Nerd Nite Brighton

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Get through the dark days of winter with nerdy fun.. Be there and be square!

Thursday 20th February

Doors open 7.30pm for an 8pm start.

Venue: Rialto Theatre

Our speakers:

Anna Crowle: Pelvic organ prolapse: it’s a tension not a weakness.

Women’s health physiotherapist and researcher Anna Crowle presents a new way of understanding and treating this common condition, which is rooted in the biotensegrity model of human anatomy.

Steve Huckel: Enervator, a cryptocurrency that incentivises energy efficiency.

Steve recently submitted his PhD thesis on cryptocurrencies at the University of Sussex. He has a BSc in Computer Science and an MSc in Music Technology. His career in computing began in the early 1990s and included working as a UNIX Systems Administrator and as an Audio Programmer in games, amongst other roles. In 2010, wanting to increase his knowledge of environmental issues, he took a second MSc in Advanced Environment and Energy at the Centre for Alternative Technology. Then, in 2013, a friend asked him to build him a Bitcoin mining rig, and so began his journey into blockchain technologies.

Jingle those nerdy bells: it’s our festive Nerd Nite special! We’ll have talks on bubbles and cinema from some of Brighton’s finest nerds. We’ll also sing nerdy carols, have our annual plasticine modelling competition and no doubt there will be mince pies.

Be there and be square (but please make sure you have voted first – nerds are needed in every democracy).

Tickets link
Venue: Rialto Theatre

Our speakers this month:

***Caspar Salmon: French actresses ***

Caspar is a freelance film and culture writer living in London who has written for The Guardian, Sight & Sound, Little White Lies amongst other publications. He hosts the podcast Film Club with Caspar.

Caspar will be talking about queer fandom that actresses generate in a certain type of film-going homosexual man, and how that fits with his love of arthouse.

Tweets by FilmClubCaspar

***Gianluca Memoli: Bubbles everywhere***

What is the link between volcanoes, dolphins, Swiss cheese and ink-jet printers? What gives taste to champagne and was first named by Shakespeare? Aye, the answer is always “bubbles”. A bubble scientist for more than 15 years, Gianluca has measured bubbles in all sort of materials and processes, from the nanobubbles to Guinness World of Record bubbles. In this wintertide tale, he will demonstrate that bubbles are everywhere (yeah, ok, and atoms…), have a sound and hold our keys to novel medical treatments and space travel. Drinking a fizzy drink will never be the same again!

Gianluca is a senior lecturer in the School of Engineering and Informatics at the University of Sussex. He arrived in Brighton in 2016 and immediately fell in love with Nerd Nite. In his daily job he designs lenses and holograms for sound, towards innovative multisensory experiences. Bubbles, his long-time passion, pop unannounced in all this, like old friends do.

*****

Hosted by Anna Downie
Doors open 7.30pm for an 8pm start.

£4 Regular Nerds
£3 Unemployed/NUS/65+ Nerds
Tickets link

We regularly sell out, so if you buy a ticket and can’t make it, PLEASE contact the Rialto Theatre and they will give you a refund and sell the ticket on to someone who can attend. Thanks!

Tickets on sale from Rialto Theatre

For November we are bringing you the best in evidence-based-entertainment with talks on community energy projects, dark matter and consciousness. Plus beer, cake and nerdy quiz fun. Be there and be square!

Doors open 7.30pm for 8pm start

Venue: Rialto Theatre.

Our speakers this month:

**Daniel Curtis – The Community Energy Revolution: How Local People Are Taking Back Power**

For 100 years the energy landscape has been owned and operated by a small cartel of suppliers who build massive power plants and sell their energy to everyone else. These power stations cost millions of pounds to build, rely on vast quantities of fossil fuels and nuclear materials, and concentrate power in the hands of the few. However, technologies like wind turbines and solar panels are transforming our relationship with energy. Homeowners, businesses and whole communities are now able to start generating their own energy for the first time, taking direct ownership of the means to power buildings, transport, and all aspects of 21st Century life.

