Back on February 9th I was rather serendipitously invited to attend Prof Andrea Sella's Royal Society Michael Faraday Lecture. The back-story involves an afternoon spent at Lab_13 at Gillespie Primary mesmerized by the great work being done by the students and their fearless leader, Scientist/Inventor in Residence, Carole Kenrick. Professor Sella is a driving force in getting Lab_13 into the curriculum at Gillespie, so the afternoon rolled into the evening with me thrilled to be having such a fun buffet of science.

Professor Andrea Sella, University College London, argues that chemists need new ways to talk about their subject and tell a deeper story in his Michael Faraday Prize Lecture. 2014 Michael Faraday Prize Lecture by Professor Andrea Sella. Filmed 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm on Monday 09 February 2015 at The Royal Society, London.

I’d never been to the Royal Society before and Sella's lecture was eye-opening in many ways and very thought provoking. His metaphor of products and process in chemistry was a beautiful metaphor for the education of science. The story of the process of education should be more gripping than the flames of test scores, but clearly there’s work to do in shifting people’s focus!

And today I find myself going back to check out more of the Royal Society lectures (of which there are MANY--click that last hyperlink to see what I mean), most of which are videoed and watchable from the comfort and ease of your home and busy schedule. What a wonderful resource to have at our fingertips!

Prof Andrea Sella's entire lecture is just over an hour, so pop yourself some corn and cozy up for some mentally explosive chemistry (which literally happens around 1:00:12).

Me, I'm about to use my statistical decision organ (aka my brain) to learn how computers can also learn, thanks to the 2014 Milner Award Lecture by Professor Bernhard Schölkopf. Exciting stuff!