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Professor Susan Evans |
Mysteries solved in UCL lectures
Lunchtime series to explore the sky at night and the strange power of frog kissing
EVER wondered what the stars in the sky are made of, or how a frog becomes a prince when kissed by a princess?
The answers to these and many other questions lie in the UCL’s Darwin Lecture Theatre every Tuesday and Thursday throughout the spring term – and all it will cost you is your lunch hour.
The free 40-minute talks straddle a range of subjects from the pleasures of car driving to an ode to the complex beauty of the Hepatitis B virus.
Dr Serena Viti, professor of Physics and Astronomy at UCL, will explain the formation of stars from the interstellar medium – a cold, dusty atmosphere made up of hundreds of different atomic and molecular species.
The interaction and exchange between the intensely hot, hydrogen-based-stars and their icy surrounds, insists Dr Viti, is vital to understanding the mechanisms that drive our universe.
The frog conundrum is slightly easier.
Professor Susan Evans, UCL Anatomy and Developmental Biology, offers the toxins in the skins of certain frogs as the rational explanation for the classic fairy-tale idea – when people kiss the frog they ingest a hallucinogen that causes them to see things.
Before you cry “spoiler”, Dr Evans has many other tricks up her lab coat sleeves in her talk “Toad Meets T-Rex: The Evolution and Diversification of Frogs”, which traces the humble amphibian back to its Mesozoic origins 250 million years ago, before dinosaurs walked the Earth.
Other lectures in the series include the ominous-sounding “The Return of Syphilis”, “Reconstructing a Face after Cancer Surgery” and what promises to be a fascinating study of the creation of colours through nanotechnology.
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