August 31, 2010
Guardian Science Podcast
Check out recordings from our antics at the Secret Garden Party this July on the Guardian weekly science podcast, including the Synaesthesia Game, our sexy science pub quiz, and interviews with scientists Tom Wright and Petra Boynton – coverage begins about 14:25 in. Have a listen here.
August 26, 2010
Green Man: Tweeted by Wayne Coyne
We met Wayne Coyne – lead singer of the Flaming Lips – on the way back to the car.
“Wow check this out,” he said, and stopped to chat with us over the brain, the centrepiece for the Synaesthesia Game. Turns out he had also made a giant brain himself for Hallowe’en, about a storey tall. For a man who wears giant hands so he can spray the audience with laser beams, this is hardly surprising.
“Hang on, let me get a photo – I’m going to tweet this.”
And so he did.
Sometimes – not all the time, but sometimes – being unable to escape the internet, even in a wet field in Wales, is a pretty cool thing.
By Zoe
Green Man: In Photos
Check out our flickr site for all the pics from this weekend at Green Man, including Jelly Brain Dissections with Guy Billings
the Flavour Feast
August 25, 2010
Green Man: Jelly Brains
In a lovely pop up presentation with a quivering jelly brain (plus a dozen miniature pannacotta brains), neuroscientist Guy Billings took us through the anatomy of our marvelous cerebrums.
It truly is an amazing construction – and we certainly do not use “10 per cent” of it, as popular myths would have us believe.
Rather, we use the entire thing – as a number of unfortunate individuals have discovered. At the mercy of curious mid 20th-century neuroscientists, famous individuals such as HM had small chunks of their cortex removed in misguided attempts to cure severe depression, epilepsy and other crippling conditions.
As we discovered, those little bits were quite necessary. HM was left with no short term memory – as Guy put it, “a human goldfish”, unable to remember anything for longer than a few seconds.
Thankfully the rest of us in the garden in Wales had ours intact, and could enjoy carving up a pannacotta model in lieu of the real thing to learn about the structure of the most complex object in the known universe. Safer, and tastier, than the real thing.
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