July 2012 archive

Fellow experimenters in art and science part I

brain images

Fellow experimenters in art and science part I Since Chain Reaction! got underway, several people have sent links to other projects around the world. Do You Mind? is a New Zealand collaboration based on neuroscience (thanks, Janet Young!).  Its rationale is pretty much the opposite to ours; rather than demystifying science for artists, it’s trying …

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On opening some black boxes

What is the history of science?  A clichéd answer might invoke a parade of big names: Galileo, Darwin, Einstein.  But this is a really rubbish history if we are trying to get people to understand and engage with science in the present day.  Will solar power save us from global warming?  Do neutrinos move faster …

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The birth of Chain Reaction!

The logo of the University of Kent's Creative Campus initiative.

Beginning a Chain Reaction! Chain Reaction! is an attempt to do some creative science communication in a way that embodies approaches taken by historians of science. On a simple level, it celebrates a piece of laboratory kit the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) machine, which is 30 years old in 2013.  By rapidly multiplying fragments of …

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