Dan is communications and marketing manager of Brighton and Hove Energy Services Cooperative, a social enterprise developing community energy projects across Sussex. Investors become members of the cooperative and take shared ownership in all energy projects developed. BHESCo have delivered low carbon energy solutions for schools, community and leisure centres, art galleries, churches, shops and homes, which collectively bring down annual carbon emissions by 321 tonnes and reduce fuel bills by £70,000 a year. Dan is a fan of Whitehawk FC, and doesn’t drink on school nights.

**Kathy Romer – Dark Energy**

Professor Kathy Romer makes her long-awaited return to Nerd Nite Brighton. Originally from Tyneside, Kathy got her BSc in Physics with Astrophysics from the University of Manchester in 1990 and her PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Edinburgh in 1995. She then moved to the USA and was a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University and at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). After a short time as a research professor at CMU, she secured a tenure track position there. She moved back to the UK in 2004 to take up a lectureship at the University of Sussex. She is still at Sussex and is now both a Professor of Astrophysics, and a Public Engagement Fellow for the Science and Technology Research Council. Kathy is a world expert in the discovery and exploitation of X-ray clusters of galaxies. She is principal investigator of the XMM Cluster Survey collaboration and is coordinating the cluster research for the international Dark Energy Survey project.

**Adam Barrett – Does capitalism require endless growth for a stable economy?**

On our finite planet, there must be an end to economic growth (at least in advanced nations). But is it possible to have a stable capitalism without growth? If we have to keep paying back debt with interest, don’t we have to keep producing more stuff? Surely, in this era of climate change and increasing strain on the world’s resources, and when growth no longer makes us happier and healthier, we should be answering this question. But mainstream economics can’t answer it. It can’t explain crashes- remember how surprised economists were by the big crash 10 years ago? I’m a mathematician who became obsessed with this question about growth. I made my own model economy, and I’ll talk about what I found.

Dr Adam Barrett is a multi-disciplinary mathematician and data scientist at the University of Sussex. While he is best known for his research on the neuroscience underlying consciousness, he applies methods across diverse domains, e.g. to macroeconomics and sustainability science.

Hosted by Dr Mick Taylor
Doors open 7.30pm for an 8pm start.

£4 Regular Nerds
£3 Unemployed/NUS/65+ Nerds

We regularly sell out, so if you buy a ticket and can’t make it, PLEASE contact the Rialto Theatre and they will give you a refund and sell the ticket on to someone who can attend. Thanks!

Tickets on sale from Rialto Theatre

This September’s Nerd Nite Brighton brings together a fantastic range of expert nerds sharing their passion with you. It’s evidence-based entertainment at its best. All accompanied by cake, a nerdy quiz and a round-up of the month’s nerdiest stories.

Doors open 7.30pm for 8pm start

Venue: Rialto Theatre.

Our speakers this month:

Dr Kate Shaw: Physics Without Frontiers.

Kate Shaw is an experimental particle physicist with a joint position at the University of Sussex, UK, and the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Italy, a UNESCO institute. Kate’s research is on the ATLAS Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN where her research focuses on the top quark and Higgs boson. Kate is also passionate about science in society and public engagement. In 2012 she founded the ICTP Physics Without Frontiers program which promotes physics in developing countries, for which Kate received the 2015 European Physical Society (EPS) Outreach Award. The programme leverages the passion of physicists worldwide to inspire, train and educate physics students in developing countries. It has reached over 17 countries to date and over 5000 students, and continues to help build the next generation of physicists.

Tim Pilcher: The history of He-Man.

