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Time Travel Safari: Adventures in the History of Life

Science writer and author Dr Olivia Judson gives a talk in the Helmholtz Lecture Series

 „Come with me on a journey through our planet’s past — to times when the moon was closer and the tides were higher, when the days were shorter but there were more of them in a year. To times before there were wildfires — for fires could not burn before land plants evolved and thus provided them with fuel. Five hundred million years ago, the first wildfires had not yet been lit.”

Helmholtz Lecture: Time Travel Safari: Adventures in the History of Life

on 16 June 2011, 6.30 pm
Kinosaal, Main Building, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Unter den Linden 6, 10117 Berlin

In the lecture, Olivia Judson will consider problems a time traveller would face — such as jet lag, and what food to bring. She will also discuss what one can safely infer about the past, and what remains a mystery. Moreover, the science writer will talk about some of the challenges in finding the information she needs in order to construct a thoughtful account of time travel.

Olivia Judson is an evolutionary biologist and science writer. She graduated from Stanford University and gained a doctorate from Oxford. Beginning in 1995, she worked for two years as a science writer for The Economist. In 1997, she wrote an Economist article named "Sex Is War!" which was awarded the Glaxo Wellcome Prize by the British Science Writers Association. Her first book, Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation (2002), details the variety of sexual practices in the natural world and provides the reader with an overview of the evolutionary biology of sex. The book was praised by critics as being witty and engaging, without compromising its scientific integrity. It became an international best-seller and was nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2003. Olivia Judson is a research fellow at Imperial College in London. Presently she is a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin where she works on her second book "Dinosaur Eggs for Breakfast".


FURTHER INFORMATION
Mirjam Bröhl
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Unter den Linden 6
10099 Berlin
Phone: +49 30 2039-2715
Email: m.broehl@culture.hu-berlin.de
Web: http://www.kulturtechnik.hu-berlin.de/hvl-aktuell