Presented by Speakers from the Edge
Join legendary climber Leo Houlding for his next new show, Exposed, a gripping live experience with stunning visuals, film, and storytelling from the world’s wildest places. After three decades on the edge of adventure, Leo now explores with his young family—kiting across the Norwegian Arctic, canyoning in the Arabian desert, paddling remote Pacific islands, and spending a week vertical camping with the kids up El Capitan.
A story of risk, resilience, and reward—Exposed will inspire you to embrace discomfort, confront fear, and chase your own horizons.
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ATOM Festival is proud to lead FameLab Academy Oxfordshire, part of the internationally recognised FameLab initiative that began with the Cheltenham Science Festival. After two successful years nurturing the Oxfordshire competition, FameLab Academy 2026 is now open to a wider range of schools than ever before.
This exciting opportunity invites Year 9 students to develop their science communication skills and confidence through an inspiring, hands-on competition. Working with a STEM Mentor from academia or industry, and supported by their teachers, students will craft a three-minute presentation explaining a scientific topic in a clear, engaging, and entertaining way.
Presentations are judged on content, clarity, and charisma, challenging students to make complex ideas accessible and captivating.
School winners will earn a place at a Science Communication Masterclass and go on to compete in the Oxfordshire Finals in March 2026, held during the prestigious ATOM Festival.
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Every 2 minutes, somewhere in the world, a pregnant woman needlessly dies. Often her baby too. This is despite health care workers and policy makers knowing, for many years, how to prevent or treat many of the underlying problems, often at little or no extra cost.
The avoidable deaths of nearly 300,000 mothers a year represents the largest global public health inequality today. Although lessons are being learnt, and solutions put into practice, progress has been painfully slow, and, in some parts of the world, is now being reversed.
To better understand the causes of death and disability, and to describe the barriers to safe motherhood faced by mothers in low- and middle-income countries, Professor Gwyneth Lewis will use the case of Mrs X, a “universal mother”, to highlight the difficulties she might encounter in her journey though pregnancy and birth. She will show how the lessons learnt from reviewing their deaths have helped save millions of women’s lives in the past 25 years, and the significant challenges that remain.
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2026 is the 80th anniversary of the establishment of "The Atomic", officially the "Atomic Energy Research Establishment" at Harwell.
Originally built in a "rural backwater" to develop UK leadership in the peaceful use of nuclear energy, "The Atomic" has transformed scientific understanding across the whole range of scales, from quarks to quasars and protons to proteins as well as altering local geography and society.
Today ATOM rightly celebrates Abingdon as the epicentre of big science. Not only did Harwell's early work lead to Calder Hall, the first commercial source of nuclear energy, but it developed the standards for nuclear safety, radiobiology, development of radioisotopes for medicine, and more. The Medical Research Council was one of its first clients.
Today the campus includes work ranging from vaccines and the structure of matter to the vastness of space and astronomy.
The talk will show how science and technology have changed our world in the last 80 years and how much of that change can be traced back to Harwell. Harwell @80 is time to celebrate our nuclear heritage.
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