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).

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 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 debated the motion "This House Believes Electric Cars are the Future of Transport" at the Oxford Union. The motion was carried.

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.

They are all around us in every nook and cranny. Trillions upon trillions inside and out of every planet, star, galaxy and the space in between. Billions pass through you every single second, night and day. But despite the phenomenal numbers it was not until 1953 that conclusive evidence of the existence of the most abundant thing in nature was discovered: the neutrino.

Since then scientists have devoted their lives to chasing these ghosts of nature. Despite its meagre size the tiny neutrino has had a profound effect upon our Universe and may hold  the answer to one of the greatest questions of all time: the Creation of the Universe.

Dr Ben Still is a particle physicist. He works as part of an international collaboration of about 500 scientists and engineers on the Tokai to Kamioka (T2K) experiment in Japan. The T2K experiment aims to use the world's most intense beam of neutrinos, one of the least understood of the fundamental particles, fired from the East coast of Japan to the Super-Kamiokande particle detector 295km to the West. By investigating the changes in the their properties as the neutrinos travel between the two sites physicists can get closer to understanding these Universe-creating particles.

Ben's website is http://www.benstill.com/

This event is being hosted in collaboration with the Brighton Science Festival.

Kat Arney works as a science communicator for the charity Cancer Research UK, after spending six years as a laboratory researcher. Kat loves talking and writing about science, and regularly comments in the media on the latest discoveries. She produces the Cancer Research UK podcast, and is also a freelance science writer and helps to present the highly successful Naked Scientists BBC Radio show in her spare time. In the rest of her spare time Kat plays in two bands, Sunday Driver and the Shadow Orchestra, and rarely sleeps. Unsurprisingly, her blog is entitled You Do Too Much: http://katarney.wordpress.com/

One hundred years ago, there were very few effective treatments for cancer, save for the surgeon’s scalpel. As a result, homespun cancer cures thrived, with all manner of pills and potions being peddled in newspapers and magazines. The 1939 Cancer Act was brought in to try to stop the advertisement of fraudulent cancer cures to the general public in the UK but it has little jurisdiction in today’s international online world, where thousands of websites offering treatments and cures are available at the click of a button. Kat Arney will talk about why we need to take an evidence-based approach to medicine in general and the treatment of cancer in particular.

The public view of the scientist is of a cool, logical and level-headed individual. As Dr Michael Brooks explains, the truth is often very different. Many of our most successful scientists have more in common with libertines than librarians. In this talk, Michael explores some of the greatest breakthroughs in science and reveals the extreme lengths some scientists have gone to in order to make their theories public. Falsification, fabrication and plagiarism hit the headlines but less obvious misconduct is so common it has been dubbed "normal misbehaviour". Sometimes fraud, suppression of evidence and unethical and even reckless behaviour is necessary to bring the best and most brilliant discoveries to the world's attention.

Dr Michael Brooks holds a PhD in quantum physics and is a consultant for New Scientist magazine. He has also written for The Guardian, The Independent, The Observer, The Times Higher Education Supplement, and Playboy. His first novel, Entanglement, was published in 2007. His first non-fiction book, an exploration of scientific anomalies entitled 13 Things That Don't Make Sense, was published in 2009. He has lectured at New York University, The American Museum of Natural History and Cambridge University.

As well as contributing to traditional outlets for science, such as BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme and Material World, Michael appeared in a regular live slot on George Lamb's BBC Radio 6 Music show entitled Weird Science which featured unusual stories from the world of science. He stood as a candidate in the 2010 General Election for the seat of Bosworth against incumbent Conservative MP David Tredinnick, who Brooks described as "a champion of pseudo-science and a hindrance to rational governance".

For television, he has appeared in a Channel Four documentary on Time Travel (which he co-scripted) and discussed alien invasions on More 4 News. He is a regular speaker and debate chair at the Brighton Science Festival.

