Well this blog brings me nearly to then end of my week at the British Science Festival in Newcastle, and what a fantastic week it’s been. I’ve been immersed in the sights and sounds of so much varied science and had some great discussions on really quite a wide range of different science topics. I’ve been officially working for the Guardian whilst here as part of my British Science Association Media Fellowship and I think it’s rounded off a great experience that I’ve had in this role over the summer. I’d love to come back and do it all again next year…and the event will move to Birmingham so I may well go although whether it’s in the capacity as a scientist, journalist or science communicator I am not yet sure. The British Science Festival staff here have been amazing helping us to set up interviews and generally looking after us. I have so many highlights (one of them being a robot that delivered us beer) but I will just summarise here the work I did along with Jason Phipps from the Guardian putting together some podcast material for the Guardian Science Weekly.
The science we covered in the podcast interviews has been very varied to say the least and on one day I had to switch to three different subjects for different interviews within a 2 hour period. I learnt that preparation is key, as long as I’d done my planning and thinking beforehand around the general questions I wanted to ask, I found my brain switched with no trouble to each interview and the conversation, on the whole, flowed fairly well. I didn’t find it too scary and actually quite enjoyed sitting in the presenter/interviewer seat for a change.
Do cosmetics really help our skin?
I kicked off my first podcast by interviewing Prof Desmond Tobin after I saw his talk about the ‘Science of Cosmetics’. He gave a really interesting insight into how the skin reacts to different beauty creams and whether it’s worth paying £650 for a pot of anti-aging cream. I think the conclusion was that we aren’t really sure but that some ‘real’ science does indeed go into the production of many beauty products. However, it might be hard for the public to work out which products had actually proven their ingredients worked, and unless an independent lab had tested the product then we couldn’t be sure. He mentioned about the use of nanoparticles in products and this is a field that is not very well understood at present (they only recently defined the term ‘nano’ in this area to mean particles as less than 40nm because these are small enough to actually enter into the skin). It seems that so little is understood about nano-sized particles that it might be better to avoid them for now. But in a largely unregulated industry the consumer may have no idea that the product they are buying contains these ingredients as companies do not need to say on the packet!
The Sun (the celestial object, not the newspaper, they aren’t reporting from the festival this week).
I also interviewed a physicist, Dr James McLaughlin, about his research on the sun and this was following on from a presentation he gave in Newcastle Central Library. Despite being a space scientist myself I found that there was lots I didn’t know about the sun, especially that if you were an astronaut in space and a solar flare came your way that it could kill you instantly. Interesting thoughts for the 200,000 people that have put themselves forward for a potential mission to Mars. At this same library event a second presentation was given by a musician who had done some really fun work of capturing the sounds of the Solar System. I heard a pulsar and the Cassini spacecraft travelling around Saturn. This was really fascinating stuff.
Reproductive health, how long can women leave it before considering having children?
I really enjoyed speaking to Prof Mary Herbert about the aging of reproductive eggs. Her rather stark warning to women was to have children young – meaning early 20’s – as reproductive health really drops off after 35. Rather sobering but potentially not very helpful advice. The press conference highlighted the fact that many women are simply not ‘choosing’ to leave it so late to have children because it is a complicated issue and there are many other factors involved in these decisions. We discussed on the podcast what could be done about this prevalence for older mothers and she suggested that we needed a total change in social and political circles to allow career-driven women, and others, to have children younger and still maintain a solid career path. But perhaps this is a much bigger debate than I have time to give it here so we’ll move on.
Designer Vaginas: Centrefold project
And we’ve moved on to a fairly controversial event. I’m so glad I went along, on a bit of a whim, to this film and debate because I learnt an awful lot about this topic. I had no idea that labioplasty surgery was so prevalent (around 2000 operations on the NHS in the last 2 years). The event I went to was an animated film about three women who had surgery and it was followed by a debate around the subject. I plan to write a longer blog piece about this because it really deserves some space but we got to speak to the film producer, Ellie Land, and one of the doctors, Lih-Mei Liao, involved in the film about this subject for the podcast. Despite the early start we had to make because the doctor was due back in London for her clinic, we had a great discussion. Both the women were really inspiring and I’m sure we could’ve chatted about the topic all day had we the opportunity. Here’s the link to the wider Centrefold Project where the movie is available for free. It’s fantastic and really thought provoking so I suggest you take a look (but it might not be for very young children).
So many other highlights but too much to cover here. I suggest that if you’re interested then sign up for some talks at next year’s festival. Anyway, I’ll be a little sad to leave the press office this week but its back to the science for me now.