September Science Cafe: ‘Collective Behaviour in Humans and Other Animals’

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The Swansea Science Cafe offers opportunities for anyone to find out more about new, exciting and topical areas of science in an informal and entertaining way.

Title: ‘Collective Behaviour in Humans and Other Animals’

Speaker: Dr Andrew King (Swansea University)

Date: Wednesday 25th September

Time: 7:30pm

Venue: The Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea

Admission: Free, all welcome

In this talk, Dr King will focus on animal aggregations such as moving swarms, schools, flocks, and herds and will illustrate one of the many benefits of being in a crowd, with a bit of audience participation in a real-time public experiment.

Dr King is part of Swansea University’s SHOAL (Sociality, Heterogeneity, Organisation And Leadership) group in the Department of Biosciences.  The group, which carries out research in the laboratory and in the field, studies the causes, patterns and consequences of the amazing and coordinated behaviours that we see across different species, and in different contexts.

In the talk Dr King will describe some recent work on flocks of birds, schools of fish, troops of baboons and crowds of people.

For more information follow SHOAL’s tweets at @SHOALgroup

Contact details: http://swansea.ac.uk/science/swanseasciencecafe/

About Science Cafe Wales

Each month, a leading expert in their field will give a brief introductory talk followed by a friendly informal chat. You can sit back, relax with a drink and listen or get involved in the discussion and debate. The Science Café organisers are committed to promoting public engagement with science and to making science accountable.

Science Café Wales are held in casual settings in Cardiff, Swansea and Bangor. They are informal and accessible and entrance is entirely free. They usually start with a short talk from the speaker, usually a scientist or writer, followed by a quick break and then an hour or so of discussion afterwards.

Previous topics have included dark matter, the common cold, Dr Who, the Big Bang and alternative therapies.

The first Cafes Scientifiques in the UK were held in Leeds in 1998. From there cafés gradually spread across the country.

Currently, some 40 or so cafés meet regularly to hear scientists or writers on science talk about their work and discuss it with diverse audiences.