“Ooh you all look like you’ve been dipped in glue and rolled around a vintage clothing store!”

Never was a truer word spoken than by compere Jamie Anderson, opening the inaugural London Cabaret Awards on The Battersea Barge last week. The boat was crammed to the ceiling with glitter, wigs, false nails, false lashes, false boobs and genuine smiles, and all were clearly determined to make merry with friends old and new. As new London Editor for Broadway Baby, it was my pleasure to be a part of it, even given the personal nightmare I had in getting there.

I had a business meeting during the day, so had come to London in normal enough clothes, but with a bag full of corsetry, stockings and feathered epaulettes. After a struggle into the steel-boned creation in the loo of an extremely overcrowded Costa on Shaftesbury Avenue, I set off on the ill fated journey across London. Wisely, I had decided to put on the heels and the epaulettes once I was there, but the corset did little for my mobility, at speed, through the subway at rush-hour. Following an extensive detour owing to severe delays on the Picadilly line, I eventually arrived at Vauxhall with twenty minutes to spare before the beginning of the champagne reception. I walked.

Being a barge, I knew it was on the river, and my rough mental map told me in which direction to walk. It didn’t, however, tell me how far to walk, and just how much of that would be along a dual carriageway. In a corset. Finally spotting a sign advising me to turn right for the Battersea Barge, I did so, and was heartened to see a number of taxis dropping off revellers. Good, I thought, I’m going in the right direction. Carrying on, more taxis and even a tour bus with blacked-out windows passed me. Gosh, I thought, this is a fancy affair. All this time I am walking through what seems to an industrial estate, with cement lorries, and refuse trucks. Very ironic, I thought. But the road took me right up to Battersea Power Station, where there was a huge queue and a great many photographers. I even think I was snapped a couple of times in my ridiculously overstated outfit, before I realised that this was, in fact, a completely different event and I was, in fact, nowhere near where I wanted to be. By this time it is fifteen minutes into the champagne reception and I am lost on an industrial estate in Battersea. In a corset. I walked.

I spent the next 45 minutes walking, investigating every alleyway and signpost until I eventually found a teeny tiny sign that directed me down a labyrinthine set of walkways which, eventually, led me to the Battersea Barge. Already exhausted, but determined to go through with my extravagant outfit, I slip on my heels and prepare to put on my feather epaulettes – only to find them gone. Somewhere, somehow, in London I have lost a pair of black feathered shoulderpads. Kind readers, if you find them, pity me and my bare shoulders in an industrial estate in Battersea, in a corset.

By the time I made it onto the barge, the champagne was finished, the guests were already pleasingly drunk, and the awards were about to start. No one noticed my shockingly bare shoulders, for which I am glad.

Compere Jamie Anderson

That was enough of a fiasco for one night, and the Cabaret Awards did not disappoint with extravagance, fake eyelashes or inebriation. Hosted by the quite delicious Jamie Anderson through choppy waters, the show and ceremony was underway with much whooping and heckling, as could be expected from a cabaret audience made of cabaret performers.

Awarded first were the glass stars for the best drag act, to Jonny Woo, the best burlesque performer, to Kiki Kaboom, and the best cabaret venue, to the Royal Vauxhall Tavern.

There followed a wonderful set by the Four Femmes on the Thames, a 40’s inspired music act reminiscent of the Puppini Sisters. With tight satin frocks and tighter harmonies, the four girls oozed charisma and thinly veiled drunkenness, and their performance was a real treat.

The Four Femmes on the Thames

The next set of awards went to Dicky Beau, for best alternative performer, and to Mat Ricardo, for best speciality act. Zoe Charles, teacher at ‘The Cheek of It’ burlesque school, was awarded the unsung hero award.

Following a brief interval, Mr B the Gentleman Rhymer treated the audience to his special brand of ‘Chap Hop’, accompanied by a miniature banjo and a spiffing moustache. Mr B was a hug hit on the Edinburgh cabaret scene in 2011, and both he and yours truly hope he will be recognised for an award next year.

