From hidden engineering on the nano scale to origami designs for engineering structures, explore an exhibition of astounding photographs taken by staff and students from the Department of Engineering.
A very small table-top display about the work of the Darwin Correspondence Project, which is publishing all the available letters to and from Charles Darwin.
UPDATE: A new drop-in element for older children has been added to this event. Do come along.
Join STEM Team East to spin and orbit into physics. Learn why yo-yos spin up and down, spinning tops precess, water vortex in a plug hole and what these have to do with MRI scans, black holes and satellite orbits around the Earth.
CHaOS student volunteers are running a series of talks filled with exciting demonstrations! You'll find more crashes, bangs, and squelches here if you find that our hands on events are full, or if you want even more CHaOS at the Science Festival!
In this talk we'll explore the ten scientific reasons why ice-cream is the world's coolest dessert. We will also make two gallons of delicious ice-cream for the audience to try, using the ultra-fast cooling power of liquid nitrogen!
This exciting new show by science junkies Huw James and Greg Foot uncovers the physiology and sports engineering that make an athelete a champion. Live on stage, we'll use sensors attached to exercise machines to see what happens as you start to sweat and struggle to get enough oxygen into your muscles.
Did you know your body hosts millions of microbes? Did you know that millions of proteins make your body function? Come to the Department of Pathology to see the miniature world that is your body.
Find out how new medicines are discovered and translated from the laboratory into the clinic through hands on interactive stations and demonstrations. We will be showing how medicines treat common illnesses such as diabetes.
Join scientists from MRC Human Nutrition Research on a scientific journey that takes you from the identification of fats in a blood sample, through to how these fats are related to your diet and then on to how they impact on your health.
Measure your walk stride length or elbow joint range of motion by using a video camera and computer software. You can compare these to a horse or a dog with footage previously captured. Or, guess how fast different animals move with our interactive quiz!
Antibodies are our natural defences against infections and other diseases, but they can also be made into therapeutic medicines which bind target molecules on the cell surface. At the MedImmune stand you can build your own model of the cell surface and make a model therapeutic antibody that can bind to it. Also, dress up as a scientist and have your picture taken!
See how modern science is providing new understanding of flower colours and iridescence, see a bumblebee arena, laser remote sensing for conservation, computer game models of plant adaptation and innovative breeding methods.
The Cambridge Science Centre team has hidden some of our future hands on exhibits for you to discover and play with across the Cambridge Science Festival. Join us at the Information marquee to start your hands on science trail - will you find them all?
Join the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Research Institute, and put on a lab coat - come and run a DNA gel, compete in a pipetting challenge and examine some tissue down a microscope.
What makes us human? Just how similar are we to each other and other organisms? How may your genome affect your health ? How can computers help us to understand genomes? Join staff from the European Bioinformatics Institute and Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute to explore these questions and more…
Have you ever wondered what fat does? We all know that if we eat too much we get fat, but having too little fat is just as unhealthy as having too much. The University of Cambridge Metabolic Research Laboratories will provide hands on activities and games that show you some fabulous facts about fat and why it is so important for our health.
The Department of Engineering invites you to learn how to make a hovercraft move by making a working model. Will it go? Will it travel in a straight line? How fast can you make it go?
The mighty mitochondrion is a special part of every cell where food is converted into fuel for your muscles and nerves. The MRC Mitochondrial Unit invite you to use LEGO® to understand the processes going on in your body and find out how electricity runs through proteins.
Did you know that if you could lay all your blood vessels end-to-end they would stretch over 60,000 miles? That's twice around the world! Find out more about what goes on inside your blood vessels and how you can keep them healthy, with scientists from the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine.
Join the Department of Pharmacology to fish for water fleas (Daphnia) and use a microscope to see their heart, guts, eye and eggs. Perform Daphnia heart-rate experiments with drugs such as caffeine (coffee and cola) alcohol, nicotine and cold medicines.
You can meet the Giant African Land Snails, Giant African Millipedes as well as the Madagascan Hissing Cockroaches! They're safe and fun to handle for ages.
Come and see where the amazing structures of proteins has lead the artist, Jenny Langley. Textiles and prints will be displayed along with sources of inspirations and sketchbooks.
Come and join technologists from Qualcomm and explore augmented reality applications on tablets and mobile devices. Augmented reality lets you see the world around you through a 'magic lens' that reveals surprising, fun and interesting content.
Ages: 9+
Use microscopes to see your own cells and to wonder at the hidden beauty of plants and insects with the help of scientists of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and the Microscopes4Schools project. Test your detective skills with our interactive stereoscope challenge!
