February event: “The Woo of Wee”
Learn of the benefits of drinking your own urine! Marvel at how it treats conjunctivitis if you pour it in your eyes! Discover if you really should be peeing on your jellyfish sting! This talk considers whether there is any scientific evidence for the benefits of urine therapy (spoiler: there isn’t), what might lead people to believe in it, and contains horrible pictures of the results caused by indulging in this practice.
Heidi owns many cats, all of which prefer to use the high class facilities of the indoor litter trays rather than the slum of the garden flower beds, and therefore she thinks about the best way to dispose of urine quite a lot. None of these ways has yet involved drinking it, strangely enough. She likes science fiction conventions, singing, and is currently trying to learn more than four chords on the ukulele.
March social
Join us from 7.30 pm on Tuesday 3rd March in the Library at the Town Wall on Pink Lane, near Newcastle Central Station, to meet fellow skeptics and to shape the future of skepticism in the North East.
Come for drinks, casual debunkings and maybe even some skeptical gaming!
March event: “Recognized More and More: Frederick Douglass and Newcastle’s role in ending slavery in the United States”
Saturday 14th March at 3pm
1867 café bar (Tyne Theatre & Opera House)
“Recognized More and More”: Frederick Douglass and Newcastle’s role in ending slavery in the United States.
Everyone knows that Newcastle had a strong tradition of reform in the nineteenth century, from land reformer Thomas Spence to political reformer Lord Grey, to the campaigning editor Joseph Cowen, and the city has made much of its connection to the abolitionist Frederick Douglass in recent years. But Newcastle’s connection to the campaign to end American slavery was in place long before Douglass arrived, and it included a range of actors, both local and visiting. This talk will give a sense of who those people were, what they did, and what difference it made to the end of slavery in the United States.
Bruce E. Baker is Professor of American History and African American Studies at Newcastle University and has written widely on the history of the American South. Since 2020, he has worked closely with Fionnghuala Sweeney, an expert on Frederick Douglass, to research the life and career of Moses Roper, a fugitive slave from North Carolina, who came to Britain and campaigned against American slavery several years before Douglass.
Past events archive
| 10 Oct 2024 | Nikolas Lloyd – How your body lies to you about pain |
| 14 Nov 2024 | Michael Marshall – Using data to counter quackery and alternative medicine |
| 12 Dec 2024 | Professor Anqi Shen – When blessings turn to curses: scammers’ exploitation of supernatural beliefs |
| 09 Jan 2025 | Dr Rebecca Woods – What’s a question to start with?: Why interrogatives are so weird (in English) |
| 13 Feb 2025 | Dr Tom Nicholson – “We’re all just a little bit ADHD, right?!” – How the world makes life harder for neurodivergent adults |
| 13 Mar 2025 | Dr Alex Niven – How to Get a Rise out of the North-East: A History of the Future in the Deep North |
| 10 Apr 2025 | Brian Eggo – The Truth is Nowt There |
| 15 May 2025 | Professor Richard Wiseman – How to Transform a Tea Towel into a Chicken and Other Mysteries |
| 12 Jun 2025 | Dr Joel Wallenberg – Stealing money from old people slowly, or How We Came to Charge for the Future |
| 10 Jul 2025 | Shayna Weisz – What’s wrong with me? How mental health awareness might actually be making us feel worse |
| 14 Aug 2025 | Maeve Hanan – When healthy eating turns harmful: How ultra-processed food panic fuels anxiety and disordered eating |
| 11 Sep 2025 | Professor Jamie Tehrani – The Natural History of Narratives: how stories evolve, spread and survive, and how they decay and die |
| 09 Oct 2025 | Dr. Darrel Ray – Sexy Evolution: What the Pope Doesn’t Know About Human Sexuality |
| 13 Nov 2025 | Dr Jane Stewart – XX/XY: not always what you think |
| 4 Dec 2025 | Dr George Locke – Apostasy in the UK: on leaving a high-control religion |