Gresham College provides outstanding educational talks and videos for the public free of charge. There are over 2,500 videos available on our website. Your support will help us to encourage people's love of learning for many years to come.
Despite the controversy, evolution was widely accepted by many naturalists within a few years of the Origin’s appearance. An important reason for this rapid triumph was Darwin’s botanical works. Seen through evolutionary eyes, plants proved to be mobile, carnivorous, sensitive – even crafty.
This lecture examines the work of Hugo de Vries, a Dutch botanist who was one of the first to claim that science would allow plants and animals to be designed to order.
Sydney’s botanic garden, founded in the early nineteenth century, was expected to ship new plants 'home' to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, from where they could be transplanted to other colonial gardens, to see if they could become valuable new crops to enrich the British Empire.
In this talk, Dr Wilkins will discuss the astrophysical origins of the chemical elements, almost all of which have an origin ranging from the big bang, to exploding white dwarfs, the collapse of massive stars, and the merger of ultra-compact objects, neutron stars.
This lecture will begin with Bacon’s imagined garden, then consider the long-term promise of the experimental or scientific garden, which would eventually lead to today’s biotechnologies.
The origin of life is one of the biggest questions in science, but until recently it was, experimentally, a question in chemistry. Now, gene sequences and a better understanding of cell growth under extreme conditions are giving insights from biology.
We will need an aggressive strategy to ensure the safety of agricultural yields and food in the future especially in drought- prone and even temperate zones.
This talk shows that the incorporation of a simple salt can lead to a flexible plastic with mechanical properties similar to oil derived plastics. Most importantly these plastics are recyclable and ultimately compostable.
This lecture tells a startling and unexpected story of science-communication success: the YouTube channel 'The Periodic Table of Videos,' which boasts over 130 million views in more than 200 counties. What is the secret to this educational success?