Barcelona Cultura
2024-12-19 13:28:29

DANIEL TAMMET

1979. This is the story of a little boy, born autistic, in a working-class suburb of London, whose first language was numbers. How to forge onself when one lives on the outskirts of words, social rules and the expectations of others?

The writer Daniel Tammet recounts his remarkable journey, from the personal battle to liberate himself from the prison of autism, passing by the recitation of 22 514 decimals of Pi to international recognition as a prize-winning writer whose rich body of work has been translated around the world.

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COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

Ants, termites and even some kinds of fungi possess a collective intelligence that is the result of a large number of interactions between different individuals and with their environment. They are systems able to resolve complex problems, such as finding the way out of a maze or establishing the best road network to link different cities on a map.

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IS TRANSPARENT SCIENCE, OPEN TO ALL, POSSIBLE?

There are presently communities of researchers and citizens who create, store, share and deliver their results to society in order to speed up the transition towards a knowledge-based society. Notwithstanding that, for many groups academic knowledge is barely accessible. Is it possible to promote collective intelligence in order to make decisions as a society? How should these actions be implemented? Are we ready and prepared to share knowledge?

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FUTURE FLORA: CELEBRATING FEMALE BIOPHILIA

Two women, a designer and a scientist, will talk about health and women, focusing on the connections between art and design, and innovation, science and technology. They will do so based on the Future Flora project (winner of the European Commission’s STARTS grand prize) which aims to encourage the beneficial presence of microbes and bacteria in the human body with techniques to microencapsulate specific bacteria in certain textile fabrics in order to turn clothing and other accessories into suitable ecosystems for cutaneous flora.

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THE CHALLENGES OF SCIENCE

What were the scientific challenges of the 20th century? What role did women play and what difficulties did they encounter in an area historically reserved for men? What is the current panorama in science? In the age of fake news, is there more or less citizen science culture?

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ARE WE REALLY MADE OF QUARKS?

Are we really made of quarks? The answer to this question is “yes”, but physicists have not arrived at it easily. The quarks model, which embodied a radically new conceptual view of the structure of matter, was hotly disputed by the physics community, and in general it was rejected. It took ten years for it to be finally accepted, after convincing and inescapable experimental trials.

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ANT-MAN AND THE WASP

Directed by Peyton Reed, Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) is the latest film featuring the Marvel Comics superhero Ant-Man, who is part of the Marvel film universe. Ant-Man has the superpower of shrinking to the size of an ant thanks to his special suit. In this session, we will get the chance to discover the role played by science in this film, thanks to the talk given by the scientific advisor of Marvel Studios, the physicist Spiros Michalakis, who has the honour of having introduced quantum physics to the world of the superheroes. After his talk, the film will be shown.

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ROBOTS AND HUMANS

In recent decades technological tools have been developed to implement perceptive, cognitive, emotional and motor systems to facilitate functional recuperation, in the case of brain damage. How can virtual reality, robotics or music therapy help us, after a stroke or other brain damage? This knowledge is also applied to social robotics, a field of research about the complex relationship that humans develop with robots.

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LIVING IN SPACE

For 30 years, the space shuttle, which now orbits the Earth 16 times a day at a distance of 350 km, has been the craft used to build the International Space Station (ISS), and it has taken astronauts to work in space in periods of up to two weeks. Since 2000, 57 teams of astronauts from different countries have lived and worked on it on missions lasting one year at the most.

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THREE DIALOGUES AND SIX VIEWS OF THE CITY, SCIENCE AND PARTICIPATION

What role can science play in the efforts to reverse situations of unfairness in the city? Is it possible to carry out collective research to generate evidence in order to respond to injustice or situations of vulnerability?

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