Events

As a round-up of the festival, here are some tips I picked up that you might find useful if you want to communicate science to the public too…

1. Be aware that different words mean different things to different scientists, and proably different meanings again to the public. For example, in my (energy) department the word ‘model’ implies running simulations on a computer, whereas for a geneticist a ‘model’ is an animal experimented on in order to learn something about humans. When you say ‘model’ to an average person off the street, they might think of Kate Moss or some lego.

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Bags unpacked and a new stack of unread copies of Eureka magazine added to my collection, I look back fondly on my week at the Cheltenham Science Festival. From the beautiful scenery of the English countryside, to my fellow bursary students, to the many intriguing science talks and interactive zones, there is nothing I would not happily do again.

Alongside the many talks held at the festival there were also plenty interactive science activities for young, old, and those somewhere in the middle. My favourite in particular was the “Who wants to be a Science Presenter?” activity in the BBC Science tent, where the Brian Coxes of tomorrow could have a go at presenting a little bit of science of their own and to make things more realistic you were given props, a fake earpiece, and a camera filming you live.

The Discovery Zone in the Town Hall was also a haven of fun and learning. I recall standing wide-eyed amidst a group of fifth graders watching a scientist from Liverpool University demonstrate how to make water into dry powder. I also loved the idea of the Talking Point tent that allowed the audience members and the speakers to congregate, ask questions and lead discussions outside of the lecture. I felt that this made science seem more accessible, especially since the speakers were so open to answering questions.
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Can a person’s neuroanatomy tell them about who they are? This was one of the most intriguing questions asked at a talk with Prof. Robert Turner, director of Neurophysics at the Max-Planck Institute, and Geraint Rees, director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL.

Unlike the other talks I had been to, I had decided to bring two guests sans science-background along for the ride, hoping that after the lecture they too would share my enthusiasm for neuroscience. Professor Robert Turner began with an introduction to the realm of neuroscience, covering the birth of phrenology by Franz Joseph Gall to Maguire’s study on increased hippocampi in taxi drivers in 2000. Geraint Rees then proceeded to address the question of whether an individual’s brain structure played a role in determining how they saw the world. Rees pointed out that in fact the visual cortices of different individuals differ two- or three-fold, so does this affect how we see?

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So I have returned from the Cheltenham Science Festival and it’s been a jam-packed week with wall-to-wall talks as well as desperately trying to cram in all the free events that ran every day and seeing as many of the stands as possible. It all took place in Cheltenham Town Hall (yes, it seemed strange to me too) and in a group of tents just outside in the Imperial Gardens (how many people out there have ever been to a lecture in a tent I wonder?) which over the course of the week came to feel like home.

A lot of the talks have been covered elsewhere in the blog but I’ve come up with some awards for the ones I liked best:

Most Thought-Provoking goes to “Vegetative State” in which Adrian Owen described how his team have discovered that up to 20% patients in a persistent vegetative state may actually be fully conscious but unable to communicate. Although there is now a method to communicate with these people via an fMRI machine, it’s still a very scary thought and I can only hope that the team come up with a more convenient way of giving patients their voice back.

Most Enlightening is the award for “Are We Still Evolving?” I thought the answer would be a straight-forward yes but in actual fact Alice Roberts showed how it wasn’t a simple answer and in fact evidence suggests that evolution is acting on us slower than ever before.

Most Interactive goes to “Brain Scan: Live” where UCL’s own Mark Lythgoe together with Derek Jones tricked the whole audience into volunteering for an fMRI before scanning one unwitting volunteer and getting the rest of us to “read her mind”.

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