Explore the world of stem cells with the MRC Centre for Stem Cell Biology. Along with many games and activities you'll get to put on a labcoat and goggles and use a pipette in a 'wet lab' experiment to see how to feed and care for stem cells on a daily basis.
Join Intel for an exciting array of demos to show what computing technologies can really do. Get involved with augmented reality, learn about eco computing and have loads of fun with some of the most advanced technology!
Dedicated to returning talented scientists and technologists to research positions after a career break taken for family, caring or health reasons. The Trust provides fellowships which are designed to significantly increase employability and remove the disadvantages associated with a career break.
Play your calcium cards right, balance the leaning tower of health, enjoy a ‘trolley dash’ through the EPIC supermarket AND tackle our frenetic fluency game, all whilst learning about the vital role that specific vitamins and minerals play in healthy development.
Come and join scientists from the Hutchison/MRC Research Centre to discover if you can solve the mysteries of how cancer cells first develop, and then grow and spread. Find out about DNA mutations, build a cancer chromosome, and see if you can take on the challenge of killing some cancerous cells.
Join Christopher Lloyd on a whistle-stop tour through the history of life on Earth using a coat of many pockets and a giant wallbook with more than 1,000 species on a four billion year timeline!
Come and explore with us how biostatistics can be used to improve health. Try our four different activities in which your creativity and thinking abilities will help you to solve the challenges we'll give you!
How active are you? Find out how everyday activities compare to being an athlete. How many marathons could you do in a year? Find out how you can make your journeys more active with the MRC Epidemiology Unit.
Enthusiastic students from the CHaOS Science Roadshow help you get to grips with exciting, fascinating and just plain weird experiments that go 'crash', 'bang' and 'squelch'!
Dr Andrew Murray will explore the physiology behind the extraordinary feats of survival that took Scott to the South Pole, Hillary to the summit of Everest and Armstrong to the Moon, and he asks if you could achieve the same with your own remarkable body.
In a series of interactive demonstrations and posters, research groups from the Department will illustrate how their research crosses the boundaries between conventional disciplines. Topics include human memory, learning, addiction and awareness and development.
In this Olympic year come on a walk with the Science Guides and hear all about Cambridge's medal winning scientists, about titanic struggles with the Americans, the sprinting Lords who took on Great Court and the 100 year old mathematician who ran from Cambridge to Ely (and back) daily.
Was the skeleton in your cupboard a man or a woman? What did Neanderthals have for dinner? Science can help archaeologists answer these questions and many others. Learn how by enjoying displays and hands-on activities to discover the secrets revealed by pots, plants, soil, bones and even fossilized poo!
Travel in time with Time Truck! Investigate rocks and minerals, discover dinosaurs and explore earthquake science with hands on activities and demonstrations.
Prepared to get your hands dirty? Don your goggles and come along to the Royal Society of Chemistry stand to get involved in some weird and wonderful experiments and learn some chemistry whilst you are at it.
CHaOS student volunteers are running a series of talks filled with exciting demonstrations! You'll find more crashes, bangs, and squelches here if you find that our hands on events are full, or if you want even more CHaOS at the Science Festival!
Descend into the basement of the Department of Zoology to see how real scientists are using the brains, guts and kidneys of fruit flies to learn more about how our own body works...
Join Christopher Lloyd on a whistle-stop tour through the history of life on Earth using a coat of many pockets and a giant wallbook with more than 1,000 species on a four billion year timeline!
UPDATE: A new drop-in element for older children has been added to this event. Do come along.
Join STEM Team East to spin and orbit into physics. Learn why yo-yos spin up and down, spinning tops precess, water vortex in a plug hole and what these have to do with MRI scans, black holes and satellite orbits around the Earth.
Kate Mummery (Rambert Dance Company Animateur) and Professor Nicky Clayton (Rambert Dance Company's Scientist in Residence) incorporate principles of biology into dance.
Go back in time to glimpse the start of life in the RNA world then move forward to discover the central role of RNA in life today. Learn how RNAs translate the digital information in genes into the unimaginable complexity of proteins and how other small RNAs regulate the process. This interactive event will include experiments, demonstrations, games and fun.
On 17 March NGOs and social enterprises will present problems in international health and development, giving teams of students and researchers a week to find an innovative, viable solution. On 24 March teams will present their solutions to a panel of judges.
How fast do bats fly? What’s the fastest animal on earth? Discover answers to these and loads more amazing ‘animal athlete’ questions. Plus: see snake strike speed, slimy snail strategy, rodent recall and ‘itchy insects – to infinity and beyond’! Junior education team representatives will be on hand with more fun facts.
Discover amazing animal adaptations for land, sea and air. Hands on activities and special displays show how natural selection works, including an 'animal arena' where you can help shape the evolution of our make-believe beasties.
