Dr Carrie Soderman works in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge. Her research investigates how the geochemistry of volcanic rocks links to the processes that are involved in their formation, from their melt source regions in the Earth’s mantle through to transport and crystallisation on their way to the surface. Her PhD work focussed on the application of a relatively new field of high temperature isotope geochemistry, specifically isotopes of elements such as Fe and Mg. These isotopic compositions in volcanic rocks can be used to characterise the presence of recycled crust in the mantle that the volcanic rocks are derived from. Her work ties together modelling the behaviour of these isotopes in the mantle, isotope data collected from rocks from volcanic hotspots such as the Galápagos, and experiments to recreate mantle melting processes at the Earth’s surface.
As part of her fellowship research, Carrie is also applying the same combined modelling and natural data approach to understand the behaviour of rare earth elements in alkaline-silicate rocks. Rare earth elements, which will become vital over the next decades for use in clean energy technologies, are often found in high concentrations in these alkaline volcanic systems, but the processes that lead to their enrichment, from mantle source to crystallisation, are often poorly understood. The application of the modelling approach used during her PhD will allow for investigation of the effects of pressure, temperature, geological setting and magma composition on the behaviour of elements in alkaline-silicate volcanic rocks.
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Dementia is a topic of considerable public interest. How empirical evidence has contributed to this societal awareness and indeed fear will be covered in this talk. It will span research from the 1980s when not much was understood about dementia up to contemporary perspectives. The focus will be on the epidemiological and public health evidence base, and how this relates to the results published from clinical and lab based research. The findings from UK and other high income countries of reduced age specific prevalence (%) will be explored, and the implications of results from brain based studies that dementia is not inevitable in the presence of ‘alzheimer’ type changes. The role of inequalities, risk varying across countries and time and our knowledge about protective factors have strengthened during recent years, and the balance of high risk with whole population approaches to reducing risk for society will be considered.
One of the many outstanding achievements of G I Taylor was the discovery of relatively simple statistical laws that apply to highly complex turbulent flows. The emergence of simple laws from complexity is well known in other branches of physics, for example the emergence of the laws of heat conduction from molecular dynamics. Complexity can also arise at large scales, and the structural vibration of an aircraft or a car can be a surprisingly difficult phenomenon to analyse, partly because millions of degrees of freedom may be involved, and partly because the vibration can be extremely sensitive to small changes or imperfections in the system. In this talk it is shown that the prediction of vibration levels can be much simplified by the derivation and exploitation of emergent laws, analogous to some extent to the heat conduction equations, but with an added statistical aspect, as in turbulent flow. The emergent laws are discussed and their application to the design of aerospace, marine, and automotive structures is described. As an aside it will be shown that the same emergent theory can be applied to a range of problems involving electromagnetic fields.
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