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.
In this lecture, I look at what people from the late eighteenth century to the present thought they knew about toes, arches, heels, and ankles. What makes a beautiful foot? How have ideas of foot-beauty changed over time?
This lecture addresses the potential links between AI and religious belief, which include the question of whether an artificial “superintelligence”, were one to arise, would be well-disposed towards us.
This lecture looks at nineteenth-century fads involving stomachs, including the medical prescription of tapeworms that were supposed to live in a person’s stomach and “eat” food on their behalf.
This lecture uses examples from cutting-edge science and medicine to explore the ethical questions which advances in robotics, personalised medicine, transplantation and artificial intelligence pose for doctors, patients and society.
Is the clitoris simply a female version of the male penis? Many scientists and biologists in the past thought so. It is only in recent decades that the physiology of the clitoris has become understood.
Lung cancer is the second most common cancer in both men and women, but kills the most people through a combination of being common and currently having much less effective treatment. Both treatment and prevention are currently improving, slowly.
The question “Will AI artefacts ever be conscious?” was raised by Turing seventy years ago, and will not go away even though no one quite knows what it means, nor how we would know they were conscious if they were.