The Euroscience Open Forum is over for this year. The 1500 participants are starting to scatter out of Munich. But they´ll meet again in two years — in Barcelona, for ESOF2008.
It´ll be interesting to see how this fledgling meeting fares in the future.
Last night Alison Abbott, Nature´s senior European correspondent, arranged to take a group of us to see Metamagicum, a show that blends magic with science.
Sound impossible? Well, just imagine a tall German man dressed as a top quark and dancing. Or deriving the equation E=mc2 with a mathematical reference to Munich´s Späten brewery. Read more about Thomas Fraps and Pit Hartling, the men behind Metamagicum, at https://www.metamagicum.com – don´t miss the link to Alison´s excellent feature about them.
After the show, Phil Campbell — Nature´s editor-in-chief — showed off a card trick or two of his own. Who knew…
Thankfully, WHOI´s HROV now has a real name.
That handful of letters refers to the latest thing in deep-sea exploration — a sort of schizophrenic deep-diving submersible that can explore the world´s oceans down to an astonishing 11,000 metres´ depth. It´s run out of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and, until lately, was known by the nasty acronym HROV, for hybrid remotely-operated vehicle.
It´s a machine that can dive off the side of its mother ship tethered to a cable to send back information, or to sail freely through the ocean depths all night and return in the morning to dump its data on board. To honor this split personality, WHOI has now named the thing after mythology´s Nereus — a god with the tail of a fish and torso of a man.
Nereus should begin exploring the oceans in early 2007. For more information, check out Oceanus magazine.
One of today´s featured speakers, Syrian philosopher Sadik al-Azm, wasn´t able to make it out of the Middle East to give his keynote presentation. But he did get to an internet cafe and email it in. So Wim Blockmans of the Netherlands read aloud al-Azm´s lecture on “Islam and the science-religion debate in modern times”. With the focus here on European science, it´s a shame a leading Middle Eastern voice was missing.
But his absence was understandable. Universities in Beirut and Haifa are closed as well. We can only hope things improve, and soon.
Gerry Gilmore, an astrophysicst at Cambridge University, gave a lunchttime talk in the aviation hall of the Deutsches Museum today. He seemed unfazed by the breadth of his topic: the entire history and future of the universe. Then again, his job title suggests he´d be up for the challenge: He´s a professor of “experimental philosophy”: https://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~gil/.
For 50 minutes, Gilmore did his best to bring cosmology down to earth. Among the tidbits of his talk:
– “The top pop song in 1931 was about general relativity,” he says. Check out the lyrics from “As Time Goes By,” made famous in the movie Casablanca — without the key references to Einstein in the early verses: https://www.reelclassics.com/Movies/Casablanca/astimegoesby-lyrics.htm.
– Isaac Newton predicted that the sun´s gravity could bend light, long before Einstein said the same thing.
– If you squashed the Milky Way galaxy down to be as flat as a sheet of paper, it would, remarkably, have the same density of that sheet of paper (around 80 grams per square metre). It would just be a really, really, really big shset of paper.
And the learning goes on…
Here´s something to mark on your planner for the middle of next year: The possible first sighting of a earthlike planet orbiting another star.
On 20 October, France plans to launch its Corot mission (https://smsc.cnes.fr/COROT/Fr/) to search for extrasolar planets. It´ll stare at a field of a few thousand stars for 150 days, hoping to glimpse the dimming of light caused when a planet crosses in front of the star it orbits.
Why 150 days? That´s as long as astronomers can keep it pointed in one direction, says project scientist Malcolm Friedlund. So after its October launch, expect a month to get the telescope up and running, and then 150 days for the first set of observations.
“We´re hoping in May or June of 2007 to be able to anounce the first rocky planets around other stars,” Fridlund told the ESOF meeting today.
For more on Corot and other extrasolar planet missions, try this link (Nature subscribers only, sorry!): https://www.nature.com/news/2006/060703/full/442006a.html.
You can read more about Fridlund´s personal feelings about extrasolar planet studies here:
Virtual reality, once a techno-toy for the curious and wealthy, is becoming an important tool for helping people cope with stressful situations. Here at the ESOF meeting in Munich, a pair of researchers presented some intriguing new work on how to treat phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder using virtual reality.
One project helps people cope better with the stress of earthquakes. Ioannis Tarnanas, a psychologist in Thessalonica, Greece (https://users.auth.gr/~ioannist/), somehow talks subjects into strapping on a pair of virtual reality glasses and experiencing a virtual earthquake. He says it´s useful for kids in particular, who can take a trip through a safe environment such as their school and then see it in ruins. They can be scared during the five-minute process, he says, but data suggest that those who have gone through the training are far less likely to suffer psychological damage if and when a real earthquake hits. Tarnanas has even used this to teach children with Downs syndrome how to cope with a quake, he says.
The EuroScience Open Forum (https://www.esof2006.org) isn´t like most of the science meetings I´m used to attending. Normally I´d be sitting in three hours of the latest research into paleoclimatology. Here, the focus is on celebrating European science and bringing it to the public in a most informal fashion.
Witness just a few of the wonders on display at ESOF: Mysterix, the interactive “science truck” where anyone can perform physics and biology experiments. “Pretzel with the Prof,” an informal chance to get career advice from leading researchers in the sunny Science Biergarten here. And the “Bremen Profmobile,” a moving science platform where, if you feel so moved, you can lecture about your research for 15 to 20 minutes to the public.
Alexandra Witze, senior news and features editor for Nature, will be in Munich from July 15-19. Check back here for her postings from the EuroScience Open Forum, a kind of pan-European festival of science.
She is particularly looking forward to filing from the Science Biergarten.