‘Unlocking the future‘ is a series of free Science and Technology talks to be delivered by Lancaster University PhD students and early career researchers. They will be held at the Storey every Tuesday at 7pm from 18 November until 9 December.
The series launches on the 18th with ‘The Web of Lies: Deception and fake identities on- and offline‘. Lara Warmelink and Alistair Baron will discuss lying and masquerading as someone else on the internet.
First Lara will discuss deception and how to detect it from a psychological point of view, then Alistair will present work on software that detects adults masquerading as children online.
Following every talk and audience questions, there will be opportunity to chat to the speakers in the bar area, where some complementary light catering will be provided.
The talks are completely free, though you will need to book online at
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/sci-tech/events/talks.php where you can see the full series programme.
On the 25th comes ‘Mighty metals: Probing nuclear waste and expediting drug discovery’, with Dr Vil Franckevičius and Dr Fabrice Andrieux. This session will give a flavour of two seemingly disparate practical applications of metals in contemporary engineering and chemistry.
Fabrice will show how the behaviour of metallic compounds can be used to detect them in industrial applications, helping the nuclear sector to improve safety.
Vil will then move on to discuss the advances, demands and challenges of modern drug discovery, and illustrate how metal catalysts can be used to accelerate the preparation of new drug molecules.
On 2 December, Robin Frost, researcher in business supply chain emissions, and extreme weather statistician Hugo Winter will talk about ‘The Impacts of Climate Change: From Global to Local’.
Finally, pursuing the quest for online privacy, on 9 December Dr Rob Young will talk about ‘Trusting Quantum Physics: Lighting the way to secure communications‘.
Protecting communication against eavesdropping has remained an unsolved problem since the dawn of information exchange. Nowadays, public systems tend to base their encryption on mathematical complexity, but this is vulnerable to intelligent attacks, and the ever-increasing power of computers.
Recent advances in physics have offered a novel solution to this problem. Quantum physics tells us that we cannot measure a system without altering it; so if ultra-weak pulses of light are used to communicate a secret, then we can detect the presence of someone snooping, through the unintentional changes they must make. In future, the security of information could be guaranteed by basic principles of physics.
In this talk Robert will discuss quantum information, and explain the work that’s going on at Lancaster to build the components required to create a quantum internet.