Bees, brains and bubbles will be explored at Brighton Science Festival
Sussex academics will explore the human brain, provide a bee’s eye view of the world, and demonstrate geometry using bubble blowing at the Brighton Science Festival starting next month.
Staff from across the University will be giving talks and engaging in practical demonstrations during the Festival, which starts on 2 February and runs until 1 March.
One of this year’s headline events is the Bright Sparks Weekend (14-15 February), which aims to inspire and educate children through a range of interactive science activities.
Sussex contributions to the Bright Sparks Weekend include:
- Dr Andy Chandler-Grevatt (Education) will be supervising a number of Sussex’s trainee science teachers as they conduct hands-on experiments to get children thinking about science. Highlights of the Teach Teachers to Teach! stall will include magnetic putty, turbines in bottles, and a doll’s head that cries tears of shaving foam when subjected to a change in pressure.
- At the Eyes, Genes and Brains stall, Professor Jennifer Rusted, Drs Sarah King, Sam Hutton and Simon Evans (Psychology), and Drs Nicholas Dowell and Naji Tabet (BSMS) will use interactive demonstrations to explore how mental effort and attention can be measured by changing pupil size. Using examples from their BBSRC-funded project grant, they will trace the connection between our eyes, our brain, and our genes.
- Children will be able to make their own ‘germs’, take part in a ‘handwashing dance’, and pretend to be doctors with real clinical equipment at the Explore the Body stall, run by medical students from Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS).
- Professor Alison Sinclair and Drs Michelle West, Erika Mancini, and John Armstrong (Biochemistry) will be challenging people to decode genomes at the DNA Detectives stall, where there will also be an exploration of how DNA is wrapped and unwrapped as different information is needed.
- The Mathematical Madness stall, run by members of Sussex’s Mathematics Department, will demonstrate that there’s more to maths than adding up. Activities at this stall will include making giant bubbles, predicting where a double-pendulum will swing, and finding out how to win your dream car using the power of maths.
Mathematical Madness will also return for the festival’s second headline event, the Big Science Weekend (28 February-1 March).
Other Sussex contributions to the Big Science Weekend include:
- Drs Paul Graham (Evolution, Behaviour and Environment) and Thomas Nowotny (Informatics) will be presenting the Bee Pilot stall, where members of the audience can see the world through the eyes of a bee. Expect lots of laughs as participants don virtual-reality headsets and attempt to navigate the bee’s blurry, low-resolution world.
- Professor Antonella De Santo and Drs Fabrizio Salvatore, Lily Asquith and Iacopo Vivarelli (Physics) will join researchers from the University of Birmingham and CERN at the Beyond the Higgs Boson stall. With the help of a cloud chamber and a set of knitted ‘particles’, the physicists will delve deep into the secrets of dark matter and supersymmetry.
For those interested in the spiritual side of science, the Festival includes two ‘Sunday Assemblies’ – non-religious gatherings that aim to uplift and inspire. Professor Anil Seth (Informatics) is guest speaker at the first Sunday Assembly on 8 February, while Professor Maggie Boden (Informatics) will speak at the second on 22 February.
On 12 February festival-goers will be able to explore the dark side of science at Music for Curious Minds: Dark Formations, a multi-media programme performed by the University of Sussex Symphony Orchestra, integrating historical film and witness testimonies about WWII bombings and Hiroshima.
Plague! (11 February) will see Professors Bobbie Farsides and Melanie Newport from BSMS engaging in a discussion with bioartist Anna Dimitriu about Ebola, drug resistance and humanity’s fear of an oncoming plague.