A virtual trip to the World Science Festival

From rap to Giant Tortoises, speciation to neuroscience - and plenty of cool jobs in science

This weekend I've been catching up on videos from the 2012 World Science Festival. Perhaps influenced by reference to evolution in the draft primary science curriculum, my browsing led to this musical presentation of artificial selection. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the piece was written and performed by a Canadian rapper, Baba Brinkman. Whilst this may not be to everyone's musical taste, it can probably claim the title of “first peer-reviewed rap", having been commissioned and overseen by Mark Pallen, Professor of Microbial Genomics at the University of Birmingham.

A link from the festival's website took me to Professor Pallen's homepage and a live feed of his twitter updates - including the sad news that the last Giant Pinta tortoise, Lonesome George, died on Sunday. Efforts over recent years to breed George, estimated to be around 100 years old, with females from a related subspecies had failed.

Mark's tweet also signposted a journal paper that explores the evolutionary relationships between giant Galapagos tortoises. This looks as though it may be good source material for post-16 students learning about geographical isolation as a cause of speciation. On the same topic, students may be interested in Beth Shapiro's video, 'Cool job: Ancient DNA detective', which describes Beth's work as an evolutionary paleogeneticist, piecing together knowledge of extinct species and hoping to develop strategies for the conservation of species that are under threat today.

There are a range of 'Cool job' videos on the festival website - engineers, microbiologists, ecologists, astrophysicists and others - including this one from the neuroscientist Andre Fenton, who describes the main job of any scientist as "to find solvable problems to work on", and uses interactive tests to give his audience insights into work on the biochemistry of memory and learning.

So yet again what started as a quick visit to one online resource led me around the globe, back to the UK (within 100 miles of home), then once more out across the Atlantic. This typical internet 'journey' is beautifully visualised in my final snapshot from the World Science Festival, 'There and Back Again: A Packet's Tale. How does the internet work?' - perhaps something to share with ICT colleagues.

A great site to explore - we'll certainly keep this one in mind when developing resource lists for the online Community.

Thanks

Jenifer

I'm currently thinking about how the Galapagos tortoise data might be used with younger students, and would be grateful for suggestions of other good data sources that can help students thinking about speciation?