This new exhibition charts the development of evolutionary thought through the 19th century. Discover the origins of Darwin’s big idea in earlier works, and explore the alternative theories that led to some of science’s most impassioned debates.
ThinkCon is back for 2012 a day of talks aim at adults and older teens covering the science and the arts, all the talks are free and open to anyone at the Cambridge Science Festival. Please feel free to pick and choose what interests you. If you do want to come for the day we offer a ticket for £6 which covers the cost of a light lunch and tea.
What happens when you make molecules really really long? They do crazy things and act in unexpected ways. The weird properties of polymers put them at the cutting edge of technology and make them a magician's best friend.
CHaOS student volunteers are running a series of talks filled with exciting demonstrations! You'll find more crashes, bangs, and squelches here if you find that our hands on events are full, or if you want even more CHaOS at the Science Festival!
Descend into the basement of the Department of Zoology to see how real scientists are using the brains, guts and kidneys of fruit flies to learn more about how our own body works...
Space plasma physicist and 'Kiss FM' DJ Martin Archer takes you on a journey into sound with his virtual DJ booth, covering waves, frequency and other principles.
Join philosopher, author, publisher and campaigner, Dr Ben Irvine, for a whistle-stop tour of some of the major objections to, and misreadings of, the theory of natural selection – and discover how understanding Darwinism better can help us all to achieve well-being.
In this talk we'll explore the ten scientific reasons why ice-cream is the world's coolest dessert. We will also make two gallons of delicious ice-cream for the audience to try, using the ultra-fast cooling power of liquid nitrogen!
PLEASE NOTE THIS HAS NOW MOVED TO THE NEW MUSEUMS SITE, DOWNING ST.
In this totally unique and spectacular live show the Science Junkies - Greg Foot and Huw James - pit one of the world's best trials riders (Andrei Burton) against one of the UK's top freerunners.
CHaOS student volunteers are running a series of talks filled with exciting demonstrations! You'll find more crashes, bangs, and squelches here if you find that our hands on events are full, or if you want even more CHaOS at the Science Festival!
Descend into the basement of the Department of Zoology to see how real scientists are using the brains, guts and kidneys of fruit flies to learn more about how our own body works...
Join Christopher Lloyd on a whistle-stop tour through the history of life on Earth using a coat of many pockets and a giant wallbook with more than 1,000 species on a four billion year timeline!
No-one's ever seen dark matter. So why do astronomers insist that it's all around us? And why might LHC physicists be so excited about it? Tackle Dr Andrew Pontzen (astronomer) and Dr Tom Whyntie (particle physicist) as they attempt to convince you that they're not utterly bonkers.
Artist Elena Cologni and Scientist Lisa Saksida have had a year long collaboration for this awarded project which explores the ‘materiality’ and ‘spatiality’ of memory through psychological and artistic tools. This collaboration, starting from shared issues in similar context, aims at attempting an exchange between Art and Neuro-Psychology based on the status of objects, time and space embodiment.
UPDATE: A new drop-in element for older children has been added to this event. Do come along.
Join STEM Team East to spin and orbit into physics. Learn why yo-yos spin up and down, spinning tops precess, water vortex in a plug hole and what these have to do with MRI scans, black holes and satellite orbits around the Earth.
With the electromagnetic dance and fame of 'watt costs what' (a new take on the 'Price is Right'), Nij Lal explores the science of electricity and gets our brains ticking about the electrical future...
CHaOS student volunteers are running a series of talks filled with exciting demonstrations! You'll find more crashes, bangs, and squelches here if you find that our hands on events are full, or if you want even more CHaOS at the Science Festival!
Descend into the basement of the Department of Zoology to see how real scientists are using the brains, guts and kidneys of fruit flies to learn more about how our own body works...
PLEASE NOTE THIS HAS NOW MOVED TO THE NEW MUSEUMS SITE, DOWNING ST.
In this totally unique and spectacular live show the Science Junkies - Greg Foot and Huw James - pit one of the world's best trials riders (Andrei Burton) against one of the UK's top freerunners.
Dr Elinor Shaffer, who has just finished co-editing the third of the three-volume 'The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe', discusses how European responses to Darwin have shed new light on the works of Samuel Butler.
What happens when you cool materials too close to absolute zero? We explore the weird behaviour of superconductors, the ultra-cold materials which drive the Large Hadron Collider and could be the future of electricity transport.
Robin Ince questions a panel of the religious and non-religious, including Mohammed Ansar, the Reverend Richard Coles and more, on whether there really is a battle between religion and science as portrayed in the mass media or if the two can survive happily side by side.
