Building on recent scientific discoveries, Mark Lynas explains that there are nine 'planetary' boundaries that humanity must not cross if Earth is to continue to support life and our civilisation. Climate change is one, but others - like ocean acidification, nitrogen use and biodiversity loss - are less well known, though equally crucial.

But this is no depressing lamentation of eco-doom. Instead Lynas presents a radical manifesto that calls for the increased use of controversial but environmentally friendly-technologies, such as genetic engineering and nuclear power, as part of a global effort to protect and nurture the biosphere. Ripping up years of 'green' orthodoxy, he reveals how the prescriptions of the current environmental movement are likely to hinder as much as help our vitally-needed effort to use science and technology to play God and save the planet.

Mark Lynas is the author of The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans, published by Fourth Estate in July 2011. He has previous written two major books on climate change – High Tide: News from a warming world (2004) and Six Degrees: Our future on a hotter planet (2007).

High Tide was long listed for the Samuel Johnson Award for Non-Fiction, and short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. Six Degrees was long-listed for the Orwell Prize in 2008, and won the prestigious Royal Society Prize for Science Books in the same year. Six Degrees became a TV hit for National Geographic, whose Six Degrees Could Change the World – voiced by Alec Baldwin – has been watched by tens of millions around the globe on the National Geographic Channel. The book has now been translated into 22 languages around the world.

In November 2009 he was appointed advisor on climate change to the President of the Maldives, His Excellency Mohammed Nasheed, and is involved in the Maldives’ effort to be the first carbon neutral country on Earth by 2020. He is a frequent speaker around the world on climate change science and policy, focusing in particular on how carbon neutral targets can break the international logjam on climate mitigation, and how emissions reduction should be seen as an opportunity not a sacrifice. He is also a Visiting Research Associate at Oxford University’s School of Geography and the Environment.

There are many non-standard ideas – most of them ‘hyper-diffusionist’ and many of them sensationalistic – about the origins, relationships and histories of languages, especially ancient languages. These ideas are rejected by those professional linguists who are aware of them but often attract support among fringe historians and indeed among the general public.

This talk will provide a brief critical overview of these non-standard claims and theories, in my capacity as a professional linguist associated with the world-wide skeptical movement.  Theories of two broad types are discussed here: claims and theories about ancestor languages, historical relationships between languages (involving alleged common origin and/or contact), the etymologies of specific words (including onomastics), ‘out-of-place’(spoken) languages, etc.; and claims and theories involving the identification and decipherment of texts or alleged texts in unfamiliar scripts or familiar scripts used in unfamiliar contexts, said to represent familiar or unfamiliar languages – including claims about‘out-of-place’ written languages.

Mark Newbrook was born and brought up on the Wirral, and obtained a BA (Hons) in Classics from Oxford and an MA and a PhD in Linguistics from Reading; he then spent many years as a linguistics lecturer and researcher in Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia.  His main areas of interest include historical linguistics, dialectology, sociolinguistics, semantics and skeptical linguistics.

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.

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.