The festival has been incredible and informative for the whole week, but this has did not stop the weekend from being better.

Myself and Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock

I kickstarted the weekend with Barry Marshall – a Nobel Prize winner in recognition of his 1982 experiment on himself, which showed that the bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, causes stomach ulcers.

Hearing how he grew these bacteria and then swallowed a potentially lethal dosage of them was fascinating! There was no easy or correct cure for these ulcers at the time and so, unlike in most scientific situations, his hypothesis had to work.

My favourite talk for the day had to be Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who has inspired me since I decided to study science, so I was really happy to finally meet her.

(more…)

Come on, isn’t that yesterday’s news? Most people mildly interested in particle physics will have heard by now that the data indicating neutrinos had travelled faster than the speed of light late last year was the result of a faulty cable in the OPERA experiment. Einstein’s relativity theory still seems to hold and time travel once again is relegated to science fiction movies and novels.

What new could this event then bring us? A lot indeed, because Jim Al-Khalili and his fellow physicists on the panel are doing a brilliant job in explaining not so much the OPERA experiment or neutrino travel, but how the quality of scientific results can be assured and what the consequences of publishing data which has not been checked thoroughly enough are. Actually, in explaining the actual relativity theory they are maybe doing the least convincing job here.

“Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof and extraordinary proof needs extraordinary care.” This is how Jon Butterworth, professor of physics at UCL, puts it and consequently argues that is was a mistake to release the data before all eventualities had been checked.

Giles Barr from the department of physics at Oxford counters: in his opinion, the publication of the data combined with the request to independently check the OPERA results was the right thing to do, because only in hindsight can it be known what the cause of the results were.
(more…)

Agriculture: a game-changer

The man outside the venue at first looked unassuming. “Let me give you a free handout,” he said. I began to reach out for the photocopied leaflet before noticing the title: Evolution – a lethal antiscience. “Do you know what antiscience is?” I had encountered a lot of different people at Cheltenham Science Festival, but not yet the evangelical campaigner.

Sadly, I didn’t have the time to get into a debate about whether his quotes from the Bible counted as evidence from a peer-reviewed publication, but the talk, Evolution out of Africa, proved to be a suitably enjoyable alternative. Mark Thomas, Angela Clow and Jonathan Rees told us about the adaptations humans migrating out of Africa picked up, and what they mean for us today.

Mark began by telling us about adaptations resulting from changes in the human diet. Advances in food culture greatly change how we work: tools for hunting, first used about two and a half million years ago, caused our diet to change from largely vegetable- to meat-based, providing us more energy for the expansion of that energetically-expensive organ, the brain.

One of the most significant dietary changes was a very recent one: the advent of farming. About 10,000 years ago humans began to cultivate crops, bringing radical changes to our diet. With small numbers of grains dominating instead of a wide variety of foraged plants, the breadth of the diet decreased, while the relative amounts of carbohydrates rocketed.

(more…)

FameLab 2012 winner Didac Carmona (left) with jury member Roland (right) and host Quentin Cooper (back)

It’s Friday night at the Science Festival, and with all due respect to the brilliant scientists I have heard so far at Cheltenham,  I need a break – and the final of the International FameLab Competition seems to be just right for that.

With competitors from 10 different countries triumphing at Wednesday’s semi-finals here at Cheltenham, FameLab indeed feels a bit like the Eurovision Song. But as host Quentin Cooper points out early during the show, FameLab is even better than the Eurovision, and yes, even better than Euro 2012. Well, we’ll have to see about that…

FameLab is about “talking science”, and all participants get three minutes up on stage to explain one of their favourite science facts in an entertaining way. Through this, the participants not only improve their presentation skills, but also get to meet people from different countries and scientific fields, all while grasping the importance of public engagement. This all sounds like a lot to deal with, but for the three minutes that they’re up on stage, FameLab is simply too much fun for them to think about anything else.

One of the best things FameLab is the opportunity to take home some facts, while still having fun. Britain’s Andrew Steele achieved this nicely as he explained the function of 3D glasses, making that next trip the cimena even more interesting. Talking about her desperate attempts to lose weight when in love with “the coolest guy of the school” as a chubby 15 year old, Dubravka Stražić from Croatia went down the complete opposite route. While her struggles were eventually rewarded with a kiss, it all ended in disaster, as following the days of  self-imposed starvation Dubravka’s body had started to metabolise fat instead of carbohydrate, resulting in her breath smelling of nail-polish remover. Urghh…

(more…)