Mr B the Gentleman Rhymer

More awards, to the Double R club, for best ongoing production; to Dusty Limits for best compere; and to Bourjeois and Maurice for the catchily titled best music-based act, were heralded with renewed vigour by the thoroughly inebriated audience.

Josephine Shaker provided the final break in the proceedings, tapping her heart out on a thoroughly sick-making stage, performing a fascinatingly androgynous strip, and being generally ignored by the increasingly rowdy contents of an increasingly crowded barge.

The final awards, almost drowned out by good natured heckling were, for best one-off production, to La Soiree, for the Time Out Audience award voted for, unsurprisingly, by the audience of Time Out, to Alp Haydar, and finally the Outstanding Achievement Award, to a seemingly very deserving Duckie. The crowd simultaneously climaxed, and Jamie Anderson’s closing comments went unheard and unheeded. A song to end the night affirmed an excellent time had by all.

Winners Dusty Limits and Kiki Kaboom

Yours truly had to rush off to catch to the last train home, much to my chagrin, for there is nothing I love better than an alcohol and burlesque-fuelled afterparty. But despite the dramatic failure of the first part of the evening, the awards themselves were a gin-soaked romp, and as one particularly drunk burlesque nominee announced, “We are all winners”. I look forward to many more cabaret awards, with the continued blossoming of the London cabaret scene. I even know where the bloody barge is now.

When I was 17, I fancied myself as a bit of an environmental activist.  I was devastated by the devastation of the Amazon, and choked by the choking of the oceans with plastic.  I joined Greenpeace and got an activist’s pack, including a stencil which I dutifully cut out.

But that was about as far as it went. I never sprayed my stencil onto anything, never did any flyering, and never chained myself to any railings.  It would seem my sense of self-preservation was a little bit stronger than my cares for the World’s preservation.  I’m a little ashamed to admit that, but I don’t really believe I am alone.  If I was in the minority, maybe we wouldn’t have the environmental issues we do, and I would be admitting a much more heinous crime of selfishness.

Would everyone in my position admit such self-preservation?  Not without producing a few excuses: we didn’t know; we didn’t know what to do; we didn’t know how to make a difference.  Not everyone wants to hijack an oiltanker to make a difference, and they shouldn’t have to.  For us to be able to deal with the climatic and ecological changes to our planet today, the baton must be carried by more than the few, fierce, selfless activists, but by all – as a part of everyday life.

UNEP’s World Environment Day (5th June), will address this issue with this year’s theme: ‘Green Economy: Does it include you?’

Like the majority of people in the UK, I am not intimately involved in forming our country’s economic policy, but I am environmentally minded. But what are the opportunities for an ordinary person to be green, without being an activist?

So I thought I would assess my own greenness, eight years on from my Greenpeace days. What has slipped unnoticed into my world?

Light bulbs: When I get home each night, I go through the same ritual.  I switch on the light in my room, and then I go and do something else for 5 minutes.  Why?  Because my house has been imperceptibly infiltrated by energy-saving bulbs, producing a laughably small amount of light when switched on, and taking hours to ‘warm up’. Apart from this very minor, first-world irritation, energy saving bulbs are one of the triumphs of subversive green policy making.  Have you tried to buy a tungsten bulb recently?  They might as well be illegal, for the trouble you have to go to.  Low energy bulbs are now made easier on the eye and on the pocket, and are a shining beacon of successful, if small, steps to greenness.

Green Energy: Wind turbines!  What a wonderful way to make use of Britain’s prevailing southwesterlies.  Personally, I find wind farms some of the most graceful, beautiful and striking examples of green engineering, but they attract a surprising number of antagonists – mostly on ecological grounds (surprisingly not on grounds of impending invasion). But are we close to meeting renewable targets, or are we even trying? Can I have my own wind turbine? Please?

