September 27, 2010
2010 Highlights Reel
Highlights from Guerilla Science’s 2010 summer season at the Secret Garden Party, Lovebox and the Secret Cinema’s homage to Blade Runner. Featuring explosions, flame tubes, mad chemists, flavour feasts, neural maps and tasty experiments.
September 23, 2010
Tripping the sound fantastic
Astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell listening to the northern lights in Camden.
Whenever I tell people about our audio tours of the universe (which we hosted at Camden’s Roundhouse this past Sunday as part of the Turning Point festival, and back in June at the Stoke Newington International Airport) they almost always say:
“But isn’t space silent?”
Not if we know how to listen. With the right equipment we can use our ears as well as our eyes to probe the cosmos. The universe is full of sounds.
Telescopes allow us to capture radio waves emitted by stars across the galaxy and turn them into noises we can hear. And space is not – as popular misconception would have it – an empty “vacuum”. Gas and dust, albeit in small volumes, floats between the stars and can conduct sound waves back to us, such as from the rippling shearing surface of our sun.
Have a listen for yourself here, from the rattling of our atmosphere, to the eerie shrieks and whistles of the moons of Jupiter, to the buzzing chords of nebular clusters – out to the farthest reaches of space and the deepest note in the universe.
Astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell took us on a guided tour this past Sunday through the streets of Camden, explaining what these strange noises have taught us about what lies above our heads.
Check out what he had to say about his first space walk with us in Stoke Newington here.
Space, it turns out, is not so silent after all – we just need to know how to listen.
By Zoe
Guerilla gorilla
The scientific name for the gorilla is (pay attention now, this will be hard to remember) Gorilla gorilla.
We’ve named ours Guerilla gorilla.
I finally learned how to make gorillas in August, for the Green Man festival.
By mid September I had refined my paper primates, to be given out at our last event of the summer, an audio tour of the stars at Camden’s Roundhouse.
On our tour we discovered what stars sound like – other-worldly shrieks, whistles, and trills.
What might Guerilla gorilla sound like? Probably something like: Oook. Oooooook. Ooooooooook…
By Zoe
September 17, 2010
The Sensecam & The Secret Garden Party
We follow neuroscientist Adrian Owen’s gadabouts through the Secret Garden Party in July 2010 – from raves to our secret island hideaway to – with a handy Sensecam, a nifty device that takes a photograph every few seconds to create a continuous record of all his experiences.
“Almost everything you experience is laid down in your brain, somewhere, but for the most part we can’t access it,” he explains. The most interesting part about the Sensecam record, he believes, is what it teaches us about human memory: only the things we might want to remember are actually made available for easy access. “And this shows us how important social interactions are for constructing memories… a large component of ‘memory’ is what you were thinking or feeling at the time you experienced these events.”
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