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A short post from me today. Science Communication dissertations are all handed in, but I will write later on what the Science Communication course has meant for me. A subject which came up in the Pub t'other night - our ideas for documentaries. My idea begins with a tunnel. There is a tunnel which runs from just outside the Science Museum, all the way underneath Exhibition Road to South Kensington Tube station. Distant voices and foreign tongues mix with buskers' notes as the sound bounces off the tiled walls. On a wet day, the concrete floor is slippery and dark, and the air is damp and cave-like. About half-way down the tunnel, a sign, mechanical and modern, directs visitors (or travelers) to the V&A Museum . The journey could begin here... (Flickr, swh) Unfortunately the V&A is the only South Kensington museum accessible by tunnel (although there is debate, particularly among Imperial College students as to whether there are more tunnels underneath Albert...

In Brave New World , Huxley presents a possible utopian/dystopian future in which humans are cloned into different classes of people. These various classes are not only genetically conditioned to fulfil their role within society – they are also psychologically conditioned to feel that their position in society makes them happy. In short, the people living in Brave New World are kept constantly happy while consuming products. I was filled with dread while reading this book. It trickled in off the page, through my eyes. It collected in pools in my brain before flowing down to my gut. This book represents my gut feeling about society as it is at the moment. Just after I started reading the book, I put the following post on my facebook page: My friends seem to like the society in Brave New World ! And actually, what’s not to like? Everyone, and I mean everyone in this society is happy. There is very little civil unrest, people do not celebrate the death of a politici...

As if weekend television couldn't get any worse, ' I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here ' has started up again. What can we learn from watching a group of celebrities, or otherwise, performing 'terrifying' tasks in an isolated environment? The 'contestants' will be pushed to their extremes, both by the loneliness and conversely by the fact that they will never by able to escape the company of the others. The tasks will demand concentration, commitment and the facing of fears. Tensions will inevitably run high and conflict will occur. This makes for some excellent TV, or so I am told. The last decade of 'reality TV' probably hasn't told us much about being human, but perhaps it has inspired scientists to start questioning how we will ever travel beyond our own ' Pale Blue Dot '. If we were to send a manned space mission to Mars, the minimum distance that would need to be covered is around 50 million kilometres. It takes light 4 minut...