18th of February 2026: “Complex and Chaotic Systems” Pulling useful information out of apparent randomness Presented by Dr Robin Wilson.
18th of March 2026: “The Common Cold: 30,000 Years of the Sniffles”. Presented by David Miles who teaches at the London School of Tropical Medicine.
Everybody knows what a cold feels like: miserable. The first cold virus was detected in a milk tooth shed over 30,000 years ago and ever since, the common cold has been a bane.
Yet while sore throats and blocked noses are annoyingly familiar, the processes that lead to them are not widely known and often misunderstood. Processes like the misdirected immune response that makes us ill with a cold instead of protecting us from illness. Like the way heating a building enhances cold virus transmission. Like the way that most cold viruses can only exist at all thanks to the society we’ve built over the last few millennia.
And, most importantly, what we can do about them