Hello everyone,

First and foremost, thank you to everyone who came to see our talks this weekend, to all our utterly amazing speakers, and all the volunteers and Winchester Discovery Centre staff who made it possible!

So, all a bit bleary-eyed from another late night after a fun-filled day, we settled in with the morning coffee to listen to Dr James Dyke’s talk about Global Challenges: Multidisciplinary Solutions. His main points were that human effects on our climate are very real and we are in the midst of a global experiment - now we have to see what we can do to “improve” the results while we can, if we can. Links: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/jd4, http://www.southampton.ac.uk/globalchallenges/. James also blogs at: http://jamesgdyke.wordpress.com/.

Next up was Paula Salgado (@pssalgado) telling us about her journey through life leading to x-ray crystallography and her work on the “glue”-proteins on the surface of the Candida albicans yeast, which causes thrush (generally transient and not harmful) but is also a real problem in hospitals, when it can be fatal if it enters the bloodstream via medical equipment.

We were then treated to a whistle-stop tour around some important elements within our bodies, by Dr Kathryn Harkup and Dr Anna Tanczos in “Chemistry of the Human Body”. You can follow @scicommstudios for more from them.

Then some truly amazing information about satellites from Dr Stuart Eves. The advances in satellite imaging technology just over the last 10 years are astonishing, and the potential for further developments over a similar amount of time even moreso. We could be imaging the entire surface of the earth every day in 5-10 years! To the point where you can make out the engines on aeroplanes and the kinds of fishing boats in docks. We were also treated to an aerial view of Winchester!

After lunch, Dr Anna Scaife then talked about a different kind of imaging, or detecting, using radio waves, in “Exploring the low-frequency Universe with LOFAR”. You can go to @KairaProject:

@winscifest Part of the team that built Chilbolton LOFAR are now building a similar LOFAR site in Arctic Finland… kaira.sgo.fi

— KAIRA Project (@KairaProject) July 22, 2012

Next up we had the fantastic almost-Dr Jen Gupta telling us all about The Extreme Universe. She told us lots of cool things about telescopes like the VLA, the updated version (still generally referred to as the VLA), planned projects and loads more. Excellent talk.

Then what was, I think, my personal favourite of the day: Dr Jon Copley on Life in the Deep. Have a look at our twitpic stream to see a few perspex-embedded specimens he brought along for us to have a look at. This was just amazing - to be able to (pretty much) hold creatures that had previously been pottering around on the deep sea floor undiscovered! We still know so little about to ocean floor, which is about half the surface of the planet! Teams like Jon’s are working to fix this. What will we find?

http://twitpic.com/photos/WinSciFest

As the final talk of the weekend we welcomed Dr Tori Herridge to tell us all about Mini-mammoths and Dwarf Elephants… The auditorium full, some exciting-looking props, we were told about elephants that were a metre tall. One meter! HOW CUTE IS THAT?? Sadly, I missed a lot of this talk due to volunteering-duties but I am reliably informed by several (lucky) people that it was amazing!

For our third and final night of evening entertainment, we started with Alom Shaha (@alomshaha) and his Science vs. Magic show, followed by the marvellous Robin Ince (@robinince) to make us laugh and think about the importance of being interested, and how awesome science and life is generally.

Again, thank you so much to everyone who was involved in any capacity - it’s been a truly brilliant weekend - we hope you enjoyed it, please tell us how much!

If you have any photos/videos/interviews you’d like us to feature, please get in touch with @winscifest or leave us a comment here. Thank you!!

I’d like to do a roundup of Saturday’s events, which were as brilliant as Friday’s!

Following Peter’s brilliant talk on lucid dreaming, unfortunately we couldn’t hear Lewis Dartnell (@lewis_dartnell) talk about Alien Evolution as he was ill - I think he was feeling better by the evening but let’s wish him well anyway!

Things still went swimmingly as Simon (@simondwatt) and (@harrison_peter) heroically stepped in and gave great talks, with Simon hoping we’ll join in saving ‘ugly’ animals (see http://www.readysteadyscience.org) and Peter showing us some of his favourite silly taxonomic classifications (scientific naming of species), as well as some cool reptile facts - animated snake heads really excited the children in attendance. But please don’t behead snakes to entertain children, it’s incredibly cruel. You can follow Peter’s other twitter account @ReptileFacts - which does what it says on the tin!

After the successful fill-in session we welcomed Simon back to give his Sperm Warfare talk. This was restricted to a 16+ audience, but it was really a fascinating insight into the world of sexual selection, a facet of evolutionary biology I can highly recommend looking into! If you would like some reading material specifically on why humans engage in sexual reproduction (it might seem obvious, we like it, but why??) and why men have their little Y chromosome instead of two Xs, I highly recommend Steve Jones’ book “Y: The Descent Of Men”.

When Simon stepped out of the spotlight, we were treated to a fantastic performance of Dark Matters by Andrew Pontzen (@apontzen) and Tom Whyntie (@twhyntie). Their double-act effectively dramatised the inception and search for one of the stranger physical concepts (aren’t they mostly strange?): Dark Matter. Do try to catch their show, it’s really entertaining!

Once fed and watered, Jenny Rohn (@JennyRohn) spoke to us about the Science Is Vital campaign and why research is so important for our economy and our lives as a whole. Do visit the website (scienceisvital.org.uk) for lots of information, and get involved if you can! You can also follow @ScienceIsVital.

