherent, and of a very specific colour. Light is made of photons, elementary particles that can interact with matter. All molecules vibrate at specific frequencies. When a photon interacts with a vibrating molecule, it’s colour changes even so slightly by what we call the “Raman effect”. By using some clever physics, we can use this to determine the composition of anything just by shinning a laser light onto it. Join us to learn a little bit more about vibrations, lasers, and the exciting applications of this in cancer research.