Tim Pilcher is an Eisner-nominated writer, editor and publisher who has worked in the comics industry for over 30 years at DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint, Ilex Books, Humanoids and Soaring Penguin Press, among others. He is the author of over 20 books on sex, drugs and comics (including Erotic Comics: A Graphic History Volumes 1 & 2 and How Comics Work) and the editor of Brighton: The Graphic Novel, and Brighton’s Graphic War and has lectured around the world on comics at Cambridge University, Trinity College, UCL, Imperial War Museum, ICA, The British Library, SPX in Stockholm, New York Comic Con and Port Eliot Festival. His one-man show, Comic Book Babylon (based on his Vertigo Comics memoir) was a finalist for Best Literary Show in the 2014 Brighton Fringe Festival Awards. He occasionally updates his intermittent blog, Sex, Drugs and Comic Books (www.sexdrugsandcomicbooks.blogspot.com) and you can find him on Twitter: @Tim_Pilcher.

John Cooper: Flint: Fact and Fantasy

A Yorkshireman by birth, John Cooper qualified with degrees in geology and Museum studies and spent the last 38 years working for the Royal Pavilion & Museums here in Brighton, mainly at the Booth Museum of Natural History. John’s main interests have been in dinosaurs and flint and he is currently writing a book about the latter. He established the Brighton & Hove Geological Society in 1984 which is still going strong. Retired now but still active in research and as a volunteer for the Booth Museum.

Hosted by Dr Mick Taylor

£4 Regular Nerds
£3 Unemployed/NUS/65+ Nerds

We regularly sell out, so if you buy a ticket and can’t make it, PLEASE contact the Rialto theatre and they will give you a refund and sell the ticket on to someone who can attend. Thanks!

Tickets on sale from Rialto Theatre

NERD ALERT! Nerd Nite Brighton in July brings together a fantastic range of expert nerds sharing their passion with you. It’s evidence-based entertainment at its best. All accompanied by cake, a nerdy quiz and a round-up of the month’s nerdiest stories.

Doors open 7.30pm for 8pm start.

Venue: Rialto Theatre.

Our speakers this month:

Professor Louise Serpell: Untangling the causes of Alzheimer’s disease: one protein at a time.

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of Dementia and diagnosis is increasing yearly as we live longer. What do we know about the possible causes of Alzheimer’s and what are researchers doing to understand it? This basic research work is essential to understand a complex disease to enable therapies to be designed to modify disease progression. Louise Serpell has been conducting research to understand neurodegenerative diseases for over 25 years. She works at the University of Sussex where she has an interest in protein self-assembly and her research group is seeking to understand the underlying causes of Alzheimer’s disease.

Kathy Halsall: Chilli, poo and confused beavers: how can we ever co-exist with wildlife in a developing world?

Where desperate people and desperate animals meet, conflict for resources is inevitable. It is one of the biggest challenges facing successful wildlife conservation, particularly in developing countries. How can you justify spending money protecting endangered species like elephants when the people who coexist with them often can’t feed their own children? Equally these countries are experiencing rapid natural habitat loss and human encroachment into previously “wild” areas. This talk will look at human-wildlife conflict overseas and in the UK, and what can be done about it. Kathy is an Ecologist who has first hand experience working with communities in developing countries to research and attempt to reduce human wildlife conflict. She currently works in the UK advising on major infrastructure developments around the country to help reduce and control their ecological impact.

Dr Hannah Maple: “You do WHAT?!” – The crazy world of transplantation in 2019

Hannah Maple somehow managed to become a transplant surgeon, despite being a) from Crawley and b) a woman. She graduated from Guy’s, King’s and St Thomas’ medical school in 2007 and currently works as a transplant registrar at Guy’s Hospital, London. She is known as the ‘pink and fluffy one’ due to her interest in health psychology and love of cats and penguins. She was awarded a PhD in 2015 for her thesis which attempted to measure how living kidney donors benefit psychologically from their donation. She is a world expert in the practice of altruistic kidney donation (where someone donates a kidney to someone they do not know) and is branching out into the complex mystical world of medication non-adherence. In her spare time she likes to think about what she would do in her spare time, if she had any.

Hosted by Anna Downie

£4 Regular Nerds
£3 Unemployed/NUS/65+ Nerds  

We regularly sell out, so if you buy a ticket and can’t make it, PLEASE contact the Rialto theatre and they will give you a refund and sell the ticket on to someone who can attend. Thanks!

