Satellites, Super Cows & Secret Proteins

Von Willebrand Factor (VWF) is best known for helping blood clot, but it also plays important roles beyond bleeding control. It supports the health and repair of blood vessel walls and contributes to angiogenesis, the formation of new vessels. VWF is also involved in the immune system, acting as a “bridge” that helps immune cells reach sites of injury or infection. While beneficial, excessive VWF activity can drive harmful inflammation seen in conditions like sepsis and autoimmune disease. These diverse roles show VWF is more than a clotting protein, making it an important focus for research into vascular health, immunity, and disease treatment.

What if cows could send alerts about their health—and microbes reveal what they
need to eat? Discover how sensors and gut microbes are transforming farming, helping
farmers improve animal health, reduce emissions, and produce food more sustainably.

Humans have made sense of the world since the dawn of time, through telling stories, creating narratives — tales around fires, memories passed from generation to generation. Climate citizen science expands on this intrinsic need to create stories. People track birds, note shifting seasons, map clouds and trees - they become witnesses. Their observations turn into knowledge, and knowledge into power. A data point becomes a seed of a story, and each story sparks collective discussion and action. When communities speak in their own voices, climate change is no longer distant, it becomes a call to act together. And here is another big question: Is citizen science about citizens or science?

Quantum mechanics has a reputation for being 'weird' — with its mysterious phenomena of 'superposition', 'interference', and 'entanglement' — and yet in our everyday lives, we see no trace of this spooky reality. Like Alice, we can 'shrink' ourselves down to explore this dizzying world up close. We will journey through its landscape, visiting controversial thought experiments and their consequences for how we view reality. We then go back up the 'rabbit hole' to show how computers harnessing these principles can tackle real-world problems. Above all, I hope you leave appreciating that reality is just as strange as Wonderland itself!