 Michael's website is http://www.michaelbrooks.org/

Irrational beliefs – such as the acceptance of the power of witchcraft – are pervasive across the African continent, and are not restricted only to peasants and the uneducated. In fact, nearly all of the educated African elite believe in the efficacy of witchcraft. It is hard to believe that given all the advancements in medicine and science in the last 500 years, most Ugandans (and indeed most Africans) today still attribute their misfortune and sickness to evil spirits and demons, courtesy of witchcraft. These beliefs benefit from the tacit support of mainstream religions (particularly the fast growing 'charismatic' forms of Christianity) which, while denouncing witchcraft as evil, fully endorse the view that it is efficacious. In their view witchcraft is seen as evidence of 'Satan' at work. Mainstream religions are also guilty of promoting a belief system that leads to:

• Pastors conning thousands of believers by stage-managing fake miracles

• Many HIV positive believers dying because they were abandoning ARVs based on unsubstantiated miracle testimonies

• Making people believe that they have been bewitched or are victims of 'generational curses'

The lack of a rational voice in this public conversation about what are spiritual matters prompted a number of local rationalists to come together and form Freethought Kampala, a club that seeks to promote reason, logic, science and critical thinking in a highly superstitious society. We host monthly meetings, and have many of our views published in the mainstream newspapers to be read by tens of thousands of Ugandans. We also have a strong online presence via a blog and Facebook page.

As a founding member of Freethought Kampala, James will give you an insight into the experience of being a skeptic in a deeply superstitious society, including the fight against witchcraft in Uganda, the phenomenal rise of charismatic forms of Christianity in Uganda, and its impact on belief in the efficacy of witchcraft, the politicisation of Religion, Spirituality, and mass conformity, the rise of skepticism in Uganda, challenges for skepticism in Uganda and the way forward from here.

At various points, children believe in lots of things from Santa Claus to the tooth fairy. Fantasy is important and distinguishing fact from fantasy is an important filter that children must develop. A sound education, critical thinking and an understanding of science and nature help people distinguish fact from fantasy, but what if fantasy is promoted as fact by people in authority? Teachers, ordained ministers and people who flaunt their credentials as men or women of science have a responsibility towards children and their position can be very influential. Then, promotion of fantasy as fact, is no longer a harmless activity. It is a form of intellectual abuse of children. In this talk James will look at various creationist books and comics widely used by fundamental evangelical Christians as ‘teaching aids’ for their position of a belief in Biblical literalism and a belief in creation over evolution.

We cannot prevent the publication of creationist books and comics aimed at children. But as a community of scientists and science educators we can prevent the ideas been taken on board as 'factual' and we can help prevent the misconceptions taking hold. We can only do this, however, if we are proactive in teaching evolution at an earlier stage in schooling and we can only prevent it with robust examples from the vast weight of scientific evidence for evolution that currently exists.

James Williams lectures in Science Education at the University of Sussex. He has extensive experience in teaching and teacher education, working in a variety of state schools as a head of department, head of year and assistant headteacher. In teacher education he has directed the PGCE secondary provision at Sussex University and is currently leading its science education provision. He has written a number of textbooks, education books, articles and academic papers. His latest book is How Science Works: teaching and learning in the science classroom (Continuum Books). He has written numerous education articles for the TES as well as The Guardian, The Independent and The Daily Telegraph. He has made expert contributions to local and national news for the BBC, ITN and Teachers’ TV.

Mike Dash worked for Fortean Times for nearly 20 years from 1983. During that time he oversaw the launch of the scholarly annual Fortean Studies (1994-2000) and wrote Borderlands (1997), an examination of the evidence for a wide variety of strange phenomena. Its miserable failure, in terms of sales at least, was (his publisher informed him) likely due to its excessive scepticism.

Trained as an historian at Cambridge and King's College London (where he obtained a PhD), Mike has focussed his own efforts on archival research, not least on an unnecessarily-ambitious 28-year project to unearth contemporary reports of the early Victorian bogeyman known as Spring-heeled Jack. He was also a watch leader with the Loch Ness and Morar Project from 1983 to 1987.