Stephen Curry (@stephen_curry), an x-ray crystallographer and science communicator from Imperial university then took to the stage. He clearly explained his work to us, which involves characterising protein shapes, particularly viral proteins that are integral to the viral replication process. This allows the design of drugs to block said proteins, with a view to inhibiting the virus’ life cycle, to attenuate serious disease outbreaks like Foot & Mouth (FMDV) and HIV. Some nice hardcore biology/genetics there, I approved!

Next we had Sylvia McLain (@girlinterruptin) explaining the practical scientific process, why failure is informative and shouldn’t always get you down, why we should get (and keep) more women in science and why she loves being a scientist.

You can look up Jenny, Stephen and Syivia on the Occam’s Typewriter site!

• http://occamstypewriter.org/mindthegap/
• http://occamstypewriter.org/scurry/
• http://occamstypewriter.org/sylviamclain/

For the last of the talks, a special treat. Milton Mermikides @bridgetx) and fretless guitarist Ned Evett (@nedevett, whom you can also find on Facebook and as "The Glass Guitarist). This was such a fantastic talk, not sure I’ve ever seen a better… thing. Not quite sure how to describe it! I know they’ll only get even better as they refine it, so if they’re near you make sure you go to see it.

Finally, for our evening entertainment we started with Ned and his percussionist Todd Chavez performing a set based on the new album, Treehouse. Pick up a copy! We were then treated to a short comedy set from Stephen’s daughter Eleanor (@eleanor_curry) who wants to do stand-up as a career. I believe the consensus was that she should do pretty well with that… To wrap up, a nerdy musical treat from Helen Arney (@helenarney) with her ukulele tunes and geeky jokes!

Some of us went for dinner and had another too-late night! I shall get back to you with a Sunday summary asap and later we’ll collate contact details, photos, video, interviews etc. here for everyone.

Good morning!

So, yesterday went fantastically well.

All the speakers were marvellous. The crowd, too - participating, applauding, laughing - all the audience-tasks are being fulfilled very efficiently. I would expect no less!

After the morning talks and Sheila Kanani’s Saturn’s Family Portrait talk, we had Jon Butterworth (@jonmbutterworth) explaining exactly what it is CERN has found with the LHC - you may have heard something about a boson of some sort recently.

We then had Jim Alkhalili (@jimalkhalili) talking all about paradoxes. Illustrated by his first slide depicting an Escher cube and a cat (Schroedinger’s, we can pretend) “inside” it. Someone pointed out on twittr that you cant be “inside” an Excher cube (it doesn’t really have an inside, but it doesn’t exist!) - so I clarified I meant in the graphic. Damn pernickety science fans!!

Stephen Slater (@steveslater1987) then introduced the film Destination Titan, which he directed - a documentary about the scientists behing the Huygens probe mission to Titan. It’s a really moving, interesting film that I highly recommend seeing if you can. We’ve learned so much about our solar system from the amazing pictures and data the probe sent back to us from Titan, it’s really fascinating.

The evening entertainment kicked off with Timandra Harkness (@TimandraHarkness) and Matt Parker (@standupmaths) practising their show for the Edinburgh fringe, Humans v Nature: Engineering FTW! This included Rubik’s cube-solving robots, sketches-within-sketches and having a pint down the road while robo-Matt filled in. Yes..!

Finally we rounded up by having a good giiggle with Helen Keen (@helen_keen) thinking about the future, visionaries from our past, and the potential of robot companions, amongst other things. Including some great photocopier-based shadow puppetry (really!).

Most importantly, thank you to all the speakers, everyone who came to listen and enjoy, and all our volunteers - a great first day, Saturday is going to be at least as good!!

Peter Harrison (@harrison_peter) has kicked off with the subject of Lucid Dreaming, which is immensely interesting and amusing. I sometimes know when I’m dreaming so it’s very cool.

That’s enough from me now - do please comment about the talks, what was your favourite, something especially amazing that you learned or some suggestions for the future! Hope you enjoy today as much as yesterday.

You can tweet our official account (@winscifest) (which is run by me, Marianne/@noodlemaz!) and our hashtag is #winscifest12.

Everything went really well this morning! We had great talks from Simon Watt (@simondwatt), Karen Masters (@KarenLmasters) and Helen Clarkson (@HelenCLondon).

As I forgot to mention in the first post, due to accidentally deleting it on first attempt at posting - I’m learning, honest! I’m tweeting about proceedings as @winscifest and you can use the hashtag #winscifest12 to comment and so on.

Now we’re enjoying Sheila Kanani (@saturnsheila) talk about Saturn’s great family of moons!

Hopefully see you later at the evening festivities… Such fantastic talks from inspiring, confident and funny speakers this morning - I know we’ll be getting much more of the same!

Good morning, everyone - Marianne @noodlemaz here. As long as the wireless technology behaves, I’ll be tweeting from the @winscifest twitter account and posting here with updates periodically.

We’ve just kicked off with Simon Watt (of the Inside Nature’s Giants series), his talk is titled Dissections Uncut - we’re getting some entertaining behind-the-scenes stuff about the programmes.

First we must congratulate James @jimbobthomas for organising everything! We hope you enjoy the talks, if you’re in attendance (if not, get down here!!), and do follow us over the next few days.

Enjoy the first day, I shall be back later!