The research of the UB has a date with the Science Festival

This year, there will be about fifty workshops to promote social interest in science, scientific culture and to contribute to create vocations among the attendants. The Festival will be open to the general audience and will be free. Schools and high schools have to register. More than 1,500 students from primary and secondary schools are expected to attend the event.

Marga Becerra, head of the Scientific Culture and Innovation Unit of the University of Barcelona and promoter of the Festival, is convinced that “culture, understood in general terms, sometimes excludes science”. The Festival intends to fight against this: “we defend that everyone should have a minimum of scientific culture, regardless of what they are working on, because it is very important for their lives. Without scientific culture we cannot take decisions based on knowledge”.

An invitation to science to promote vocations among youngsters

The workshops, which are communicative and ludic, are carried out by researchers from all areas of knowledge, so the themes are very diverse and the Festival does not forget about any discipline.

Participants will see, for instance, forensic genetics can be used to find out the author of a crime, or that archaeoacoustics can be useful to see how old musical instruments sounded, and even how to build one.

The visitors will be able to find out the applications of research on stem cells, and understand the concept of neuronal cell culture, an interesting tool for physicists and biologist to understand how the brain works as well as its damage caused by diseases.

Also, the attendants will see a bit of the field of nanotechnology and the implications of working at a nano scale (between 1 and 100 nm). With commercial nanotechnology products (shirts, creams), they will see the nano compounds create features and applications which were unknown so far.

These are some examples of the activities in the Festival, but there will be many more: among other options, visitors can take a test on their law knowledge, and create a mockup of the Earth seen from the inside, learn how archaeological research works, discover the physical basis and the mathematical scheme inside soap bubbles, and take neuropsychological tests on the functioning of the brain.

Apart from all the workshops, the Festival includes three exhibitions:

Visitors can see the exhibition: “Quan no nʼhi ha prou per repartir. Pensar matemàticament”, which shows how mathematics are used to face resource distribution problems. The exhibition is part of the FECYT project “Estrategia, cooperación y justicia: matemáticas para la sociedad” (ECOJUST). Its aim is to show in a clear, simple and communicative way but rigorous at the same time, several applications of mathematics to solve social problems. To illustrate how society divides benefits and obligations, the exhibition will treat some specific cases: How are kindergarten vacancies assigned? How is the income tax decided? Where do dumping sites and filter systems go, and how does this damage balanced? Who receives the only available kidney for a transplant?

Moreover, the Hall of the Historical Building will exhibit some of the works shown in the final gala of the scientific dissemination project NeuroArt, which wants to bring the school audience closer to the human nervous system functioning and invites schools to create artistic representations of the nervous system, both in structure and functions or plasticity. In this yearʼs edition, nineteen centers and about a thousand students took part in it.

Also, visitors can visit the exhibition “Women of mathematics throughout Europe”, whose aim is to show a view of the field of mathematics through photography (by Noel Tovia Matoff) and extracts from interviews (by Sylvie Paycha and Sara Azzali) in thirteen mathematics from all Europe. With this, the exhibition aims to show the role of female mathematicians and offer female figures -which are usually not present- to the new generations.
 

The Festival is organized by the UCC+i, the UB counts on the support from three collaborating companies: Alpino, PanReac AppliChem and Staedtler.