Welcome to Lewes Skeptics in the Pub

Chris Lintott, FRAS, is best known as the co-presenter, with Patrick Moore, of The Sky at Night, first appearing on the programme in 2000. He studied Natural Sciences at Magdalene College Cambridge, and received a PhD in  astrochemistry of star formation at University College, London. He then took a research position the University of Oxford and ran the team responsible for Galaxy Zoo, a project which engaged hundreds of thousands of people in the task of classifying galaxies. For the last year he has been but is currently spending a year at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. At Adler he works as Citizen Science Project Lead expanding the range and depth of opportunities for everyone to contribute to scientific research. Away from academia, his interests are theatrical, whether writing for the Royal Opera's Ring Cycle programmes to producing Patrick Moore's comic opera, Galileo, which bemused audiences from Cambridge to Chichester and beyond.

Chris will be talking about Planet Hunters. 'Planet Hunters' is the latest citizen science project from Zooniverse. A chance for anyone to get involved in hunting for new planets. Participants help sieve through data taken by the NASA Kepler space mission. The data consists of brightness measurements, or "light curves," taken every thirty minutes for more than 150,000 stars. Users search for possible transit events - a brief dip in brightness that occurs when a planet passes in front of the star - with the goal of discovering a planet (hence the name "Planet Hunters"). The most difficult detections for Planet Hunters and for computer-based searches will be those from planets that orbit far from their star and therefore cross the star infrequently. It may also be difficult for computer algorithms to detect planets in data that has artificial offsets (which can occur with telescope pointing errors or space craft rolls). Planet Hunter participants may be better than computers at finding signals in this type of data. Because of the outstanding pattern recognition of the human brain, it is hoped that participants will also establish new "families" or classifications for the light curves.

Electric cars? They're rubbish aren't they?! Nothing but glorified golf carts that take forever to charge and then run out of power on the way to the shops. Try finding somewhere to charge them. They cost a fortune to buy and another fortune to replace the battery when its range drops to half. You don't want to believe all that nonsense about them being environmentally-friendly. They are actually worse than petrol-powered cars because the batteries are made from dirty lithium and use electricity made from dirtier coal. There isn't even enough lithium in the world to make all the new batteries we'd need anyway. Electric cars are just rubbish. Aren't they? - Robert says no. This evening he'll tell us why he thinks we need to put away our prejudices and think seriously about electric vehicles as the future of transport.

Robert Llewellyn is an actor, writer, comedian, TV presenter and self-described wishy-washy liberal best known for playing the android Kryten in the long-running BBC sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf. He presented Scrapheap Challenge for 10 years and these days he can be seen on TV presenting the shows Car-Pool on Dave and How Do They Do It? on Channel 5. He is probably the UK's most prominent advocate of electric vehicles (EV) and presents a YouTube-based show called Fully Charged which documents current developments in the electric vehicle industry. He also writes a column for the EV website The Charging Point. He has been notably critical of BBC's Top Gear's position on electric vehicles -  a case in point being the Top Gear "review" of the Tesla V in 2008 which is currently the subject of a lawsuit by Tesla. This February he will debate the motion "This House Believes Electric Cars are the Future of Transport" at the Oxford Union.

We hear a lot about the stresses of juggling motherhood with paid work and the subsequent harm this might cause our children. But recent research led by Dr Anne McMunn suggests this is most likely myth rather than fact. Far from being detrimental to a child's development it can have the opposite effect.

Anne McMunn is Senior Resarch Fellow in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at UCL. She currently leads a research project within the ESRC International Centre for Lifecourse Studies in Society and Health (ICLS) investigating the influence of parental divisions in paid employment and childcare, as well as stability and change in family structure, on the emotional wellbeing of children in the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). In addition, Dr. McMunn continues her work on the social determinants of healthy ageing in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA).

Mark Stevenson has been to the future a few years ahead of the rest of us – and came back believing we still have everything to play for. His voyage of discovery took him to Boston to visit a robot with mood swings, to an underwater cabinet meeting in the Indian Ocean, and Australia to question the Outback’s smartest farmer, had his genome profiled, and glimpsed the next stage of human evolution … then he tried to make sense of what’s in store.

The result was An Optimist’s Tour of the Future, which is finding fans from schoolchildren through to Nobel Peace Prize winners. Mark will talk of the future of humanity and how technology will help remedy some of these problems.

Mark combines two careers – one as a successful writer and comedian and as co-founder and director of the cultural learning agency Flow Associates and the science communication agency ReAgency, Roving Learner at The Age of Smart, a fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce and Nibmaster General for the Ministry of Stories.

http://anoptimiststourofthefuture.com/