Science Festival April 2025
Join us for a super science Saturday as we welcome leading science communicators headlining our Science Festival 2025!
In addition our stellar line up of talks below, planetarium shows will run throughout the morning.
Line UP:
Inside Your Brain – Ten Discoveries That Reveal How the Brain Works
Lucy Ann Unwin, Caswell Barry
A comedic journey through science history explores ten mind-bending accidents and experiments that take us inside the brain to discover how it works. Professor of Neuroscience Caswell Barry and children’s author Lucy Ann Unwin will take you on an irreverent gallop through history to uncover ten groundbreaking discoveries
The human brain is famously complex and difficult to understand. The brain is also essential to how we function—so much so, that you can’t simply poke a stick at it to see what happens. However, if you accidentally poked a stick through your brain, it turns out there’s a lot you can learn… READ MORE…
Elusive – How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass
Frank Close
In the summer of 1964, a reclusive young professor at the University of Edinburgh wrote two scientific papers which have come to change our understanding of the most fundamental building blocks of matter and the nature of the universe. Peter Higgs posited the existence an almost infinitely tiny particle – today known as the Higgs boson – which is the key to understanding why particles have mass, and but for which atoms and molecules could not exist.
Frank Close traces the course of much of twentieth-century physics from the inception of quantum field theory to the completion of the ‘standard model’ of particles and forces, and the pivotal role of Higgs’s idea in this evolution. Drawing on conversations with Higgs over a decade (a figure generally as elusive as his particle) this is a superb study of a scientist and his era – and of how scientific knowledge advances. READ MORE…
NATURE’S MEMORY
Jack Ashby
Zoologist Jack Ashby shares hidden stories behind the world’s iconic natural history museums, from enormous, mounted whale skeletons to cabinets of impossibly tiny insects.
Look closely and all is not as it seems: these museums are not as natural, Ashby shows us, as we might think. Mammals dominate the displays, for example, even though they make up less than 1 per cent of species; there are many more male specimens than females; and often a museum’s most popular draw – the dinosaur skeletons – are not actually real. Over 99 per cent of museum collections are held in immense, unseen storehouses. And it’s becoming clear that these institutions have not been as honest about their complex histories as they should be. Yet natural history museums are also the only museums that can save the world – it is just starting to be understood that their vast collections are indispensable resources in the fight against biodiversity loss and climate catastrophe. READ MORE…
How Life Works
Philip Ball
Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong. Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living systems, tissues, and organisms. We can reprogram cells, for instance, to carry out new tasks and grow into structures not seen in the natural world. Some researchers believe that ultimately we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined. How Life Works is a sweeping journey into this new frontier of the nature of life, a realm that will reshape our understanding of life as we know it. READ MORE…
