In case any readers in Guildford are interested, you might like to know that Guildford Café Scientifique long ago serendipitously scheduled an event this evening on the LHC. The speaker is Prof Nick Evans, from our Sepnet partner institution the University of Southampton. More details are available on the Café Scientifique web site.
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It definitely felt like Saturday as I waited for the bus from the hotel at 7 this morning. The roads were much emptier, and the bus timetable at the stop told me that the most frequent service didn’t actually start until 8 at the weekend. Still, I got into town quickly, and failed to get […]
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Hello, keen followers of my exploits at the EuroScience Open Forum in Dublin. I mentioned in my Day 1 post that I thought the name of the event was a bit strange to me. Well, today, they have had their "policy" day, in which a large number of the events did not concern themselves with […]
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I skilfully navigated the bus network this morning to get in to the conference venue with time to spare for my first event. It was organised by the UK charity Sense About Science and was organised as a kind of career development event for young scientists. Peer review (examination of your work by others in […]
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I’m in Dublin as a delegate at something called the Euroscience Open Forum. To me, it is a science festival, but in typical European style, it has a rather strange name. It consists of a series of talks, discussions, debates, workshops, plays, poetry readings and much else besides, covering all areas of science, from my […]
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The image to the left is a San Diego (in southern California, USA) beach scene painted using differently coloured bacteria, by Nathan Shaner and Paul Steinbach. A protein that fluoresces green was discovered in jellyfish. If you insert the gene for this protein into bacteria, then they fluoresce green. Then you can paint in green with these bacteria, using a plate covered by a layer of food that the bacteria will grow on. This green fluorescent protein has now been engineered to produce blue, yellow, etc versions so you can make and then paint with bacteria with all these colours.
Now, this is very pretty, but you may be thinking it is about as much use as these officials UEFA have put behind the goal lines in Euro2012 matches. This is not so. What reminded me of this painting is a meeting I had with my biologist collaborators at King’s College London.
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