Sustainable and Organic: Many foods and products now proudly tote logos proclaiming their sustainability. The Red Tractor for British farms, and FSC for sustainable wood are both fairly ubiquitous in the marketplace, offering green alternatives at no expense or inconvenience.  The Organic revolution is still floundering though, with organic goods prohibitively expensive for all but the lavishly rich or the more pressingly green-conscious.

This is a pretty small list.  Although it could be made longer, it would begin to include options, like organic food, that require a strength of will, awareness, or purse, that most people don’t have time or inclination to invest in.

Does the Green economy include me?  A bit, I suppose, if you count my light-bulb ritual and my love of wind farms.  But until all unfriendly solutions go the quiet but definite way of the tungsten lightbulb, I won’t hold my breath for willing or active advocacy.

This blog post is submitted as an entry to the UNEP/WED blog competition.

Making a tree inevitably involves a lot of number crunching, but the resulting diagram is elegant and informative.  Try this general one of eukaryotic life

Phylogenetic Tree of Eukaryotes

Here, Bacteria have been used as an ‘outlier’ to compare all the other members of the Eukaryotes. Each branch marks an evolutionary ‘divergence’ – a novel change that created that group of organisms.  For instance, the invention of chloroplasts led to the all the members of the plant kingdom, just as the invention of feathers led uniquely to birds. The fewer the number of branches between two creatures, the more closely related they are.  For instance, we are more closely related to cows and whales, than we are to marsupials.

So to a graphically minded palaeontologist, a phylogenetic tree is quite a thing to behold, but there is a way of making them even better.  For many, more detailed trees, you may be dealing with specific species, and lots of them.  Take this now-famous ‘megatree’ of all the dinosaurs:

Dinosaur Phylogenetic Tree. Lloyd et al Royal Society

While it is undoubtedly a breathtaking piece of work, with a striking design, its usefulness is questionable to all but the most dedicated head-tilting members of the vertebrate palaeontological community.  More and more trees are appearing with more and more information crammed into them, and they are no longer the elegantly informative diagrams they once were.

But there is a growing trend to making phylogenetic trees beautiful and readable again, using silhouettes of the creatures being compared, rather than, or in addition to, their names.  And hopefully this graphically gorgeous trend will continue with the launch of PhyloPic a new open database of life form silhouettes for use in phylogenetic and other applications.  Here’s an example:

Rangifer tarandus (reindeer) from PhyloPic

The open source database is encouraging submissions from registered users (registration is as easy as pie) of silhouettes of any creature, in solid black, to be used under a creative commons license.  Users can search the database for the latin or the common name, and download the image in a variety of sizes and manipulable formats.

At the moment, the search and browse facilities are still a little clunky, and the database is  rather sparsely populated with some odd looking silhouetted.  What on earth are these?

Mystery silhouettes from PhyloPic

They are, in actual fact (from left to right): a single-celled symbiotic euakryote, a placozoan, a human baby, a choanoflagellate, and a pterosaur.  Perhaps a little more contecxt will make these silhouettes a little less mysterious.

Needless to day, as an artist and a palaeontologist, I heartily approve of this new resource and I know I’m not alone – the young palaeo-community has got silhouetted ants in their pants with excitement over it.  I will certainly be contributing some images over the coming weeks, and I encourage any other artistically minded palaeontologist, zoologist or miscellaneous scientist to help to build this wonderful database.

Browse or contribute to PhyloPic here: http://phylopic.org

Sitting camel. Indian ink on paper. Copyright Leila Battison 2012

How did you learn the geological timescale?

Geology is not a standard subject in the UK Curriculum, so those few students who arrive at university having done it at GCSE or A-Level, have usually been taught it by non-tradtitional means.  They are more exposed to the whim and wit of their teacher than they would be in any other subject.

