science
Demetrios Matheou
As good as many films are, few have the “wow” factor that leaves you elated, high as a kite. Gravity is one of those. Alfonso Cuarón’s space drama is a cinematic tour-de-force, after which it takes quite a while to come back to Earth.A team of US astronauts are space walking outside their shuttle. Mission commander Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) calmly tells jokes while he enjoys the view; Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), a scientist on her first mission, is a bag of nerves. Suddenly they receive a message from Houston that the debris from a destroyed Russian satellite is speeding towards them. Read more ...
Sarah Kent
While the main gallery is closed for renovation, the Wellcome Collection has taken the opportunity to mount a fascinating upstairs show exploring the way choreographer Wayne McGregor collaborates with scientists.A timeline charting McGregor’s career reveals that it all started back in 1997 when he attended the opening of the Inter Communication Centre in Tokyo and learned that, with their brains wired up to scanners, two people could activate a toy car by accidentally thinking of the same number. This sparked an enduring fascination with the mind and how it acts upon, and interacts with, the Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
When Leonardo da Vinci went for a job in Milan, he wrote ahead mentioning his bridge-building skills and then turned up at court with a lyre he had made in the shape of a horse’s skull. But had he finished compiling his illustrated treatise on the human body - said Alastair Sooke in this Edinburgh Culture Show special - it would have been as a scientist, rather than as an artist, that he would have been remembered for centuries.Some of the hundreds of anatomical drawings he made are on show at the Queen’s Gallery, Holyrood House now, many on loan from Windsor Castle, having passed from a 16th Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Teamwork, as the song once said, makes the dream work. Homo sapiens knows this, if not quite by nature, then at least by nurture. Turns out that there are some chimpanzees in Leipzig which are all over the team thing too. Offered the chance to pull together on a simple mechanism to retrieve a nut – one each – two chimps will work in tandem to make it happen.Perhaps these are just highly efficient Teutonic chimps who uniquely understand the meaning of Vorsprung durch Technik. But no. That stat about sharing 98 per cent of our DNA with chimpanzees? It seems the ability to cooperate is part of Read more ...
Laura Gascoigne
One of this summer’s seaside attractions in Margate is an overstuffed walrus, but day-trippers won’t find it in the town’s Museum of Monstrosities. The taxidermic freak, on loan from the Horniman Museum, is the star exhibit in the new show at Turner Contemporary. Against the backdrop of a North Sea painted by Turner, the adipose Arctic mammal is out of its element. The fact that it’s also uncomfortable in its overtight skin (thanks to an overzealous Victorian taxidermist who had never seen a live specimen in the sagging flesh) makes it doubly curious - and doubly qualified for inclusion in Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Given the breadth of Marcus du Sautoy’s cultural scholarship, it was a small surprise that British poet Andrew Marvell wasn't name-checked at the start of the presenter’s new three-parter Precision: The Measure of All Things. “Had we but world enough and time,” the great Metaphysical wooer called to his Coy Mistress, touching directly on the subjects of episode one, “Time and Distance”. Time was equally of the essence for du Sautoy, who barely caught breath in his (more respectable) urgency to explain everything behind his subject, and how it touched on the world we live in. The unforgiving Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Marie Curie must rank right up there among the world’s achievers of greatness. She certainly wasn’t one of those who had it “thrust upon ’em”. In fact, fate stacked the odds against her achieving the eminence she did in just about every way possible.She was born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw at a time when Poland was dominated by its Russian occupiers, and scientific training for Poles could only be had on the hoof in the underground, so-called “flying” universities. Through great good fortune she followed her sister to the Sorbonne, one of the very few universities accepting women at the time, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When the NASA space shuttle Challenger fell out of the Florida sky on the morning of 28 January 1986 after 73 seconds, killing all seven astronauts, the Nobel-winning theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was the only independent scientist appointed to the investigating panel. He duly made a nuisance of himself, asking awkward questions, ignoring protocols, disobeying instructions and generally making damn sure the appliance of science would dig up the truth protected by vested interests. Feynman has been portrayed onstage by Alan Alda, and on the radio by Alfred Molina, but when you want Read more ...
graeme.thomson
What is truth? Is it fixed or fluid, personal or universal? Does it require hard evidence or merely faith? These are the areas of interest poked and prodded in this co-production between the Traverse and Peepolykus, the company which previously brought The Hound of the Baskervilles to the stage. The result is an eccentric romp through the life of Arthur Conan Doyle, a famously ridiculed figurehead for the spirit world in his later years, which ponders – none too deeply, but with immense good humour – the conflict between fideism and rationalism.Doyle’s story is presented here as an Read more ...
graeme.thomson
During a previous Imagine about neurologist Oliver Sacks, Alan Yentob listened to Jessye Norman singing Strauss while scanning equipment showed his brain “bathed in blood”. It provided powerful visual evidence that music physically alters our emotions – instantly and dramatically. The job of this latest film was to find out how and why. As composer George Benjamin pointed out, it’s “a mystery that has eluded scholars for thousands of years”. Enter Yentob and a veritable legion of talking heads to clear up any misunderstandings. In the event they ended up exactly where they started.There is Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Science thrives on stage. In play after play, various scientific ideas seem to flourish in the warm, well-lit environment of the theatre, fed by a crew of artists and despite the threats of critics or other predators. Now, Lucy Prebble — fresh from her outstanding success with Enron — turns her attention to the subject of love and neurology in her latest play, which opened last night. Directed by Enron maestro Rupert Goold, the play stars Billie Piper so it’s already sold out, but is it any good?The short answer is yes. For a longer answer, read on. The Effect is set in a facility managed by Read more ...