Salon 4 - Other Worlds + Main TEDxCambridgeUniversity Conference Launch

We invite you to join us at our final Salon of the year! We'll hear from speakers discussing a range of topics including the media influence on attitudes towards technology, new methods to study cancer, and eco-friendly refrigeration, alongside a spoken word performance by an international, award winning slam poet! SPEAKER DETAILS: Richard Hand Our present world is one of enormous change on every level from the micro to the macro. If we walk down the street, we can witness a transforming world in the yawning caverns of empty shops or in people’s techno-social interaction. At the same time, popular culture continues to speculate about ‘other worlds’: shows such as Black Mirror draw on a rich tradition of dark domestic fantasy on TV and radio with stories of extrapolated technologies and its impact upon our sense of self and our values. In this talk, we will look at everyday tales from the worlds of dark fantasy and the emerging and evolving fault lines of technophobia, alienation and societal peril. Dario Bressan Cancer is one of the biggest killers of our century, and perhaps its scariest features is how little we know about it. We are still largely ignorant of how each tumour interacts with its host, and how it will react to the therapies that we use to fight it. To learn more about this we need to step in a different world, made of cells, proteins and genes: the world inside our body where these interactions happen. I am part of an international team of scientists funder by Cancer Research UK, developing new technologies to map this world in incredible detail, charting the position and molecular fingerprint of each and every cell, with the aim of producing a computer model that doctors and researchers can literally walk inside, studying it with a level of detail previously impossible. In my talk, I will let you step in this world, and explain why we think it might be key to treat cancer better. Zareen Roy-Macauley Zareen Roy-Macauley is in her second year at the University of Cambridge, studying Human, Social and Political Sciences. She is the co-founder of the slam poetry collective, ‘GlobePoets’, and has won and competed in several national and international slam poetry competitions, including ‘Brave New Voices USA’ and ‘SLAMbassadors UK’. She has performed in renowned arts and performance venues around London, including the Roundhouse, Southbank, and Richmix, and is a frequent performer at Cambridge University Hip Hop Society’s exhibition nights. Juan Bermudez Garcia In this talk, I will show the “hidden world” of the daily life heat energy through a thermal camera. I will focus the discussion on emergent eco-friendly refrigeration technologies. Nowadays, refrigeration already accounts for around 20 % of the global energy consumption, and is expected to triplicate by 2050. Moreover, most of refrigerant materials are volatile, hazardous, pollutant and greenhouse gases, which have already contributed to the ozone layer depletion and the global warming. In this context, I am studying the “hidden world” of heat energy to develop novel solid materials that can replace refrigerant gases for eco-friendly refrigeration technologies. These solids cannot escape to the atmosphere, and they can transform the force of our hand into a cooling effect. In summary, I will show how studying the “hidden world” of heat, we can create innovative eco-friendly refrigeration technologies for a “sustainable world”.