In fact, it was partly the charisma and enthusiasm of my A-Level Geology teacher that prompted me to apply to Geology at university, and…well, the rest is history.  Initially planning to take science subjects and apply for biochemistry, I chose Geology at A-Level on a bit of a whim – having always enjoyed physical geography.  Imperceptibly, as the weeks passed, all thoughts of biochemistry slipped away, and I realised I’d been a geologist all along.  Starting it at university was a bit of a shock to the system, and it was only then I realised my love affair was not entirely with the subject, but also with the teaching (not the teacher, I know how that sounds), and I was suddenly deprived of it.

Amongst the physical memories: Shap granite on the front desk, the poster about petroleum play (tee hee) and the river delta tank – some lessons still remain.  By far the most useful was a handy mnemonic for remembering the order of the geological time periods.  I was surprised to find later that not everyone learnt this, and I admit I have rather come to depend on it, reciting it inside my head whenever I need to pluck a series of periods out of the air.  It goes like this:

Camels Often Sit Down Carefully, Perhaps Their Joints Creak – reciting upwards from the base of the Phanerozoic goes through Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous.  In fact, this only really covers the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic, but they are always the trickiest ones to remember. Nevertheless, my choice to research the Palaeozoic and Precambrian is in part due to the fact that I have no idea of the order of the things in the Tertiary.  Perhaps it is possible to become too reliant on a mnemonic…

Let me tell you one of my favourite things about this little phrase.  It is clever when it come to C’s.  You have three periods beginning with C – the Cambrian, the Carboniferous, and the Cretaceous.  Now if you didn’t know and you were given an acrostic-style mnemonic that dealt only with the first letter, you would be left in the dark while you were guessing whether the Cretaceous or the Carboniferous came first.  But this is great in that the C’s are padded out – CAMels for the CAMbrian; CARefully for the CARboniferous, and CREak for the CREtaceous.  Neat, huh?

So no, it won’t help with your Vendians or Ripheans, or with your Palaeogene or Pleistocene, but it is a super little phrase which played a big part in shaping my career.

I’d love to hear any other suggestions, especially something that can help ease my distrust of the Cenozoic…?

Why should I be so concerned?  Surely it’s just his opinion and I will either agree with it or not.  But in a sense it meant much more to me.  I love the BBC, I really do.  I am to the BBC what Sam is to Frodo, what Tristan is to Isolde.  I will vehemently defend it to the last as a fundamental crutch on which our nation depends, and as a responsible custodian of our trust.  And yet there has been a secret seed of dissatisfaction gnawing away at me for some time.   Swallowing my denial, I sat down this morning and read.

And I agree.  I agree with what the good Mr Robbins says, but was also surprised to find that his kernels of irritation were different to mine, albeit with the same result.  I am coming out now and saying that I cannot watch most BBC science programming, and I am ashamed when I hear it on the radio.

Perhaps my point of view is one that is a little more personal.  As an aspiring journalist and science communicator, I last year spent three months working (for free) with the BBC, with Horizon, online newsgathering, and radio production.  I’ve already spoken at length about what an enriching experience it was for an amateur, but it was the chance to see the inner workings of these long revered institutions that really fundamentally changed my viewpoint.

With regard to television, Martin Robbins said:

The BBC’s drive to avoid bias is admirable, but – whether through laziness or fear – journalists have fallen into the trap of believing that avoiding bias means avoiding any kind of judgement.

From my time at Horizon, I can attest to that.  Working in Development, I was charged with the thankless task of coming up with new programme ideas that excited the non-scientist editor.  If he deemed them not exiting enough, or not balanced enough at first glance, you could go and work them up for a week, and present them again.  But by then, the story was old, and the editor had lost interest.  Almost without fail, the only ideas that made it through were related to health, happiness, and any other branch of social science that could be bulked out with the inevitable conscious-twanging shot of unhappy children.

Now, I don’t have a problem with social sciences, but should they be the exclusive content of Horizon?  As a child and a teenager, I watched Horizon with wonder, never hoping to understand the details, and accepting that maybe even the scientists didn’t.  But it sparked in me a curiosity and a passion that has brought me to where I am today.  I realised then that I actively avoid BBC science documentaries – I didn’t even watch Adam Rutherford’s Cell, despite having consulted and provided fossils for it.

