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I’m a Moderator, Get Me Out of Here!

23 Mar

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been helping out with I’m a Scientist, Get Me Out of Here – a science engagement project that takes place via the magical medium of the internet.

The two-week event sees scientists being grilled by hundreds of schoolchildren around the country. The students are assigned to a zone (e.g. “Space Zone”, “Quantum Zone”, “Energy Zone”) in which they can send questions to five scientists, as well as taking part in live chats. During the second week, one scientist is voted off each day, and each zone’s winner receives 500 shiny pounds to spend on a science engagement project of their choice.

My job as moderator was to help manage the questions and make sure the live chats ran smoothly (at least, as smoothly as you’d expect when a class full of hyperactive schoolkids is let loose on the internet). For this event, there were eight zones, plus another six zones in a sister project running for the first time (I’m An Engineer…). This meant A LOT of questions and live chats. In fact, working on the questions was sometimes like painting the Forth Bridge – you’d put a batch through only for the students to send through 50 more.

But the sheer brilliance of the questions prevented this from ever getting boring. There were questions about flying pigs, questions about ethics, questions about juggling, questions about Super Mario, and lots of questions about bodily fluids. There were questions about whether or not the world is going to end (general verdict: probably not anytime soon), and questions about whether or not aliens exist (general verdict: possibly, but the universe is so big that we might never meet them).

And there were also some brilliantly unique questions that only kids could come up with – the sorts of questions that are simple and profound at the same time. Here are some of my favourites from the past two weeks (click on the images to read the scientists’ answers):

Is there a gene for liking or disliking marmite?

Where does time go?

Is it true you can die from a broken heart?

If a turtle loses his shell is he homeless or naked?

For more great questions, read this lovely blog post by Adam Stevens, winning scientist in the Space Zone and one half of the legendary Team Tash.

Cosmology meets The Beatles

9 Nov

The amusing tale of four scientists who tried to shoehorn The Beatles into their cosmology paper:

This is from the Sixty Symbols collection of physics videos filmed by Brady Haran, a video journalist based in Nottingham, UK.

These videos have been going down a treat on YouTube, and it’s easy to see why – it’s pretty rare to see physics explained in such a personable, engaging way. I’m also probably a little bit biased, as I spent my halcyon undergraduate days in the Nottingham Uni physics department.

If physics isn’t your bag, Brady has also filmed video series on chemistry (Periodic Table of Videos), theology (Bibledex), food (Foodskey), language (Words of the World), and, erm, trees! He also recently launched two new projects about maths (Numberphile) and astronomy (Deep Sky Videos). Phew! To call this man prolific wouldn’t do him justice…

I can haz physicz videos?

10 Oct

Every quantum physicist’s favourite feline, Schrödinger’s cat, used to make about as much sense to me as this photo:

Philippe Halsman's 1948 photo of Salvador Dalí, some flying cats, and a chair

But things are now a great deal clearer, thanks to this excellent “Minute Physics” animation:

And here’s an explanation of the science behind this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, won by Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess for their mind-bending discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up.

Lots of other equally awesome animations can be viewed over on the Minute Physics YouTube channel.

Science films galore

28 Jun

I stumbled upon SciCast a few weeks ago – a treasure-trove of short, homemade films about science; a bit like YouTube with more Petri dishes and less cats on treadmills.

Every year, SciCast runs a competition to encourage new entries from anyone who fancies flexing their creative muscles. Nominees for the 2011 awards will apparently be announced soon. In the meantime, here’s my favourite film so far: an off-the-wall celebration of time which won a SciCast award in 2009.

'It's About Time' by Andrew Hanson

Dancing Pendulums

4 May

Richard Wiseman calls this the most beautiful video ever. He might not be too far wrong…

“Fifteen uncoupled simple pendulums of monotonically increasing lengths dance together to produce visual traveling waves, standing waves, beating, and random motion.”