Outreach Events

Pictured left is the Bio-Bubble, the world's largest inflatable human cell, designed to allow school children to "shrink" to the size of microscopic bacteria, walk inside and examine giant-sized organelles. It was just one of the weird and wonderful exhibits at this year's BA Festival of Science in York, UK on September 9-15.

Other events at the festival, which was organised by the British Association for the Advancement of Science and included seminars, exhibitions and interactive presentations, included sessions by EMBL's Eleanor Hayes and Julia Willingale-Theune. Eleanor chaired a workshop about Science in School, asking teachers about the topics they wanted to see covered in the journal. EMBL alumnus Anastasios Koutsos and Julia ran the ELLS virtual DNA microarray game, developed by Anastasios and involving a huge mat simulating a microarray.

"A highlight of the festival for me was the presentation by Professor Peter Hammond of the UCL Institute of Child Health," says Anastasios. "His team has developed a method to diagnose genetic diseases producing facial abnormalities. Software scans the face of a patient, creates a 3D image and compares it to a bank of images of people with known genetic disorders. It's 90% accurate and may reduce the number of genetic tests needed to diagnose genetic abnormalities."

Next September's festival will be hosted in Liverpool.

Highlights of this year's festival