Photo credit in poster: The Journal of Cell Biology (Creative Commons)

Tickets on sale from Rialto Theatre

Nerd Nite is back with a bang! We’ve got a fantastically diverse line up this month, alongside our usual nerd quiz, nerd news and cake. Be there AND be square.

Doors open 7.30pm for 8pm start.

Venue: Rialto Theatre.

Our speakers this month:

Dr Muna Al-Jawad: Old Person Whisperer’s Adventures in Comics-Based Research

Muna is a consultant geriatrician working in Brighton. She started drawing comics as part of her Masters in Medical Education, and discovered her super-hero alter-ego Old Person Whisperer. She became part of the Graphic Medicine community and she uses comics-based methods to research practitioner experience and the culture of healthcare. She is co-convener of the 10th International Graphic Medicine Conference which comes to Brighton in July. https://oldpersonwhisperer.wordpress.com/ www.graphicmedicine.org

Dr Mika Peck: Conservation in a time of capitalism: Spider monkeys and Chocolate

In the tropical rainforests of Ecuador one of the top 25 most endangered primates, the brown-headed spider monkey, has been brought to the brink of extinction by logging, agricultural expansion and hunting. Using a model that engages with local communities, a community protected area has been established and a sustainable development model that could be copied in regions of high poverty with globally exceptional biodiversity. Mika will summarise his journey from science to grassroots engagement that provides one model for future conservation action.

Mika is a Senior Lecturer in Conservation Biology at the University of Sussex.

Eric De Golier: A Revolution in Athlete Aerodynamics

Eric founded Brighton-based Body Rocket which is leading a revolution of aerodynamic measurement in sports. In fast moving sports like cycling and skiing, aerodynamic drag is the biggest factor that stops athletes from going faster. What makes it a difficult design challenge is that most of the drag comes from the athlete’s body, so how you sit on a bike or stand on your skis is far more important than how aerodynamic your equipment or clothing are. How to solve that problem, and give athletes the information they need, is the focus of this talk.

Eric studied Engineering and is also a former elite cyclist who represented the USA at the 2004 Paralympics.

Hosted by Dr Mick Taylor

Graphics used in image by Dr Muna Al-Jawad

£4 Regular Nerds
£3 Unemployed/NUS/65+ Nerds  

We regularly sell out, so if you buy a ticket and can’t make it, PLEASE contact the Rialto theatre and they will give you a refund and sell the ticket on to someone who can attend. Thanks!

Tickets on sale from Rialto Theatre

Come join us this March to learn about medieval rude badges, re-evaluating past scientific conclusions and modelling complexity. With the usual nerd news, nerd quiz AND free cake.

Thursday March 21st
Doors open 7.30pm for 8pm start.

Venue: Rialto Theatre.

Our speakers this month:

Meriel Jeater: Medieval rude badges

Nerd Nite alumnus Meriel Jeater returns with a new talk exploring the saucy side of medieval material culture. Meriel joined Museum of London in 2000. She is a curator in the Archaeology Collections department (covering the ambitiously wide timescale of 450,000BC to AD1700) which includes archaeological objects and social history. Meriel has worked on the permanent medieval London gallery, the War, Plague and Fire gallery, and recently curated the Fire! Fire! exhibition. Meriel has a BA in Archaeology and Ancient History, an MA in Museology and is most interested in the medieval, Tudor and Stuart periods.
www.museumoflondon.org.uk

Prof. Zoltan Dienes: Evidence for no effect: Re-evaluating many past scientific conclusions

Zoltan studied natural sciences at Cambridge, experimental psychology at Macquarie University and Oxford, where he obtained his doctorate. He has been a lecturer, and then professor, at the University of Sussex since 1990. He investigates unconscious learning and also hypnosis. He has written two books and over 100 publications in scientific journals, including Nature and Science. He has a particular interest in how we draw inferences from data, writing a book in 2008 on the philosophy of science and statistics. He is regularly invited around the world to promote a Bayesian approach to statistics as an alternative to the significance testing that is routinely employed by scientists.

