The Cambridge Philosophical Society has its roots in the Earth Sciences, with all three of our founders (Edward Clarke, Adam Sedgwick and John Stevens Henslow) being engaged in geology at the University of Cambridge. Professor Marian Holness FRS in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge and Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge explores the geological and social history under our feet with some surprising finds.
The cobbled area outside Trinity College Great Gate is a useful area to park lorries making deliveries to the college, and also commonly hosts groups of tourists admiring the Gate and the statues above it. What is less recognised is the enormous scientific and historical interest of the cobbles themselves. Even a cursory glance from a non-specialist shows that there is a huge range of colours in the cobbles and that they are clearly natural materials with no evidence of them being cut into shape. A closer look tells us that there are many different rock types, most of which are not found anywhere near Cambridge with the source of a couple of types that can be confidently placed in southern Norway. These cobbles are most likely to have been laid in the sixteenth century, re-used from an older road down to the river - the makers of that road collected the cobbles from nearby fields, deposited there by glaciers during the greatest Ice Age almost half a million years ago. That we can see Norwegian rocks tells us that this huge ice sheet must have travelled from Scandinavia across the North Sea, ending up in East Anglia.
Video courtesy of Trinity College Cambridge.
Photo: Not all that glitters is gold: a larvikite cobble from Norway, with its characteristic iridescent grains of feldspar.
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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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