Alle berichten van Science Cafe Wageningen

Fuels of the Future

Thursday October 18th

19:45 live music by Radiant Wood
20:15 speakers
Café Loburg

Our society was and is still propelled by fuels. It started with burning wood, which allowed our ancestors to rise to the top of the food chain, fuelling the evolution humankind. Many millennia later, it was the coal fired steam engine that fuelled the industrial revolution, followed by the rapid adoption of many other so-called fossil fuels that our current society has come to depend on. Those fossil fuels are non-renewable and are used on such a scale that they are causing the Earth’s average surface temperature to rise, due to the accumulation of greenhouse gasses, with potentially catastrophic consequences. Therefore, it is important that we find new fuels again, that are renewable. Our two invited speakers, Samira Farahani, and Rene Wijffels will discuss two of those potential fuels of the future: hydrogen and algae.

Dr. Samira Farahani works jointly at Energy & Industry Section and Process & Energy department at Delft University of Technology. She is an expert on the use of hydrogen as energy carrier.

Prof. Rene Wijffels is chair holder of the Bioprocess Engineering group at Wageningen University. He is an expert on the use of microalgae in biotechnology.

PREVIOUS SESSION: Gravity

Thursday September 20th

19:45 live music by Troubagroove
20:15 speakers
Café Loburg

Gravity, there is really no way around it. Perhaps that’s why this phenomenon by which all things with mass attract one another is easily taken for granted. But not in this Science Café. Jeroen van Dongen en Erik Verlinde will take us from the Einstein’s theory of gravity to the recent detection of gravitational waves and latest ideas of Erik Verlinde about ‘Emergent Gravity’, which he published in 2017.

Prof. Jeroen van Dongen leads the History of Physics group at the University of Amsterdam. He researches the Science and Life of Albert Einstein and his contemporaries, and the history and philosophy of gravity.

Prof. Erik Verlinde is part of the String Theory group at the University of Amsterdam. He received the prestigious Spinoza Prize in 2011 for his major contributions to Physics and Mathematics, including the Verlinde formula and the Witten–Dijkgraaf–Verlinde–Verlinde equation. He became known by a wider audience for his novel theory to explain gravity.