BIG e-news : Issue 4 - January 2008

Well… Happy New Year and all that! Now the festive season is well and truly behind us we can look forward to other exciting things such as the imminent arrival of a shiny new addition to our wallets – the BIG membership card – which will be landing on your doorsteps over the coming weeks. Please check your contact details are correct on the website members’ database so that your card arrives at the right place! Remember, BIG exists to serve the needs of its individual members and we need to know what our members want. We welcome comments and articles, long or short, to include in future bulletins, so get scrawling now!

Sarah Vining
BIG Administrator

BIG Event 2008

It’s been six months since last year's BIG Event which means that the planning for this year's Event is really beginning to shift up a gear. As I'm sure you're all aware the Event will be taking place in Wrexham in July. There will be a call for session proposals very soon so get your thinking caps on and watch out for the announcement on BIG Chat later this month.

BIG Bursary Winner Announced!

Congratulations to Ben Brown from Explorer Dome for winning this year's BIG Professional Development Bursary Award.

Ben says, "It is with great pleasure that I take on the mantle of responsibility that comes with spending BIG's 'Free Money'. Presenters like me often find ourselves in a 'jack-of-all-trades' situation - striving to present authoritatively on a range of topics from physics, biology and chemistry through to wild cards like comparative world religions. It can be difficult to keep standards of scientific accuracy high and, while a certain amount of carefully placed blagging can work wonders, there's no substitute for really knowing your subject.

I came into this business in 1997 with a Zoology degree and now find myself presenting complex cosmological concepts to KS4/5 students and adults. The concept of RIGOUR was taught to me some years ago by one of our more astronomically-minded presenters whose tolerance for mis-information was low. Consequently our shows included regular presenter-to-presenter debates, which audiences loved and which greatly improved the rigorous accuracy of our material. The point of rigour is not to make things sound complicated, but just to avoid saying things you don't know are true, or which are not well supported by evidence.

I think we can all benefit from attention to Rigour and I'll be using my BIG Bursary to fund a distance-learning astronomy course with Liverpool John Moores University. If I'm a good boy and do all my homework then I'll be in a far better position to stand up and fight for the RIGOROUS corner at the BIG Event 2008. See you there!"

The Human Torch

Steve Owens, Science Education Co-ordinator, Glasgow Science Centre

You should never play with fire. But we’re not playing, are we? We’re responsible adults, right? Right. So how about this little experiment to impress and amaze your friends and family?

What you’ll need:

• A responsible friend
• A cylinder of butane/propane gas (camping gas), along with a suitable valve (the nozzle from a blow-torch attachment is good)
• A length of rubber tube attached to the butane/propane gas valve
• A bucket of soapy water
• A lighter and some splints
• Two pairs of safety goggles

You and your friend will need to wear goggles throughout. Have your friend roll up their sleeve and submerge as much of that hand and forearm as they can fit into the bucket of soapy water.

Then bubble some of the butane/propane through the tube into the soapy water, forming a froth of flammable gas. Turn the gas off and have your friend scoop up, with their wet hand, a very small dollop of froth into the palm of their hand (a 4cm diameter dollop is more than enough – any more and it’ll burn your skin!)

Have them hold their arm out straight, directly away from themselves, away from the cylinder, and towards you. They should have their hand palm up, nice and flat, fingers together. With a lit splint, touch the top of the pile of bubbles in their hand.

The bubbles will burn, enveloping their hand in a flaming fireball, and a pillar of fire will leap about one metre into the air.

They will feel nothing except a slight warming of their skin! Why? Well, the burning gas only has a certain amount of heat energy, and before any of that heat can start burning their skin it has to first evaporate the water coating. There isn’t enough heat next to their skin for long enough to evaporate all of the water.

Safety

• Watch where you light the bubbles. Take care to keep the splint flame away from skin
• Keep all flames away from the butane/propane cylinder
• Disable any nearby fire sensors if doing this in an enclosed area
• You need to do your own risk assessment of this demo!

The Science

Energy density of butane/propane gas ~ 107 MJ m^-3
Approx. volume of butane/propane burned in demo ~ 3 x 10-4 m³
Approx. energy released from burning butane/propane in demo ~ 30kJ

Latent heat of vaporisation of water = 2260 kJ kg^-1
Approx. volume of water coating hand ~ 20ml ~ 0.02m³
Approx. energy required to vaporise water on hand ~ 40kJ

Safety - important note: These notes give an outline of demonstrations intended for suitably qualified people, not the public. As such, some safety precautions may not be listed. The demonstrator should make a full risk assessment before use and ensure that the demonstration is safe to carry out.

Photo: Andy Buchanan

Hong Kong’s Science Alive Festival

Helen Lloyd, science made simple

Members of BIG took part in the annual ‘Science Alive’ Festival in Hong Kong, held by the British Council and the Hong Kong Science Museum.

Helen Lloyd and Becky Holmes from Cardiff-based science made simple ran 5 teachers’ workshops entitled ‘Science at the Olympics’. With the Olympics in Beijing and Hong Kong next year the ideas about teaching science through sport were very well received. The teachers really got into the spirit of the thing, with the ‘Hong Kong Egg Olympics’ being the grand finale of the event – I have never dropped and bashed so many eggs in so little time – and some survived!

