Angela Saini, BBC science reporter and award winning journalist, talks about her book Geek Nation, a fascinating story of how India, a nation of geeks, swots and nerds, is transforming itself into a global science superpower. Almost one in five medical and dental staff in the UK is of Indian origin and Angela’s fascinating book based on extensive research meets the inventors, engineers and young scientists helping to give birth to the world’s next scientific superpower. As the balance of power shifts from west to east this book has never been more relevant or important.

Angela Saini is an award-winning independent journalist based in London, and the author of Geek Nation, a journey through India, to find out whether the country is set to become the world's next scientific superpower. The book was published by Hodder & Stoughton and Hachette India in spring 2011.

Angela's work focuses on science, technology and their impact on society. Her writing has been published in New Scientist, Science, The Guardian and Wired, and she's a regular reporter on BBC radio science shows, including Click.

She was shortlisted for the best feature award from the Association of British Science Writers in 2010 and named European Junior Science Writer of the Year by the Euroscience Foundation in 2009. Before going freelance, she was a reporter for BBC News in London, where her investigation into bogus universities won the Prix Circom Award for European television journalism. In 2011 she was nominated under the media professional category at the Asian Women of Achievement Awards.

Angela started out as a newspaper journalist in New Delhi before joining ITN in London on its prestigious news trainee scheme. Her undergraduate degree was a Masters in Engineering from Oxford University and she has a second Masters in Science and Security from the Department of War Studies at King's College London.

Fancy a beer and a chat? Well then, you're in luck. We'll be meeting up in the summer sun (hopefully!) at the Fat Cat at 4pm for a wee drinkie and a chinwag. Feel free to join us!

Addiction is one of today's favourite manias. Like allergies, everyone's got to have one, and many present the evidence for their 'addictive personality' by announcing their greater-than-average capacity for biscuits.

But what is addiction? Compulsion, behaviour, illness, all three, or none of the above? Do AA and other 12 step recovery programmes really work? And will a skeptic *ever* admit to needing a higher power?

Tania Glyde is the author of Cleaning Up, a memoir about how she took on British drinking culture and survived.

taniaglyde.com

Why should nothing matter? If anything matters, why should nothing matter? And yet it does, for there isn’t anything, it seems, that nothing does not touch, or anything that does not touch nothing. History, philosophy, religion, science, art, literature, music – all look towards nothing at some point, stimulating questions that would otherwise not be asked.

Who, for example, could have believed that nothing held back progress for 600 years in the Middle Ages, all because of mistaken translation, or that nothing is a way to tackle (and answer) the perennial question "what is art?"? Ronald Green uses nothing in a genuine attempt to look at the world in a different way, to give new angles to old problems and so to stimulate new thoughts.

What is this nothing, that we can’t actually see, touch or feel? Is it absolute? Is it relative to everything else? If we are able to think about it, write and read about it, is it something, and if so wouldn’t it then not be nothing?

This is precisely the mystery of nothing – that the more we think about it, the more there is to it.

Disarmingly invisible, the point of nothing – to paraphrase Bertrand Russell on philosophy – is to start with something so simple as to seem not worth examining, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

Ronald Green is the author of "Nothing Matters – a book about nothing" (iff-Books). Philosopher, linguist, university lecturer and ESL teacher, with 13 ESL books published, Ronald has lectured and given workshops in Europe, North and South America and the Middle East on linguistics, ESL and the use of the Internet in education. His short stories have been published in Nuvein magazine, Tryst, Aesthetica, the Sink and Unholy Biscuit. He has completed a philosophical novel and co-authored a psychological thriller with strong philosophical underpinnings. For the past five years he has been thinking seriously about nothing, culminating in his recently-published book.

Alom Shaha is a science teacher, writer and film-maker. He is also the author of The Young Atheist's Handbook, an account of his journey from being raised in a Bangladeshi Muslim community to becoming an outspoken atheist. Along the way, Alom also attempts to share his ideas for how to live a good and happy life without god.

One of only a handful of high profile public "ex-Muslim" atheists, Alom believes that atheism should be a way of life that should be available to all, regardless of their background. He was inspired to write the book following his experiences as a school teacher and a conversation with A.C. Grayling in which the philosopher told him "you should write a book".  The Young Atheist's Handbook is a celebration of atheism rather than an attack on religion and presents ideas from science, philosophy and theology in a way the author hopes is accessible to a wide audience and refreshingly different to the other books on atheism out there.  

Our behaviour, attitudes, beliefs, and even the way we experience events are highly influenced by the demands and expectations of the various roles that we occupy in the course of our everyday life. We need to be seen as authentic in our roles, namely that we are adhering to what the role requires of us. But we also need our roles themselves to be seen as authentic. Hence we are likely to resist any challenges to our authenticity in both respects.

The same can be true when we are clients in a role relationship. This may lead us to behave and think in ways that are irrational, questionable and counterproductive. Michael shall illustrate this with reference to therapeutic practices, including ‘alternative medicine’ and – if time permits - demonstrate how this analysis has been helpful in addressing some questions that have arisen in his forensic and medico-legal work.

Michael Heap is a clinical and forensic psychologist with over forty years of experience working both with people with mental health and neurological problems and with criminal offenders. An internationally recognised authority on hypnosis, he is also a prolific writer and speaker on scepticism and one of the organisers of Sheffield Skeptics in the Pub. He is the author of a recent book entitled Universal Awareness: A Theory of the Soul, which may be ordered from CreateSpace at https://www.createspace.com/3640356.  His website is http://www.mheap.com/.