The palette and the pipette. Frances Ashcroft will speak in the discussion Strange and Charmed: Science and the Contemporary Visual Arts with Sian Ede, A. S. Byatt, Martin Kemp and Richard Wentworth at the Royal College of Music on September ; Helen Haste will speak about the "two cultures" in the discussion "Can Science and Literature Cross-fertilise?" at the Royal Geographical Society, September 18.