Tag: New Scientist Live

There were big beasts, big crowds and big ideas at New Scientist Live, an awe-inspiring three-day festival of innovations and discoveries in London last weekend. Visitors young and old enjoyed a huge range of exhibits from leading research groups and companies working in STEM, including King’s College London’s hospital of the future and a pop-up planetarium.

Thousands of attendees were treated to close encounters with insects, robots and even a fighter jet, not to mention fearsome dinosaurs stalking the show floor. Thanks to virtual reality, there was also the chance to step inside a nuclear reactor, drive a racing car and ride a rollercoaster.

On five stages, there were enlightening talks covering a vast range of subjects, from the birth of the universe to the power of artificial intelligence. The speakers included Nobel prizewinner Venki Ramakrishnan on why we die, TV anthropologist Alice Roberts on ancient epidemics, psychologist Kimberley Wilson on eating for better brain health and statistician David Spiegelhalter on how chance rules our lives.

At the schools’ day on 14 October, palaeontologist Mike Benton delved into dinosaur behaviour, biologist Camilla Pang explained how to think like a scientist and psychologist Dean Burnett told students why their parents are hung up on their phones.

In the Future of Food and Agriculture area, visitors learned how science is changing the way we feed ourselves, with cutting-edge techniques for improving soil health, tackling methane emissions from cows and discovering new crop varieties.

Festival-goers even had the chance to come up with their own innovations to protect wildlife and build them from LEGO bricks. Master builders constructed the best ideas submitted to our “save the gibbons” competition, including a fruit-dispensing “social hub” and a solar-powered “skyspeaker”.

The festival will be back next year from 18 to 20 October – we hope you can join us for more mind-expanding experiences.

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Dear readers,

New Scientist Live is one of my favourite weekends each year, and so it is with great excitement that I can say it is now just over a month away. On 12 and 13 October, thousands of people will descend on the ExCeL Centre in London to attend what I think we can confidently call the greatest festival of ideas and discoveries in the known universe.

Across five stages, we will have talks from exciting scientists and big thinkers, covering everything from black holes and brain health to the science of free will and the paranormal.
I can’t wait to hear what Turi King has to say about how genetic testing is revolutionising genealogy and Carolyn Thompson’s talk about the amazing lives of gibbons.

The show floor will also be filled with incredible experiences and exhibitions once again, including a virtual-reality rollercoaster, ocean artefacts, live insects, robots and even an aerobatic jet-powered aircraft from the Royal Air Force’s Red Arrows.

Our schools’ day on 14 October is a chance for thousands of students and their teachers to experience the show floor in full, as well as a specially tailored programme of talks.
If you can make any of the show days, you won’t regret it. And if you can’t, you can still catch the talks on demand with an online ticket. I hope to see you there.

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