In the meantime you have a twitter feed over there…

Chris

The kids from fame may not be your ideal scientific role models, but I’m delighted to be able to blog about the rather wonderful FameLab competition run by NESTA in association with the Cheltenham Science Festival.

I’d always been a bit scared of Famelab, which seeks new talent in science communication by asking anyone involved in science (researchers, teachers and so on) to communicate to an audience in just three minutes. But then I was lucky enough to be a judge at the first UK heat of this year’s competition, and we had a lot of fun, as you can see from their posted video :

Fun though that was (it’s got a frog in it!) it misses the point rather, which is that Famelab is a very serious event. The national prizes include £10,000, a foreign tour courtesy of the British Council and slots on Channel 4. More importantly, it was amazing to watch how the contestants improved between the morning’s heats and the evening’s regional final; a little thought, a little feedback from the judges (the others were much more useful than me – I was just generally impressed) and a masterclass arranged by the organisers made all the difference.

Much to my surprise, I learnt things during the day too. I learnt how precisely to explain that the LHC will not destroy the Earth, and I learnt I have the body of a 15 year old boy thanks to the replacement of my cells.

The next heat is in Bristol this Saturday, and then the roadshow visits London, Oxford and Edinburgh. If you’re at all curious about communicating science, go. If you’re a member of the public, go along to the regional finals and learn something. It’ll be the best use you will ever make of a sequence of three minute periods of your life.

Never one to miss out on an opportunity to write, I was going to pontificate on the role the Harvard (and Greenwich) computers played in early 20th century astronomy, and how Galaxy Zoo relates to their legacy. But Andrew’s beaten me to the first part.

Instead, let me talk about two women who contributed not as practitioners themselves, but as popularizers and interpreters of cutting-edge science. The first is the namesake of my Oxford college, Mary Somerville. Somerville grew up in a relatively well connected family, and was encouraged in her talent for studying mathematics and science; she was quickly in correspondence with many of the learned men of the day. That led to the chance to make her own name in translating foreign texts.

In fact, her ambition reached wider than that. Her first major commission was to translate Laplace’s Mécanique Céleste. When the result was published under the title The Mechanism of the Heavens she had not only translated into English, but as she put it from ‘algebra into common language’. By doing so with grace and flair she brought the importance of the work to a much wider audience than it would have otherwise had – to give you an idea, the use of the word ‘variable’ in a mathematical context is her coinage.

The book also set the stage for her great surveys of 19th century science, including On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, published in 1834, a copy of which sits well-thumbed on my bookcase at home. To write a survey of a fast moving field is no easy thing, which brings me to my second heroine.

Agnes Clarke was an Irish astronomer in a similar position to Somerville, but about 70 years later. Although Somerville had, along with Caroline Herschel, been admitted to the Royal Astronomical Society it was still rare for women to be admitted, a major factor behind the founding of the British Astronomical Association. One of the BAA’s early leading lights, Clarke was also a prolific author whose greatest work was a history of nineteenth century astronomy. Published in the first decade of the twentieth century, the book takes a quick look back at progress made, before running through our current state of knowledge on everything from Mars (canals likely a mistake) to galaxies beyond the Milky Way (’a long forgotten and discredited hypothesis’).

I know of no book in the field anything like it, and if I had several years spare I’d spend it writing the 20th century equivalent. It shares with Somerville’s writing a sense of being right at the forefront of knowledge in the company of authors who know the field which they are surveying intimately. The two are remembered differently; Clarke barely existing beyond second-hand bookshops, Somerville remembered with a crater on the Moon and, of course, the college named in her honour. Both, though, were clearly capable of contributing to science. If they were transported to 2009 would they have been researchers? Perhaps. But I bet they’d both be blogging, too.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day.

There followed a period for the audience to chat in groups with the speakers. How well this went depended on the luck of the draw; flitting from group to group I heard lots of argument about whether it made any sense to say space and time began at the Big Bang, but I also heard groups dominated by someone with a bee in his bonnet about the LHC.

The most successful part of the evening – much to my surprise – was the reading of a short story by poet and storyteller Ross Sutherland. I’m normally really skeptical about such things, but Ross had an interesting take on how theories develop, all wrapped up in a very human story. He was told he had to put it online – and it’s now available here.

In the beginning, there was Ewan’s Bar and Grill.

Ewan created a huge expanse behind the bar, and then I came into this world..

Now go and read the rest.

The format is very simple; put a bunch of talkative academics (is there any other kind?) around a table, and talk. The first episode features not only me talking about Citizen Science but the excellent Irene Tracey talking about synaesthesia.

Go and listen – and let us know what you think.

The first – my interview with the last man to walk on the Moon, Eugene Cernan will be broadcast today at 1530 GMT (that’s 1030 am EST), and then repeated at 0230 GMT on Friday (21.30 EST, Thursday).

Enjoy – and let me know if you see them.

