Broadcast
Bombs, drugs, ‘sniffer’ flies…these were the three elements that turned Professor Thomas Nowotny’s research on how to develop an electronic nose into Sussex’s most popular news for October.
Jacqui Bealing,
Senior Press Officer
The BBC World Service’s serious science programme ‘Science in Action’ ran with the story, as did the Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Engineer, The Sun and more than 50 other print or online news providers. Thomas was also filmed by BBC South East Today – with the story becoming the evening’s (16 Oct) ‘special report’.
Sometimes it’s the academic themselves who becomes the focus of the story. Professor Maggie Boden joined the legion of great thinkers to be profiled for BBC Radio 4’s ‘The Life Scientific’. Maggie discussed her life’s work exploring the themes and ideas of artificial intelligence and its relationship with philosophy.
Also in the spotlight for her career this month was Professor Mariana Mazzucato. News that she had received the first New Statesman SPERI prize in political economy for her work on the “entrepreneurial state” and innovation in the public sector made the pages of (naturally) the New Statesman as well as regional coverage in the Argus.
An accolade of a rather different sort was given to Dr Richard de Visser, who was dubbed ‘Dr Lad Points’ after being the academic expert in a BBC Radio 1 documentary looking at the new phenomenon of how young men regard and rate each other’s behaviour.
Meanwhile, Dr Ted Morrow has become one of the leading commentators on whether the government should give the go-ahead to a new ‘three-parent baby’ IVF treatment. Ted joined a BBC Radio 5 live discussion on it before giving evidence to a government select committee on the issue.
The School of English have also had some notable media coverage this month. Dr Justyna Robinson talked on BBC Radio 4’s ‘The World Tonight’ about whether world leaders should give speeches in languages that are not their mother tongue, Professor Andrew Hadfield discussed Shakespeare’s attitude towards the Irish on BBC Radio Foyle, and Dr Minoli Salgado talked to BBC Radio Sussex about the launch of her debut novel at the Royal Festival Hall.
But the story that undoubtedly created the warmest media glow this month was the Students’ Union’s mass ‘kiss in’ in a Brighton supermarket where a Sussex student and her girlfriend were asked to leave after a peck on the cheek. The unusual protest sparked headlines across the globe, with one of the best being the Argus’ “It started with a kiss…”
A fuller round-up of October’s media coverage will be online in Sussex in the News next week.