Why?  Because it is hollow.  It is dull.  As Martin Robbins says, it stays:

 …in the safe world of recreating GCSE-level text books in glorious 1080p…

And that is now all it is good for.  Wide panoramas of dramatic Argentine mountaintops (with the ubiquitous Cox-akimbo), or comical captures of thieving penguins, but NO SCIENCE. Where is the passion? The glistening eyes and wistful expression of Sagan? Where are the strong personal stories of Gorillas in the Mist? They are gone to be replaced by sllooow explanations of why you get fat when you eat too much, by a presenter who has excellent diction, but has never even done an alcohol immersion test.

Therein lies the rub.  At Horizon, the non-scientists outnumber the scientists.  I know the point is to make programmes that are accessible, but contrary to popular belief, not all scientists speak only in latin, and you only have to turn to the immense online community of professional and aspiring science communicators to find fascinating new takes on old ideas.  Think what they could do with a BBC budget and connections?  In my honest opinion, Horizon have fallen off the wagon in favour of fluffy school science and the frontiers of science communication have left them far behind.

Martin Robbins also touched on another half buried rage ball of mine.  John Humphry’s. How does that man sleep at night? You really have to congratulate the Today programme on finding the most brashly opinionated and unabashedly ignorant man in Britain and persevering in letting him loose daily on some of the best minds in the country.  In this I wholeheartedly agree with Mr Robbins, and can only repeat what he so eloquently put (presumably because he wasn’t fighting the urge to punch something Welsh):

When his guests provided answers, such as Rutherford’s neat explanation of the economic benefits of investing in scientific research, they aroused an “mm” or were ignored. Worse, Humphrys seemed almost proud of his own ignorance of the subject…

I now use the Today programme as an alarm clock.  I think I average about 5 seconds from deep sleep to hurling the radio across the room.  It has never failed.

This is all turning into a bit of a rant, so let me say something positive.  BBC Science does get some things right, and that is its news.  Whether written online, presented on the 6 O’Clock, or prerecorded for a weekly roundup, the newsgatherers hit the spot.  Outwardly, they seem to regularly strike the perfect balance between quirky, serious, and engaging.  .  They  are not all scientists, but they have something the feature programmers drastically lack – passion.  They invest emotion and interest in scientists’ findings, and their curiosity is infectious whether reading, listening, or watching them, or working with them.  Give them a prime time airing and much of the BBC’s ills could be cured.  The two months I spent with them were two of the best of my life.

What is it about newsgathering that is so much more alive than feature programming?  Perhaps the endless onslaught of new information selects for those who are flexible and can think on their toes.  Perhaps seeing a feature documentary through is a soulless task, unavoidably stripping out any enthusiasm that may have once been there.  All I can say with confidence is that somewhere along the way, the BBC have got the equation wrong, and it risks losing the unquestioning belief of the public, as well as my (almost) unconditional love.

So I can only thank Martin Robbins for exposing my guilty secret, the embarrassing truth, that I would sooner watch the cringing comedy Twenty Twelve, than any science on the BBC.

Nevertheless, productivity has found some alternative outlets during the last month in the form of crafts.  I don’t generally do much ‘crafting’, owing to the fact that I should be using my time to be doing my thesis, and I live in a rented house in Oxford which I shouldn’t really be covering in glue, woodshavings or paint.  But if Christmas isn’t a time for gluing your fingers together in a misguided attempt to make a scaffold out of cocktail sticks, what is it!?

So, following on from the success of the great cake bake, and in liu of my dwindling funds, I decided to make all my Christmas presents this year, roving into previously uncharted crafting territory: clay and oil.

Anyway, the recipients seemed pretty pleased, though I wonder how much they were humoring me – I thought I’d share with you some of the creations.