Chris

To get a taste of it, the BBC have put a clip from the broadcast up on Youtube, so sit back, pour yourself a glass of aquavit and enjoy :

Since then, we’ve made a lot of use of the results, but I’ve also spent a lot of time talking to all sorts of people and plotting to expand the project way beyond its original scope. Real people are now employed to make this happen, and Galaxy Zoo 2 which launched on Tuesday is our first site to use a new, extremely flexible interface.

It’s all come together rather rapidly in the last few weeks. On Monday night, I talked to the University’s Space and Astronomy society and told them the launch was only an hour or two away. Opening my laptop and connecting to the net on the train, I saw the new site appear. By chance I’d logged on 20 seconds after the beginning. I wonder if I was the first to see it?

I stayed up for a couple of hours that night watching the forum and email to see how reactions were. People were positive, but it stayed quiet and there was no flurry of press attention to mark the end of our press release’s embargo.

I lay in bed that night wondering if we’d just lost a colossal gamble. Perhaps we didn’t understand what it was about Galaxy Zoo that attracted people. Perhaps it really was just a one-off. It still seemed quiet the next morning as I watch the first report on BBC Breakfast TV, at 6.20, but I didn’t have time to think before being picked up and whisked off to Television Centre for more interviews.

And then we were off. More breakfast tv at 7.20, upstairs to 5 Live with Annie, one of our users, for 7.55 before that got bumped. Then back downstairs for more TV at 8.20 (Annie was great!) and then, as she headed off to work upstairs again for Radio 4. Once more I was sitting opposite John Humphrys, and we had a lot of fun on Today getting more and more enthusiastic about the project.

Spat out in the corridor, I was grabbed by the World Service for a quick interview, by now working completely on automatic. Just as quickly I found myself in a cab and at Paddington, and on a train to Oxford had time to catch my breath.

The site was clearly struggling, but stayed up (which is more than we managed for Galaxy Zoo 1) which I think is a pretty impressive achievement. More importantly, we were busy which meant that people were interested, and would come back to the site. Galaxy Zoo 2 is going to work, and we are going to get the data we want. It’s an amazing feeling; a mixture of relief and excitement. Less incredulous laughter, more satisfied grinning, I suppose.

We’d scheduled a small celebration for 5pm in the department, but unfortunately Arfon our lead developer had a bright idea just as the clock ticked toward 5, and he spent the whole time typing frantically, champagne at his side.

Since then, traffic has refused to die (which is fantastic) and as I write we’re on the front page of Digg.com so that’s not going to change any time soon. Thanks for your efforts – and the more classifications you do the sooner you’ll see what we’ve got up our sleeves for our next trick.

Personally, I enjoyed the update on the Chariot lunar rover – which took part in the inauguration parade in Washington this week – provided by Potentia Tenebras Repellendi.

New Scientist Cover art

It must have seemed like a good idea. The cover above will certainly sell copies of the magazine, I imagine. I wouldn’t be surprised if they do a steady trade from back issue orders of this for years and years, although whether the people who want to read ‘Darwin was wrong’ are interested in the rest of New Scientist’s content is another matter.

Let me rewind. This week’s edition of New Scientist leads with a story by writer Graham Lawton. You can read the full article here. The idea is uncontroversial enough; that the image of a branching ‘tree of life’ was (a) central to Darwin’s view of the world (so critical that ‘Without it the theory of evolution would never have happened.’) and (b) Wrong, because hybridization and the swapping of genetic material between species quickly turns a nice, linear tree into a tangled bush.

I’ve just finished Janet Browne’s magnificent biography of Darwin which provides a more nuanced view. If you want a more forthright, shorter explanation of why the first point might be rubbish try the Evolution Blog. For an explanation of why point 2 isn’t controversial see Sandwalk.

Even if the article had been 100% true, the problem is this: By splashing the ‘news’ that Darwin was wrong, New Scientist plays up to the idea that evolution can be attacked by attacking Darwin. Of course he was wrong, about many things; he was writing a century or so before DNA was even discovered, for goodness’ sake. As PZ Myers says, It’s a symptom of creationist influence that journals would think that hyping a story that “150 year old theory gets revised!” is newsworthy.

I’m sure New Scientist’s intentions were either unconscious or innocent – perhaps they thought the headline would appear to their scientifically literate audience already sick of Darwin commemoration in this, the 200th year since his birth. But nonetheless that Dallas Morning News story gives us a taste of what we’re in for :

Rep. Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands … said there have been “significant challenges” to evolution theory. She cited a recent news article in which a European scientist disputed Darwin’s “tree of life” showing common ancestors for all living things.

It’s too late. The genie is out of the lamp, and all of us who deal with questions about creationism are going to have to get used to hearing about ‘The New Scientist article that said…’. Nonetheless, a contrite apology – as public as possible – by the magazine in next Thursday’s issue is now required.