Dr Giorgia Busso talks about her work on the Gaia Mission at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge.
Dr Giorgia Busso is an astrophysicist at the Institute of Astronomy working on the European Space Agency’s Gaia space mission. Dr Busso is part of a small team at the University of Cambridge who processes the photometric and low resolution spectral data sent from Gaia. Launched in 2013, Gaia operates in an orbit around the Lagrange 2 (L2) point, located 1.5 million kilometres behind the Earth in the direction away from the Sun. The primary objective of Gaia is to measure stellar distances using the parallax method. To date, Gaia has catalogued around 2 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. This data helps astronomers to understand the formation history and evolution of our Galaxy.
The team in Cambridge is part of a wider international consortium of scientists working on the Gaia mission.
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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.
The structural mechanics of shape-changing structures: from bending armadillos, self-deploying satellites, to roll-up displays.
Most structures, e.g. buildings & bridges, are designed to be near rigid when loaded: in view of high winds or heavy traffic, their movements are barely noticeable. Formally, they are stiff, strong and stable, in terms of their “structural mechanics” – the study of their loaded deformation. Large movements from material weakness, overloading, or bad design, typically portend failure & eventual collapse. Embracing large movements, i.e. deliberate changes in shape, can admit new behaviour if safe and reversible, to yield transformer-like technologies and simple explanations of biological morphology, for example. In this talk, I will describe several structural mechanics principles for making shape-changing structures, out of ordinary materials, complete with physical demonstrations.
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