The BA Festival of Science: Wrap-up (or Indulge me a minute)
Posted by Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
So as the press centre winds down, and the festival comes to a close, I thought I would quickly wrap up the festival through the adventures of the other BA Media Fellows before we all go back to our day jobs.
Emma Byrne started the week at an early morning press conference on monkeys, where one of the scientists started jumping around and hitting things to illustrate what constitutes aggressive behaviour in these animals. None of the other press conferences were quite as exciting.
Elizabeth Mitchell covered the Venus project – which lets people explore hidden treasures at deep underwater archaeological sites from their own virtual submarine.
Several of the fellows took the opportunity to report on the topics relevant to their research fields, with Frances Harris reporting on food policy in Britain and Lorna Dawson reporting on the role of earthworms in cleaning up soil polluted with lead and copper.
Many of the stories were from the press conferences which filled our mornings, like Marcus Pearce’s story of the weakness of steel, Jennifer Carpenter’s article on a new touch-sensitive nerve fibre responsible for the sense of pleasure from stroking, and Ashok Jansari’s piece on how the unreliability of memories makes them a serious problem when it comes to investigating crimes.
A few, like me, were allowed the freedom to wander the festival and see the other sessions. Angela Hodges wrote about modelling of the spread of epidemics based on tracking mobile phone movements, and Matt Rooney has a piece coming out next Thursday covering some of the debate at the festival on blue skies research.
And in the middle of all this we got to see the LHC hullabaloo from the journalist side of things.
We have all had a wonderful time. But now it is back to the laboratory for me, at least until next year when the festival comes to me at the University of Surrey.
Comments
All around the world a lot of Festivals of Science are organized to discuss all arguments, even regarding animals and their health conditions. Unfortunately, at my best knowledge, nobody has organized jet a Festival of Science in order to prevent CANCER, solid or liquid, in individuals, rationally selected, i.e., involved by Oncological Terrain (OT) and OT-dependent Inherited Real Risk, located in one biological Systems (For instance:See http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2008/03/this_is_your_brain_on_diesel.html#c92279 ; http://network.nature.com/forums/italy/1196?page=1#reply-3344 ). As a matter of fact, such as enterprise is not expensive, since it requires only a simple stethoscope. Finally, the majority of these patients, "silent" from the clinical view-points, heal under a specific treatment, based on Coniugated-Melatonin, NIR-LED applications, and proper DIET (Mediterranean Diet), ethymologically speaking, including physical excercises, avoiding tobacco smoke, a.s.o.
Posted by: Sergio Stagnaro | September 15, 2008 09:00 AM