Perthshire Society of Natural Science
Environment, Nature and Cultural Heritage.
John Ferguson spoke about his work with the Binn Group on transitioning from seeing plastics as a waste to be discarded in landfill, to a commodity to be banked against potential future uses, keeping the value in circulation for longer.
A video is available on our youtube channel: https://youtu.be/641ry_KMBTY
Last Friday evening, Professor Jennifer Smith from the University of Glasgow presented the findings from the Speak for Yersel project – a series of quizzes investigating how use of Scots words (both overt and covert) and grammatical phrasing are distributed around Scotland, both geographically and broadly by class, and explored its interaction with Gaelic in the north-west Highlands.
A video of the evening is available on our YouTube channel:
The fourth evening in our Curious Minds series is the first of three talks on the subject of Recycling.
Dr Kevin Ross from Impact Solutions spoke about various kinds of plastic, how readily they can be recycled, how well they are recycled, the environmental consequences of (not) recycling, the value of plastic products as part of their lifecycles and external factors such as the international trading of waste. Whew!
A video of the evening can be found on our YouTube channel:
Last night’s Curious Minds talk was a cracker!
Professor Alessio Ciulli runs one of the biggest and highest profile research teams in Dundee. He is a world leader in the field of Targeted Protein Degradation – a way to encourage a cell’s natural garbage-disposal mechanisms to remove rogue proteins.
TPD is a breakthrough method that has enabled the development of multiple new drugs for treating some of the most intractable cancers and other diseases. More than 30 drugs are currently in the approval pipeline with many more promised – and many are based on the Ciulli group’s work in Dundee.
A video of the evening is available on our YouTube channel:
For the second talk in our Curious Minds lecture series, Dr Brendan Gabriel from the University of Aberdeen spoke about the effects of circadian rhythms on metabolic disorders especially diabetes, including how disruptions such as shift work affect health.
A video of the evening can be seen on our YouTube channel:
For the last meeting in this PSNS season, Laura Brown, curator of the collection, gave us a guided tour of the photographs available – somewhere between 1.6 and 1.8 million photos(!), some dating back to the earliest days of photography in the late 1830s.
Unfortunately, due to technical issues, a video of the evening will not be available. However, the live link at which the collection can be viewed is: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/collections/
Professor Mark Harris, director of the Ian Ramsey Centre at the University of Oxford, is both a physicist by training and an ordained Anglican priest. He spoke about the ways the relationship between science and religion and theology can be seen – from outright conflict (which is bigger than the other?) through independence to a dialogue and more.
The video of his talk is available on Youtube:
For this year’s McAlpine Lecture, Professor James Curran (visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde, amongst many other positions held including former chair of SEPA) spoke to us about the state of climate change.
From problems – CO2 emissions leading to global warming, biodiversity loss, extreme weather events and more – to how our perception of the solutions should change, understanding Sustainable Development of the environment supporting society and the the (circular) economy.
The video can be seen on our Youtube channel:
