Ri Christmas Lecture Livestream
CHRISTMAS LECTURES from the Royal Institution "The Truth About Food"
Watch-along of the LECTURES at WMG
You can watch the lectures LIVE as they are recorded, with live hosting and entertainment.
As the world-famous CHRISTMAS LECTURES from the Royal Institution are filmed for the BBC, you can watch-along with us before (almost) anyone else. With live entertainment, extra challenges, experiments, and demonstrations - all in a University auditorium - this is the perfect way for your whole family to watch the CHRISTMAS LECTURES.
Image (above) credit: Paul Wilkinson Photography
Dates, Times, and Info
When:
WMG will be hosting livestreams of two of the three CHRISTMAS LECTURES on:
Tuesday 10th December 2024
Thursday 12th December 2024
Arrive: 17:30
Live stream starts: 18:00
Latest finish: 20:30
Where:
WMG on the Warwick University Campus (CV4 7AL). The video feed will be broadcast to us to watch live in our auditorium.
Note that we cannot provide the link to anyone else to stream elsewhere. This is an in-person event.
REGISTER HERE
What are the CHRISTMAS LECTURES from the Royal Institution?
More information on the Ri CHRISTMAS LECTURES.
Initiated by Michael Faraday when organised education for children was scarce, the CHRISTMAS LECTURES established an exciting new way of presenting science to young people.
World-famous scientists have given the Lectures, including Nobel Prize winners William and Lawrence Bragg, Sir David Attenborough, Carl Sagan and Dame Nancy Rothwell.
The lectures are a fantastic and prestigious event and the highlight of the science calendar each year. However, only around 100 people can attend the theatre in person - so we have been given an exclusive opportunity to broadcast the lectures live as they happen in to the auditorium at WMG at the University of Warwick. There will be a live host with additional entertainment so this will be more than just another online event. This is an exciting opportunity to see the lectures as they are filmed for the BBC and before anyone else (except those in the theatre themselves!).
Think of it as a science movie premiere - and join us in the exclusive audience!
What are this year's CHRISTMAS LECTURES about?
Chris will investigate how food has fundamentally shaped human evolution, uncovers the importance of our microbiome – as the extra ‘organ’ we didn’t know we had – and asks how we can all eat better in future, for the sake of our own health and the health of the planet.
The lectures will include fact-fuelled demos, special guest appearances, festive food hacks, and a healthy dose of self-experimentation. From tastebuds to toilet, we’ll find out what happens in the body when we eat. How we eat with our eyes (green eggs and ham anyone?) and how smell and even sound can affect the taste of our food.
Chris will take us on a journey to the centre of his gut as he swallows a camera-pill to unpack the digestion process at every saliva-soaked step. He’ll reveal how we transform food into fuel – and into the building blocks of life – and how our digestive systems match up to those of our animal relatives. We will find out how many stomachs a cow really has, and why platypuses have no stomach at all. Chris will venture into the amazing world of the human gut microbiome and ask who’s really in charge: us or our microbe passengers?
Chris will reveal how he believes we can repair this broken relationship with food – investigating what we should be eating and joining forces with expert chefs and scientists of all kinds to cook up some weird and wonderful sustainable future foods in the Ri Theatre.
Featuring animal, as well as human guests, this year’s lectures will provide plenty of surprises, shocks and some truly gross moments. And there’ll be startling facts to chew over about how our modern food is made and what it’s doing to our bodies.
Who is the Speaker?
Text from the Royal Institution via https://www.rigb.org/explore-science/explore/person/dr-chris-van-tulleken
Chris van Tulleken is an NHS infectious diseases doctor at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London, one of the UK’s leading science presenters and a New York Times bestselling author.
Chris grew up in London and trained in medicine at Oxford University, specialising in infectious disease and tropical medicine. He has a PhD in molecular virology from Greg Towers lab and in 2016 he won the Max Perutz award for his HIV research. He is currently an Associate Professor in the division of Infection and Immunity at UCL, where his research focuses on how corporations affect human health, especially in the context of child nutrition, and he works with UNICEF and the World Health Organisation.
Chris is one of the UK’s leading science presenters having worked on many flagship Health and Science programmes including: Trust Me, I'm a Doctor, Horizon, The Truth About…, Operation Iceberg, Cloud Lab, Museum of Life, and Blizzard: Race to the Pole, among others.
Operation Ouch, Chris and his brother Xand’s double BAFTA winning series for CBBC, continues to delight audiences around the world, with Series 12 being filmed in 2023. Throughout the series, the twins create fun and often disgusting experiments to help young people learn how the human body works. The programme results in fan mail from around the world from a young audience who want to know, above all, what they need to do to become doctors.
Chris and Xand’s programmes are often shaped by their readiness and ability to self-experiment and test out theories on one another (as clones, they are the ideal test and control) – whether changing their diets, exposing themselves to environmental extremes of heat, cold, sleeplessness and pain, Chris learns and informs his young audience by becoming a patient himself.
His concerns about antibiotic resistance and over-reliance on prescription drugs led him to create a campaigning series for BBC One in 2017; ‘The Dr Who Gave up Drugs’, and in 2018, he turned the focus of the topic to children with the second series, which received rave reviews.
Following on from the success of ‘The Doctor Who Gave Up Drugs’, Chris investigated the impact ultra-processed foods has on our children, in ‘What Are We Feeding Our Kids?’ for BBC One. In 2023, Chris published ‘Ultra Processed People’, which became an international bestseller.
Chris lives in London with his wife and children.
Get Involved
WMG at the University of Warwick will be hosting two events with livestreams of the CHRISTMAS LECTURES from the Royal Institution on Tuesday 10th December and Thursday 12th December. We will have a 'first look' at the lecture before it is shown on TV. Alongside the livestreams we will also have opportunities to meet with our researchers, engineers, lecturers and scientists, and take part in fun scientific experiments to learn more about the subject. You will be part of a live audience for this event.
The lectures themselves will take place in the Royal Institution headquarters in London. They will provide livestream videos of the lectures to us, which we will show to the audience in the room. At certain points the staff at the Ri will need to pause the lecture to set up demonstrations or fix technical issues, during which times the outreach team at WMG will entertain you.
Warwick Staff and Students
Staff and Students at the University of Warwick can attend with their families. We will hold up to half of the tickets for each night and allocate them to staff on a first-come-first-served basis.
You can use this form to register your interest as a member of Warwick Staff.
There are still spaces available so please do sign up!
Local Community
We will hold up to half of the tickets for each night for members of the local community, and these will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.
The Lectures are advertised to an age range of 11-17 years old, but they are so well produced that they will appeal to an adult audience. As an outreach team our priority is to work with young people, so we are encouraging people with families to attend.
You can use this form to register your interest in attending as a member of the local community.
There are still spaces available so please do sign up!