The Invisible Stuff That Shapes Our World

We eat the equivalent of a credit card’s worth of microplastics a week. Or do we?
Plastic pollution has been found everywhere we have looked: in the deep ocean, on Everest, in the air we breathe and the water we drink. It is in your hair, your blood, your sputum, your meconium and your bronchoalveolar lavage fluid. This talk explores what we know about microplastics, how scientists are engineering new enzymes to break down plastics and how to spot clickbait headlines in science.

The universe seems to expand out infinitely in all directions, but we have only seen a tiny fraction of it. Could outer space be finite (while very large)? Could it be curved, like a sphere? Or a doughnut? Mathematics might hold the answers.

We know that everything we can see - stars, planets, people - makes up less than a sixth of the Universe. The rest is dark matter: invisible, mysterious, and still completely unknown. So how do you study something you can’t see?

In this talk, I’ll take you inside the strange world of dark matter detection, where we build ultra-sensitive experiments, cool them to near absolute zero, and listen for whispers from the cosmos. From underground labs to quantum sensors, this is a story about how we try to uncover one of the biggest missing pieces in physics - and why it matters for the future of science and technology.