Opposites attract: from chaos to order, atmosphere to earth and robots to humans

How can we make robots soft and squishy? The field of soft robotics is focused on answering just that question, to create robots and devices that can carry out functions their rigid counterparts are unable to. This talk follows an industrial designer’s perspective on designing with and for human interaction with soft robotics. Discover the hurdles that designers encounter when testing their designs in the lab, and how they test these designs with people. Tag along on a designerly journey of creating a toolkit that allows children and adults alike to learn about and build their own soft robots.

The space around our Earth is becoming day by day more traffic-jammed by new satellites. Over the past 40 years, the European Space Agency (ESA) has been dedicated to observing the Earth from space to better understand the complexities of our planet, particularly with respect to global changes. The EU-ESA Copernicus initiative is a Earth Observation program including a family of satellites (Sentinels), providing accurate information for monitoring our atmosphere, land and ocean. Sentinel-5p is the first Copernicus mission dedicated to monitoring our atmosphere. Launched in October 2017, the satellite carries the TROPOMI instrument (in the image) which globally maps every day a multitude of trace gases, like nitrogen dioxide, ozone, methane, all of which affect the air we breathe.

In this talk, we will specifically focus on ozone. Being present both in the stratosphere, as “good ozone”, protecting life on Earth from the damaging solar ultraviolet radiation, and in the troposphere, as “bad ozone”, affecting humans, plants and ecosystems, ozone is one of the most important trace gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. Using the eye of TROPOMI, we will look into ozone global/regional maps and we will discuss how current and future satellites can guide us towards a better understanding of the ozone influence in our life and towards making more air-quality informed decisions in our ever-changing world.

Natural systems are unimaginably complex. At the same time, it is extremely important we understand them and where possible, predict them. But how can we manage that? What do we need to do this? In this Pint of Science we are going to explore how the same principles that allow you to create a .zip file can help you understand nature, and how the reasons that make the weather so unpredictable can sometimes be seen in ecology as well!

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