As well as nearly 70 debates at this year’s festival, there will be several festival attractions to keep you intellectually stimulated throughout the weekend, be it the music performance, the art exhibit or a number of other events. These are all listed on the festival attractions page.

Naresh Fernandes, editor-in-chief, Time Out India and writer on urbanisation and urban culture has confirmed he will be speaking at two debates this year - at the Keynote Controversy, ‘Age of the Metropolis’ and at the Contemporary Question, ‘India at 60’.

Alexander Cockburn, US-based journalist, editor of CounterPunch, and author of numerous books and columns, has confirmed he will be speaking at two debates at this year’s Battle of Ideas - at the Keynote Controversy, ‘The new heresies’ and at the Battle for New Technologies debate, ‘Digital commons’.

The Battle of Ideas Satellite Event at the Genomics and Society conference, The battle over ethics and regulation now has four distinguished speakers confirmed:

-Professor Ruth Chadwick
distinguished research professor, Cardiff University; director, Centre for Social and Economic Aspects of Genomics (CESAGen)

-Dr Christine Hauskeller
senior lecturer, ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (Egenis), University of Exeter

-Mark Henderson
science editor, The Times

-Dr Stephen Minger
director, Stem Cell Biology Laboratory, Wolfson Centre for Age-Related Diseases, King’s College London

Tickets for this event are available from the Genomics and Society conference website. For more information, visit the Satellite Event page.

Not only can you discuss why ‘particle physics is sexy’ at the Battle of Ideas, you can see why too. Thanks to the Science and Technology Facilities Council, the festival will exhibit a model of the Atlas experiment - a particle physics experiment exploring the fundamental nature of matter and the basic forces that shape our universe.

To accompany the Battle for Music debates, the society for the promotion of new music (spnm) are setting up Listening Posts around the Royal College of Art, bringing you sounds created by some of the most exciting composers currently emerging in the UK. We hope they’ll engage, provoke, stimulate, and energise.

To ensure that debate neither starts nor ends with one weekend, we can now announce that three Satellite Events will be taking place, produced in association with our Satellite Partners: the Design Museum, the ESRC Genomics Network and london knowledge lab.

‘Design in denial?’ @ Design Museum - 1 October: 19.15-20.30
‘What good is e-learning?’ @ london knowledge lab - 5 October: 18.30-21.00
‘The battle over ethics and regulation’ @ Genomics & Society conference - 26 October: 14.00-15.30

Arts & Business, the festival ‘arts champion’, have invited guest curators to put on an exhibition on the theme ‘should art change the world?’ which will be on throughout the weekend in the Lower Gulbenkian gallery.

Three new debates have been added to this year’s programme:

‘Is identity politics undermining democracy?’ (Saturday, 10.30-12.00)
‘Particle physics is sexy’ (Sunday, 17.45-18.30)
‘London 2012: a sporting chance for the city?’ (Sunday, 11.00-12.30)

Featured speakers include Kenan Malik (author, Man, Beast and Zombie), Vicky Richardson(editor, Blueprint and Richard Bishop (director, Design London), with further speakers to be announced shortly.

To watch video footage of some of last year’s sessions, visit Fora TV.