Recently in Public awareness Category

In other news, the BBC has another article on how young Britons aren't interested in science. Surprise, surprise, there's a gender imbalance too:

The survey also suggested there was a gender divide: young men were far more interested in new inventions and technology, while young women were attracted to subjects such as the Earth, the environment and the human body.

Now this at least I can vouch for in terms of my own experience. I'm in the process of moving from the engineering and technology dominated field of radio propagation to something more akin to climate modelling. And on the way I've noticed that there is a lot more women working in climate change. I went to a day's introductory course on the Met Office Unified Model and was pleasantly surprised to see the course attendees were pretty much 50:50 male:female split. Nothing at all like the radio courses I've been to, where the ratio was more like 10:1 (or worse).

Comedian Helen Keen

On Friday I visited Edinburgh to see a space-themed comedy gig at the Fringe: It is rocket science!, by Helen Keen, a former winner of Channel 4's New Comedy Writing Initiative Award. It'll feature on the back page of next month's Interactions, so I don't want to give too much away.

It tracks the development of spaceflight, and the characters involved, from German rockets to the near future, using costumes and shadow puppets to help explain some of the science involved -- all accurate, which you'd expect from a show given an Institute outreach grant and ably assisted by a real-life rocket-scientist, Chris Welch of Kingston University.

One thing that Helen said that I particularly picked up on was that she'd first become interested in astronomy, as a child, simply by looking at the sky, and added that growing up in East Yorkshire, with the nearest town being Hull, in the days before the internet, there was very little else to do. Probably thousands of children became interested in space in exactly the same way: I certainly did, growing up in similarly dull Durham.

But does this happen anymore? Just as Pro Evo Soccer on the Playstation means fewer kids actually play football, are children going to be too busy using MySpace to ever look upwards? Or, to put it another way: How can we utilise the internet as a substitute? There are a few interesting sites to get the public involved in real astronomy -- remote-control telescope "Slooh" and the recently completed Galaxy Zoo spring to mind -- but none aimed specifically at young people.

ISIS Second Target Station

Occasionally there are significant scientific breakthroughs that general punters hear very little of. This week there was a breakthrough that the newspapers and news broadcasters barely touched, yet it was a major milestone for research across a range of crucial research areas, such as clean energy and the environment, pharmaceuticals and health care through to nanotechnology, materials engineering and IT.