Bulldogs and monkey business: how to present science
Different ways of taking science to the public have picked up awards on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, an unusual partnership between a comedian and a physicist has won a Sony Radio Academy Award, while in a more traditional approach, the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) has received two Bulldog Awards for Excellence in Media and Public Relations for a publicity initiative that brought worldwide media attention in 2010 to results from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).
BBC Radio 4’s The Infinite Monkey Cage took the gold award for Best Speech Programme at the 2011 Sony Radio Academy Awards. Hosted by comedian Robin Ince and particle physicist Brian Cox, The Infinite Monkey Cage, which has been running since 2009, is a "witty, irreverent look at the world according to science". Each programme centres on a topic – such as, is philosophy dead?, is cosmology really a science? – which Ince and Cox discuss with guests, typically a couple of scientists and another comedian.
Brookhaven’s award-winning campaign was developed to announce two major results from RHIC in 2010. The campaign – which included a press briefing at a national meeting of the American Physical Society and media tours of RHIC – was planned and executed by members of the Media and Communications Office, with the assistance of PR consultants from Tartaglia Communications. It won a gold Bulldog award in the "Best Campaign Under $25,000" category and a bronze award in the "Best Not-for-Profit/Association/Government Campaign" category. The awards are given by the publisher Bulldog Reporter.
• To download podcasts of The Infinite Monkey Cage, go to www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/timc.
For more about the results from RHIC, see www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/PR_display.asp?prID=1282.
CAST reaches milestone but keeps on searching
The CERN Axion Solar Telescope (CAST) has fulfilled its original physics programme after eight years of searching for the emission of a dark-matter candidate particle, the axion, from the Sun.
CAST, the world’s most sensitive axion helioscope, points a recycled prototype LHC dipole magnet at the Sun at dawn and dusk, looking for the conversion of axions to X-rays. It incorporates four state-of-the-art X-ray detectors: three Micromegas detectors and a pn-CCD imaging camera attached to a focusing X-ray telescope that was recovered from the German space programme (CERN Courier April 2010 p22).
Over the years, CAST has operated with the magnet bores – the location of the axion conversion – in different conditions: first in vacuum, covering axion masses up to 20 meV/c2; and then with a buffer gas (4He and later 3He) at various densities, finally reaching the goal of 1.17 eV/c2 on 22 July. While a direct solar-axion signal remains elusive, the experiment has set the most restrictive experimental limit on the axion-photon coupling strength for rest masses, which includes the theoretically and cosmologically motivated range from μeV/c2 to eV/c2. At the same time, the collaboration has gained valuable experience in low-background detectors (<10 keV)>
After a scheduled maintenance, CAST will resume data-taking in 2012 with improved sensitivity for solar axions (hot dark matter). The experiment will also expand its physics horizon, searching for paraphotons (the "hidden sector") and chameleons (dark energy), while exploring the possibility of searching for relic axions (cold dark matter) in an, as yet, inaccessible rest mass range of around 0.1–1 meV/c2.
NUFO strengthens the voice of ‘users’
The National User Facility Organization (NUFO) represents the interests of 30,000 users who conduct research at 39 national scientific user facilities in the US, as well as scientists from US universities, laboratories and industry who use facilities in other countries. This includes SLAC, Jefferson Lab, Fermilab, the Oak Ridge, Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley and Los Alamos national laboratories, as well as astrophysics facilities, their user organizations and the organization for US users of the LHC at CERN.
NUFO aims to enable communication between users, user organizations, facility administrators and other stakeholders. It seeks to provide a unified message at the national level about issues of resources for science, economic competitiveness and education for the next generation of the scientific workforce. It is organized into two major branches: user organizations’ representatives focus primarily on outreach activities, while user administrators focus on streamlining processes to facilitate access. Both branches work together closely to fulfil the overall mission. An elected steering committee – consisting of three user organization representatives, three user administrators, three additional elected members and three appointed members – conducts the organization’s business between annual meetings.
The organization recently played a fundamental role in the 2010 revisions of the Department of Energy (DOE) Order on Foreign Visits & Assignments, widening access to DOE-supported facilities by non-US citizens. This year its most important outreach activity has been the User Science Exhibition, which was held at the US House of Representatives on 7 April with the aim of highlighting the important role that scientific user facilities play in science education, economic competitiveness, fundamental knowledge and scientific achievements.
Visitors to this public exhibit were able to talk to facility users, examine posters, watch videos and learn more about the accomplishments and achievements of facility users. Attendees included congressional leaders (both senators and representatives and their staff members), management from the DOE Office of Science, four national laboratory directors, a representative from the National Science Foundation and representatives from a number of scientific agencies or societies, including the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics.
Speaking briefly during the exhibition, Rene Bellwied of Wayne State University, and NUFO chair, identified the key role that national user facilities play in fostering science by providing the capabilities for key discoveries that advance new technologies and stimulate economic growth. Stephen Wasserman, of Eli Lilly and Company, addressed the importance to his company’s drug-development efforts of the research conducted regularly at a number of facilities represented at the exhibition. Thom Mason, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, reinforced Bellwied’s comments and stressed the research benefits of co-located user facilities at national laboratories. Charles Fleishmann, congressional representative from Tennessee, expressed his support for science and its role in the economic future of the US and thanked NUFO for arranging the exhibition.
NUFO also participated in the inaugural US Science & Engineering Festival in Washington DC in October 2010. An estimated 500,000 people of all ages participated in this two-day event. The NUFO booth, which featured popular science demonstrations and information on the research conducted at user facilities attracted an estimated 5000 children, parents, high-school students and teachers.
• Additional information about NUFO can be found at www.nufo.org.