Water as a weapon against climate change

We need new technologies that rely on renewable sources of energy to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Inspired by how plants use sunlight to make sugars through photosynthesis, scientists are developing artificial materials that can use sunlight to convert water into hydrogen fuel, which burns cleanly without releasing any carbon dioxide, just water. In this talk, we will discover the latest and most exciting achievements in this field, and how we are getting closer to economically viable devices.

Marine currents are a natural and powerful phenomenon. Amongst other things, they work to thermo-regulate the Earth and as such have a big role to play in slowing global warming. Oceanographers at Imperial are looking at changes in human-generated radioactivity in the ocean, working to unveil the precise pathways of ocean circulation by measuring single atoms and simulating the nuclear bomb fallout.

Our research focuses on solar cells; trying to identify materials other than silicon that can be used to mass-produce cheap and efficient solar cells, so that we can then rapidly ramp up production and directly compete with the fossil fuel market. I'll talk about the biggest challenges currently facing this field, and how we're using massive supercomputers (a million times more powerful than a desktop computer) and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques to solve them.