• 18:00 - 19:00
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre

The sensation of pain is one which nearly everyone is familiar with, usually being considered an unpleasant experience. Wouldn’t a life without pain be better? Drawing on human genetics and the wider animal kingdom, we shall see that there are in fact benefits to pain, or rather nociception, the neural process encoding noxious stimuli. Pain is not however static. For example, following an accident, the injured part of the body becomes more sensitive, a phenomenon that usually resolves as the injury heals. Understanding the molecular processes by which pain functions and how the sensitivity in the system changes under different conditions is important for the development of novel therapeutics to treat the chronic pain, such as that associated with osteoarthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, endometriosis, and a wealth of other conditions. Looking to potential new therapeutic avenues, we will discuss what can be learned from studying human genetics and extremophile organisms, such as the naked mole-rat, as well what the future holds regard gene- and cell-based therapy.

• 18:00 - 19:00
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre

By using telescopes to look deep into space, we can see back in time. I will talk about our quest to understand the history of the universe, and find out properties such as its ingredients and age. I’ll describe a conundrum facing astronomers today: our community’s two methods of measuring the rate that space is growing, and the age of the universe, don’t agree. Have we got something wrong in our understanding of the universe? I will describe our team's contribution to answering this question, using telescopes high in the Chilean desert tuned to measure millimetre-wavelength light coming from the earliest moments in time. By surveying half the sky every couple of days, we also hope to see new types of astronomical events in distant parts of the universe.