Tackling Oddities: Drugs and Space

The ability to detect abnormalities that will lead to cancer or other fatal diseases at the cellular level is incredibly important. Additionally, being able to then selectively kill off those cells without causing collateral damage will be a tremendous advancement.This talk will introduce gold nanoparticles functionalised with a shell of synthetic DNA strands as new potential agents for simultaneously detecting abnormal changes in cells in combination with highly targeted drug delivery.

Hurricanes can be deadly, especially when they make landfall. Predicting “where” and “how hard” they will hit can save lives, but too often we still get the “how hard” prediction wrong. However there is something that can help us improve these predictions, something that it is used everyday for a completely different purpose, and that is the sat-nav system. Maria Paola will tell you all about how NASA embraced the idea and turned it into a constellation of small satellites, which uses sat-nav signals to tell us more about how an hurricane evolves and how strong it will be when it touches land.

We are all familiar with the periodic going up and down of the sea due to tides, but we would expect its average level to stay constant. Instead, its global mean is increasing by 3 mm per year—due to climate change. While this may not sound as much, when we look at future projections of sea level rise we realise that it is one of the biggest problems for our society. In this talk I will discuss why sea level is changing and how we can measure it from space. I will also say why we must act now to mitigate this problem.