Events

Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore is a cognitive neuroscientist who researches something many of us find mysterious – the teenage brain. She believes that our adolescent years are a period of great change in terms of brain activity and being able to untangle what is going on could have wide-ranging implications for education. I went along to her lecture at the British Science Festival to find out more.

A newborn baby has nearly the same number of brain cells as an adult, an astounding 100 billion. The difference, as you might already know, are the connections between the nerve cells, or neurons, which change massively over the course of a person’s life.

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Dr Lewis Dartnell (UCL Space & Climate Physics) is, in his own words, “paid to hunt for aliens”. Lucy Harper from the Society for Applied Microbiology went to his fascinating talk at the British Science Festival entitled, ‘Astrobiology – the hunt for alien life’.

ExoMars rover - phase B1 concept © ESA

We humans, and the billions of species we share the planet with, are protected from harmful radiation by the Earth’s magnetic field and a thick atmosphere.

But on other planets, such as Mars, radiation levels are much higher and these “Martian death rays” are damaging to life as we know it.

Dr Dartnell is trying to find out how long organisms can survive when exposed to this level of radiation.

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For Professor Michael Baum (UCL Research Department of General Surgery), the National Gallery is not just an extraordinary art museum, it’s a medical school. In his lecture at the British Science Festival, he treated the audience to a virtual version of the “ward rounds” of the National Gallery that he takes his medical students on to teach them the art of diagnosis.

Piero di Cosimo, A Satyr mourning over a Nymph, about 1495 (©) The National Gallery, London

Professor Baum believes that classical paintings can reveal a great deal about anatomy, the history of medicine, pathology and even uncover murders.

With a bit of artistic and medical sleuthing, Professor Baum and his students have published many papers describing medical diagnoses, ranging from syphilis to Paget’s disease, which give new perspectives on paintings that have been around for hundreds of years. (more…)

What if the room you’re sitting in right now could talk? Or your pen could tweet? Today at the British Science Festival UCL academic Dr Andy Hudson-Smith (UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis) presented his intriguing tales of things project which aims to create a social network of things and, ultimately, the geography of everything.

In a press conference to some (slightly confused) national science journalists Dr Hudson-Smith introduced us to a world where the things around us have their own online presence, where their movements are mapped and they can even talk. The tales of things project uses QR code technology to allow people to add information about things to an online profile. I’ve written up a press release for more information.

A nice example from the press conference was a stripey jumper in an Oxfam shop which, when scanned with the average smart phone, starts playing an audio file from its previous owner who describes how she wore the jumper the first time she met her ex-boyfriend.  There are also a series of bus stops in Norway, which have been tagged with the technology and can tweet the next bus times, and allow people to add their own information – for example a video about somebody losing their gloves!

Is this materialism gone mad (as one journalist called out in exasperation)? No, says Dr Hudson-Smith: “This project means that we can value things in a completely different way.  Imagine going into a charity shop and being able to find out who owned the suit that you bought.  People like provenance, in fact we’ve shown that they will even pay more for it.”

Dr Hudson-Smith describes it as like a mash-up between Facebook, the Antiques Roadshow and eBay.  And, of course, it’s another great example of innovative university research.

Image: Dr Andy Hudson-Smith brought Annie Lennox’s dress to the British Science Festival to help explain the tales of things project.