Steve Mesure of the Creative Science Consultancy gave multiple performances of his show ‘Beautiful Music, Horrible Sounds’ with the help of translator and performer William Yip. School Children loved watching their friends being baffled by the ‘confusaphone’ and seeing William play the giant whoopee harmonium.

Karen Bultitude and Laura Strieth from the University of the West of England and Laura Grant from the University of Liverpool ran multiple sessions, ranging from their well-known and popular show ‘Our Planet – Our Future’ to a ‘Meet the Gene Machine’ Science Café.

Despite working hard, we managed to find time for a fair bit of eating and drinking and even checking out the night market!

How to argue with … Young Earth Creationists in 300 words

Mark Lewney, Freelance Science Presenter

Errr … what?
Hang on, you actually believe …
Umm, … no, you’ve got to be kidding me.
Aren’t you?
Please. Please tell me you’re just doing this for some attention.
Ah. You’re not.
OK. Err …

Right, supernovas. God creates light shows of distant star explosions which never actually happened, does He?

Oh. The speed of light was much faster in the past. And from E=mc², I suppose Adam set off a nuclear explosion whenever he lit a fire.

OK, half-lives. Yes, radiocarbon dating only works for 60,000 years. But what about Iron 60 or other isotopes with half-lives of a million years or more - where are they?

Oh. God deliberately made the Earth without them. How annoying of Him.

Right then, the fossil record. You never find a primate, seagull or any modern bird or mammal below a line of Iridium under the very top layers, and you never find a dinosaur above that line.

Ah, the Flood. Stupid dinosaurs drowned first while the clever old mammals found higher ground, dying later. And pterosaurs conveniently forgot how to fly while birds didn’t. In any case, the Flood churned up the Earth’s rocks so much that the Grand Canyon formed in a few years, or even weeks, after which the water quickly disappeared. South America sped away from Africa faster than London traffic. And throughout this whole apocalyptic tempest, a wooden boat containing two of every animal, including dinosaurs, didn’t sink.

You know what? I could not argue with you in 300 years, let alone 300 words.

300 years ago, people still took Chronicles, Psalms, Isaiah and Ecclesiastes literally and held that the Earth remained fixed while the sun moved around it: same facts, different starting points.

The thing is… your starting point is that you’re BARKING MENTAL.

Science Communication Masterclass Revisited

Karen Bultitude, Science Communication Unit at the University of the West of England

The Science Communication Unit at the University of the West of England, Bristol, working in partnership with At-Bristol, recently hosted their first Masterclass in Science Communication.

When we first proposed the idea back in the summer many members of BIG expressed interest, and suggested ideas on how it might be run or what content they would like to see, so we figured it was about time to report back on how it all worked out…

The week-long Masterclass was held in November 2007, and was hosted within At-Bristol. 30 delegates took part, with a high international representation including Portugal, Belgium, Austria, Germany and the Slovak Republic, as well as recruits from throughout the UK. The breadth of experience of the participants – representing universities, research councils, science centres, charities, freelance writers and industry – meant that the discussions during the sessions were dynamic and wide ranging.

The Masterclass was designed to provide a professional introduction to science communication, and covered topics ranging from ‘Current Drivers for Science Communication’ to ‘Science and the Media’ and ‘Finding Funds’. The delegates particularly appreciated the practical nature of the workshop activities, where they were for example asked to pitch an idea to a business for funding, or critique a mock evaluation questionnaire.

Delegate feedback was extremely positive; participants felt they had worked hard and got a lot out of the week. One delegate even wrote to us afterwards saying :

Just wanted to drop you a quick line to say both hello and also THANK you for such an amazing time at the science communication course last week. I had such a brilliant time and met a lot of really great people. It was informative and interactive, and honestly for the first time ever I came away from professional development thinking that what I achieved and what you marketed were one and the same- the course certainly did what it said on the tin!

A big thanks to the rest of the delivery team for making the week such a success, including Frank Burnet, Emma Weitkamp, Clare Wilkinson & Laura Strieth (all SCU at UWE, Bristol), Rebeca Medrano Arnaez (At-Bristol), Laura Grant and Malcolm Love.

The SCU are now planning to hold another Masterclass, to run in the first week of July 2008. BIG members may also be interested to know that as part of the soon-to-be-released membership card scheme we will be offering discounts to BIG members to attend. Watch this space for details!

Time for a change?

Jenny Shipway is now Planetarium Manager at INTECH Science Centre & Planetarium ...

There are lots of lovely new jobs out there on the BIG website so please don’t forget to take a sneaky peak. You can also get your opportunities seen by over 600 professionals in the science communications industry by adding your own job vacancies - free of charge.

With best wishes and a Happy New Year from the BIG Executive 2008…

Noel Jackson, Chair
Karen Bultitute, Vice-Chair
Rachel Mason, Treasurer
James Piercy, Secretary
Savita Custead, Event Organiser
and Sarah Vining, Administrator

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