Out of air-drying clay that I picked up (and then had to carry home in its extremely heavy 5kg block) I sculpted some owl tealight holders each with their individual personality:

Family of owl tealight holders. Air-drying clay and acrylic. Leila Battison 2011

These were pretty easy and fun to make, taking about 1hr45mins in total, and then drying slowly (to avoid cracking) over a period of about three days.  After drying they were painted with pearlescent acrylic paint and a thin layer of varnish.  Here’s a video of the making of one not pictured here.

Sticking with the owl theme, I made an odds-and-ends jar for my mum, sculpted slightly differently with thin plates of clay, but finished in the same way.  The result is heavy but not too unbecoming.

Owl jar. Air-drying clay and acrylic. Leila Battison 2011

Buoyed by the success of these small scale projects, I decided to ramp up the ambition and recreate something I had seen for sale in an rather unaffordable gallery in Oxford – hares.  These were constructed differently, with a card and wet newspaper inner structure and an air-drying clay outer.  Mostly this worked, but it gave them a bit of a haggard emaciated look.  I’m going to pretend that was what I was going for all along.  They were an absolute bugger to transport, and I’m still having nightmares about those ears, but luckily the emaciated look lends itself to rough mends.

Sitting Hares. Air-drying clay and acrylic. Leila Battison 2011

After battling with these two for several days, I had pretty much lost my temper with clay, so turned my hand to another new and untested medium – oil.  After my autumn trip to Anglesey and Portmeirion I drew a pen and ink landscape of the village.  But my black and white ink work doesn’t fit very well into my parents home, so I wanted to do something in colour for them.  I don’t get on overy well with watercolours – they are sneaky and change colour on the page, so oils it was.  This was the outcome.  I still thing there is some way to go, and in the end I ran out of time to fiddle with it to my satisfaction, but there it was.  It is now fully dry and awaiting a frame in my mothers possession.

Portmeirion. Oil on canvas. Leila Battison 2011

So that was what I did during December.  But it wasn’t just me that was crafting.  I also received some delightful crafty gifts.  Earlier last year I tweeted about some amazing looking knitted microbes.  My mother has discovered twitter, and believed that its primary purpose is to subtly communicate gift requests.  So along with a large wooly jumper, I also received these happy fellows…

Knitted Microbes, Wool. Lesley Battison 2001

They are thoroughly adorable, and mean much more than any gift money can buy.

All round a very crafty Christmas, but I think I’d better put the glue away and concentrate on some science for a while…

And, after 30 hours, 32 eggs, and 3kg of marzipan, this was the outcome:

Evolution cake by the Oxford Palaleobiology Group

This photo isn’t really the best, and there are lots of things I would like to draw your attention to, so I have made a lovely video for your watching pleasure. You can find it *here*.

Anyway, we were all supremely happy with what we produced, which was just as well because we didn’t even win the competition.  Not that I’m bitter about that at all….  It would seem that when a cake is being judged on both style and taste, you can’t rely on a thoroughly manhandled multi-bake cake and marzipan to clinch the deal.  Never mind.

I plan to hand in a less edible version as a diorama alongside my thesis.  Pretty sure it will boost my approval?

Do you know why the Higgs boson is significant?

Get going with your answers and we’ll have a compile and a summary ready for reading over Christmas.

Do you think there is life elsewhere in the universe?.

Part of my research focuses on this subject, addressing how and where we might look to find and verify extraterrestrial life.  Overwhelmingly I find that when I tell people this, I am bombarded with questions along the lines of: So have we found life? Where is life most likely to be? What will aliens look like?  It is a great talking point and something I never get bored of talking about, so I wanted to find out what the general perception was, among those who haven’t just bought me a drink.

The response, while not overwhelming in number, was overall more positive that I would have imagined.  Out of the 19 people that sent me their responses (I’ve had a busy week and haven’t had much time to trudge the streets, but watch this space!), all but three were positive about the possibility of extraterrestrial life.  I would love to get some more responses so see if this trend is maintained, so may revisit the question in the future.