Dr Mick Taylor: Making sense of complex systems

Mick Taylor is a lecturer in the dept. of Mathematics at the University of Sussex, where he also obtained his doctorate in mathematical epidemiology. He is the education lead for Brighton-based charity the Hummingbird Project and the co-founder of Goodmoney CIC, a social enterprise working to transform how money works in our communities. In addition to this, Mick is one of the Nerd Nite Brighton team and often hosts our events.

Hosted by Dr Partha Das

£4 Regular Nerds
£3 Unemployed/NUS/65+ Nerds

We regularly sell out, so if you buy a ticket and can’t make it, PLEASE contact the Rialto theatre and they will give you a refund and sell the ticket on to someone who can attend. Thanks!

Tickets on sale from Rialto Theatre

Come join us this February to learn about the importance of play, psychedelic medicine and evidence-based nutrition. With the usual nerd news, nerd quiz AND free cake.

Thursday February 21st
Doors open 7.30pm for 8pm start.

Venue: Rialto Theatre.

Our speakers this month:

Matthew Bellringer: Don’t work, play!

Adults have forgotten how to play. This is a big problem. Play is vital for creativity, growth and happiness. Other intelligent species spend much of their lives playing. What can we learn from them? What happens to your brain when you’re playing? Can you replace work with play completely?

Matthew is a tech entrepreneur and student of business psychology. He’s helping people who take new approaches to personal development get in touch with the people who really need them. He is also partly giving this talk to remind himself to spend more time playing.

Dr Graham Campbell: Psychedelic Medicine

Graham’s earliest memory was accidentally tripping on Strepsils aged 3 after secretly eating an entire packet. It’s not clear whether this kick-started his early interest in dreams, minds, consciousness, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, medicine and his gravitational attraction to psychiatry. Reading about LSD in psychology books in his teens triggered a fascination with the potential for positive, even healing, experiences with psychedelic drugs. Politicians and the media haven’t been kind to these molecules and there have certainly been casualties attributed to their widespread use. But perhaps the story isn’t all bad? Could the vilification of these substances make way for recognition of their potential role in the alleviation of human suffering?

Dr Graham Campbell works as a consultant inpatient psychiatrist in Sussex. He completed a Neuroscience MSc with King’s College London/Institute of Psychiatry in 2012. In 2018, he became an Honorary Clinical Research Fellow with the Imperial College Psychedelic Research Group to support their second clinical trial of psilocybin for depression.

Jess English: Coffee – black, hold the butter.

To carb or not to carb? Paleo? Flexitarian? FODMAPs?! The world of nutrition science can be a confusing place. Eating is something that we’re all kind of experts at – but it can be tricky to translate these fancy, jangly terms into what exactly you’re going to put into your mouth. Jess will be taking a closer look at the world of nutribollocks and diet tribes; the evidence (or lack of!) behind it all and why the goalposts constantly seem to be moving – plus a handy guide to spotting it in the wild.

Jess is a HCPC Registered Dietitian with a passion for evidence-based nutrition science and a particular interest in public health. She has worked in the NHS as a clinical dietitian, in public health and community nutrition and now runs her own private practice (Level Up Nutrition) where she’s on a mission to help people decipher nutrition science, translating it to fit their own lives in an easily digestible way.

Hosted by Dr Mick Taylor

£4 Regular Nerds
£3 Unemployed/NUS/65+ Nerds

We regularly sell out- so if you buy a ticket you can’t use, please let us know on the Facebook page so we can ensure disorganised nerds who forgot to buy a ticket in time can still come.

The first Nerd Nite of 2019! Come join us to learn about the trouble with facial recognition, the trouble with predicting the future and the need for non-lethal self defence techniques for time travellers. With the usual nerd news, nerd quiz AND free cake.

Thursday January 17th
Doors open 7.30pm for 8pm start.
Venue: Rialto Theatre.

Our speakers this month:

Dr. Graham Hole: Why ID cards and CCTV are a bit of a waste of time.