In a series of interactive demonstrations and posters, research groups from the Department will illustrate how their research crosses the boundaries between conventional disciplines. Topics include human memory, learning, addiction and awareness and development.
Come and explore the exciting versatility of materials, from levitating trains to magnetic sand, lemon-powered light bulbs to shape-shifting materials. With tons of hands-on experiments you are sure to find something you'll enjoy.
Come and join SeeK to investigate a range of materials with unique properties, create your own kaleidoscopes and make your own badges, plus a host of other fun and engaging activities.
The Naked Scientists take you on a whistle-stop tour of the world of waves, gases and chemistry. They detonate bombs, electrocute vegetables, turn air into a liquid, reveal the secrets of sun cream, use chemicals to produce bright lights, and launch hydrogen-powered rockets. Definitely not for the faint of heart!
Artist Elena Cologni and Scientist Lisa Saksida have had a year long collaboration for this awarded project which explores the ‘materiality’ and ‘spatiality’ of memory through psychological and artistic tools. This collaboration, starting from shared issues in similar context, aims at attempting an exchange between Art and Neuro-Psychology based on the status of objects, time and space embodiment.
UPDATE: A new drop-in element for older children has been added to this event. Do come along.
Join STEM Team East to spin and orbit into physics. Learn why yo-yos spin up and down, spinning tops precess, water vortex in a plug hole and what these have to do with MRI scans, black holes and satellite orbits around the Earth.
Will we find signs of life in a sub-glacial lake, buried beneath 3km of ice and untouched for up to half a million years? A member of the Lake Ellsworth Mission team gives an insider's view of the project.
In this Olympic year come on a walk with the Science Guides and hear all about Cambridge's medal winning scientists, about titanic struggles with the Americans, the sprinting Lords who took on Great Court and the 100 year old mathematician who ran from Cambridge to Ely (and back) daily.
We all need to breathe constantly to stay alive - as little as three minutes without oxygen can kill a human. Yet some whales can hold their breath for over an hour whilst diving.
CHaOS student volunteers are running a series of talks filled with exciting demonstrations! You'll find more crashes, bangs, and squelches here if you find that our hands on events are full, or if you want even more CHaOS at the Science Festival!
Descend into the basement of the Department of Zoology to see how real scientists are using the brains, guts and kidneys of fruit flies to learn more about how our own body works...
Join Christopher Lloyd on a whistle-stop tour through the history of life on Earth using a coat of many pockets and a giant wallbook with more than 1,000 species on a four billion year timeline!
PLEASE NOTE THIS HAS NOW MOVED TO THE NEW MUSEUMS SITE, DOWNING ST.
In this totally unique and spectacular live show the Science Junkies - Greg Foot and Huw James - pit one of the world's best trials riders (Andrei Burton) against one of the UK's top freerunners.
Alison Pearn, Associate Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project, looks at the letters exchanged by Charles Darwin and Samuel Butler, and charts the disintegration of their relationship from a shared spirit of intellectual enquiry to a state of personal and public conflict.
CHaOS student volunteers are running a series of talks filled with exciting demonstrations! You'll find more crashes, bangs, and squelches here if you find that our hands on events are full, or if you want even more CHaOS at the Science Festival!
Featuring authors Katherine Orr and Adam Marek and scientist, Dr Simon Stott. Chair: Ra Page (editor). Is research always fully aware of its consequences? Does science need to grow a conscience? Or are we in danger of being too distrustful of science? Of demonising it even? Supported by the Wellcome Trust.
One of the UK’s finest and most imaginative writers, Alan Moore, discusses the meeting of science and fiction, his own inspirations from the world of scientific discovery and whether there is room for the mystical in a rational world. With Robin Ince. Of course, a man of so many ideas may well go off on quite a different tangent and none of the above may be applicable.
Join Hannah Critchlow from the Naked Scientists on an exploration of the brain with mind-boggling live experiments and demonstrations. A not to be missed science theatrical stage show for all the family. Definately not for the faint of thought!
This talk looks under the microscope at some of the amazing structures produced in the natural world, from ants' feet and spider silk to carnivorous pitcher plants. Can we mimic them to make high-performance man-made materials? Nature has had a two-billion year head start, but can we catch up?
A film about the youth of Guglielmo Marconi, the discoverer of radio waves. This film documentary is a homage from the world of communication to the great scientist.
Matt Parker, Helen Arney and Steve Mould are back at the Science Festival with a completely new show. Join three of London’s best (and nerdiest) performers as they break down the boundaries between comedy and science with a mixture of stand-up maths, geeky songs, interactive experiments, special guests, and maybe some things that go bang...