Mike will be speaking on "Assessing the evidence for strange phenomena" and drawing on his extensive casebook to cover subjects ranging from dodgy hypnotic experiments conducted with the severed heads of guillotined criminals to the infamous "Mince Pie Martians" UFO case that took place in Birmingham in 1979. Without wishing to spoil the surprise, he concludes that most Fortean phenomena can be attributed to a rich stew of hoax, misperception, wishful thinking, fantasy-proneness and little-known physiological processes occurring deep within the human brain.

His website is http://www.mikedash.com

According to one estimate, around 100 UFOs are sighted worldwide every 24 hours – that’s one every 15 minutes. What’s causing all these reports? Are they, as believers claim, evidence that we are being visited by aliens from other planets? Or is there a more prosaic explanation? This hard-hitting talk by Ian Ridpath, traces the growth of the flying saucer myth since the first sighting in 1947, and demonstrates some of the most common causes of UFO reports. The talk will discuss the implication of formerly top-secret government documents recently released under the Freedom of Information Act, and will end with Ian’s first-hand account of his own researches into the Rendlesham Forest incident, a major event outside a US Air Force base at Woodbridge in Suffolk, still widely regarded as among the best UFO cases ever.

Ian Ridpath is a writer, editor, broadcaster and lecturer on astronomy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and has worked at the University of London Observatory. His books include Star Tales, about the mythology of the constellations, and The Times Universe, a pictorial tour from the Earth to the farthest reaches of the cosmos; the Collins Guide to Stars and Planets; The Monthly Sky Guide; and Collins Gem - Stars, a pocket guide to the constellations. He is the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Astronomy and of Norton’s Star Atlas and was a General Editor of the Collins Encyclopedia of the Universe.

Three of his early books concerned extraterrestrial life and interstellar travel: Worlds Beyond, Messages from the Stars, and Life off Earth.

He has been involved with the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and is a UFO skeptic. In 1986 he was Highly Commended in the annual British Science Writers Awards for his investigation of Britain’s most famous UFO case in Rendlesham Forest near Woodbridge US Air Force base in Suffolk.

His website is http://www.ianridpath.com

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Jon Ronson is an award-winning writer and documentary maker. He is the author of two bestsellers: Them: Adventures with Extremists and The Men Who Stare at Goats which was adapted into a Hollywood movie of the same name, and two collections, Out of the Ordinary: True Tales of Everyday Craziness and What I Do: More True Tales. He will be talking about his latest book The Psychopath Test (due for publication June 2011).

When Jon is contacted by a leading neurologist who has recently received a cryptically puzzling book in the mail he is challenged to solve the mystery behind it. As he searches for the answer, Jon soon finds himself, unexpectedly, on an utterly compelling and often unbelievable adventure into the world of madness. Jon meets a Broadmoor inmate who swears he faked a mental disorder to get a lighter sentence but is now stuck there, with nobody believing he's sane. He meets some of the people who catalogue mental illness, and those who vehemently oppose them. He meets the influential psychologist who developed the industry standard Psychopath Test and who is convinced that many important CEOs and politicians are in fact psychopaths. Jon learns from him how to ferret out these high-flying psychopaths and, armed with his new psychopath-spotting abilities, heads into the corridors of power.

Jon Ronson's official website is http://www.jonronson.com.

Please note: Although this event is taking place at the Con Club, tickets for the event will be available from behind the bar at the Elephant & Castle (and not from the Con Club) from 9pm Sunday 29th May, and then online at http://lewesskeptics.eventbrite.com about a week later (exact date TDB).

Martin Poulter first encountered skepticism while a teenager. He has a Philosophy and Psychology degree from Oxford University and a PhD in Philosophy of Science from the University of Bristol. He has been a Scientology-watcher since 1995, when he was threatened with legal action over material he posted online. He is an ordained minister in the Church of the SubGenius, which offers eternal spiritual salvation or triple your money back.

Scientology has been described in the States as “ruthless, litigious and lucrative” and in this country as “corrupt, sinister and dangerous”, yet it boasts global success and has made hundreds of millions of dollars. Thanks to the Internet, it now faces an unprecedented global opposition. The scary secrets of Scientology and its recruitment methods will be exposed in this talk. It will be useful for anyone wanting to set up their own lucrative cult.

His website is http://infobomb.org