Graham is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Sussex; he is interested in the psychology of visual perception and attention, especially in relation to “real world” problems (like face recognition and driving). Graham is particularly interested in finding out what information is actually extracted from faces in order to recognise them. He’s been doing research on face recognition for about 30 years now, and still has no idea about how we actually manage to recognise them (enlightened ignorance!).

Dr. Julian Mayers: That Was The World That Wasn’t.

Happy New Year. A perfect time to look ahead and make wild and hilariously inaccurate predictions about the coming 12 months. Will Brexit happen? Will Albion survive a second season in the Premier League? Will you find love?*

If it’s difficult enough to gaze just a year ahead, how about the next 10, 50 or 100 years? Why is predicting the world of the future an almost impossible task?

Astrophysicist Dr Julian Mayers has been fascinated by our visions of the future ever since watching John, Pete and Val bury the Blue Peter time capsule in 1971.He will look back who have been the best – and worst – predictors, show how Cosmology can help our understanding and ask why it is important to try to gaze into the crystal-ball anyway.

Julian is a part-time astrophysicist – what might be quaintly termed as a ‘gentleman scientist’. His research at Sussex University includes weighing Black Holes, searching for the nature of Dark Matter and hunting alien X-ray communications. He is a BBC radio documentary maker and runs a video production company.

*maybe, definitely and no (though not necessarily in that oder)

Mike Capozzola: Self Defence for Time Travellers.

With time travel inching closer to reality century after century, non-lethal combat techniques are needed now more than ever for keeping travellers safe while protecting the intended flow of historical events

Mike Capozzola is a New York-raised, London-based comedian and a published cartoonist (WIRED, Private Eye, McSweeney’s, MAD Magazine).
He plays an agent in “Men in Black International” due out Summer 2019.

Hosted by Anna Downie.

£4 Regular Nerds
£3 Unemployed/NUS/65+ Nerds

We regularly sell out- so if you buy a ticket you can’t use, please let us know on the Facebook page so we can ensure disorganised nerds who forgot to buy a ticket in time can still come.

Tickets on sale from Rialto Theatre

The last Nerd Nite of 2018. Come along and learn about soap bubbles, junk DNA and interactive art. With the usual nerd news, nerd quiz AND free cake.

Doors open 7.30pm for 8pm start.
Venue: Rialto Theatre.

Our speakers this month:

Dr. Filippo Cagnetti: Soap bubble and mathematics.

Filippo graduated in Theoretical Physics at “La Sapienza” University (Rome) in 2003 and obtained his PhD in Applied Mathematics at SISSA (Trieste) in 2007.
He enjoys very much both researching and teaching mathematics.
He has worked at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh), Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon), and University of Texas (Austin).
He has been a member of the mathematics department at the University of Sussex since 2013, and he loves living in Brighton.

Dr. Alex Bousios: Most of our DNA is junk – but hugely important in the function and evolution of species.

Alex received his PhD in molecular biology in 2009 from the University of Sussex. After a few years in Greece, he returned to Sussex in 2013, where he has now established his own research group as a Royal Society Research Fellow. His research investigates the evolution of plant genomes with a focus on its most abundant component, the fascinating transposable elements.

Dr. Cécile Chevalier: Playing and Audience experience in Interactive Art Systems.

Cécile Chevalier is an artist and Lecturer in Digital Art. She works with art installation and instrument making to explore forms of digital cultural transformation in relation to embodiment-technologies, performativity and performance. Her background is in Fine Art, Crafts & Design and Media Studies, while her current artworks and investigations draw from an interdisciplinary practices between conceptual and computational art and participatory/play theory. Cécile will draw from her collaborative artworks to discuss play theory in relation to Interactive Art Systems and instruments.

Hosted by Dr. Mick Taylor

£4 Regular Nerds
£3 Unemployed/NUS/65+ Nerds

We regularly sell out- so if you buy a ticket you can’t use, please let us know on the Facebook page so we can ensure disorganised nerds who forgot to buy a ticket in time can still come.