Interestingly, among those who were confident that there was life out there the reasoning was pretty vague, relying mostly on optimistic logic over the cold hard facts.  I suppose as a scientist, groundless optimism is drilled out of you early, but I was delighted to see it was alive and well and still dominant among the many.  Optimistic curiosity is, after all, what drives some of our best science.  Here are the two main arguments I was presented with.

The universe is so large, we can’t possibly be alone…

This line of thinking harks back to the earliest thoughts on astrobiology – those of Frank Drake and Enrico Fermi – who tried to quantify the amount of intelligent life in the universe at any one time.  While the Drake Equation predicted any number of communicating civilisations between one (our own) and 10,000, Fermi was concerned with the overwhelming silence of the stars.  If there is life out there, then why can’t we detect it?

Many ideas have been proposed as a solution to the Fermi Paradox, including the vast distances representing an insurmountable barrier to communication, or the concept that we are being watched but that our watchers purposefully hide themselves from us.  Whichever the ultimate solution, it would seem that the cool logic of the reasoning public errs on the optimistic side and personally, I can’t say I blame them.

We’ve just found a planet just like earth…

On 5^th December 2011, NASA announced that for the first time a planet had been found orbiting well within the habitable zone of a star just like our own sun.  They painted a picture of Kepler 22b as a veritable Eden, an ocean planet with an atmosphere maintaining the world at a very pleasant 22 degrees Celsius.  While considerably larger than our own Earth (suggested ot be around the size of Nepture), it is the closest analogy to Earth that we have yet found outside our solar system.  And it is this recent finding, on top of the host of other extra-solar planets that Kepler has identified this year, which seems to be spurring on the general optimism.

Of course, merely the fact that there is another Earth-ish planet doesn’t necessarily mean that we are more likely to find life.  As a conscious species we are inherently biased toward those environments that we find comfortable.  In this case it is an equable temperature range, and oxygen-rich atmosphere, and a 24-hour day.  But there are whole host of other organisms, even on Earth, for whom our heaven would be the worst kind of hell.  Extremophilic organisms have a very different idea about what is an equable climate for life, and there is just as much chance that any potential aliens will similarly find the predominant conditions on an Earth-like planet pretty unpleasant.  That we are finding other planets around other suns is exciting, but we should be a bit broader in our ideas of what is ‘habitable’.

Alien autopsies and UFOs…

I was surprised how few people claimed to be won over by the countless videos of live ‘aliens’ and ‘UFOs’ that can be found on the internet.  Only one anonymous respondent claimed their belief of extraterrestrial life came from these dubious sources.  In all, it was encouraging for the propagation of real scientific thinking on the subject.

In terms of the negative responses, the reasoning was once again varied:

It’s bleak but true…

An attitude such as this plays into one of the more troubling solutions to the Fermi Paradox – that the reason we haven’t identified life is because we are, in fact, alone. Ultimately this is based on pure, unoptimistic facts.  We have found places where there is the potential for life, but no indication of life there yet.  Time will tell, but if we remove optimism and deal only with the evidence we have, we would seem to be alone.

We haven’t managed to make it ex nihilo…

The fact that we haven’t yet found the way life got started is indeed good evidence that our understanding of the earliest biological processes is incomplete.  And surely, if we don’t understand how, when and where life started on earth, we can’t hope to know how or where it happened elsewhere.  But does this mean there is nothing else out there?  Perhaps, if you take the current holes in our knowledge to imply a force stronger and stranger than our natural laws, with the need for unique Earthly Creator.  But perhaps it just means we don’t have all the answers yet.  It certainly wouldn’t be the first time, and our knowledge is increasing daily.

So it would seem that optimism rules the way in my small sample. For most people, we are probably not alone, and we scientists must bear the responsibility, not only of finding the objective truth, but also to live up the hopes of thousands (represented by 20). Better get to it then…

Thanks to everyone who responded to the first SciVoxPop. Watch this space for next week’s question.  It’s a topical one!

So let me introduce SciVoxPops - a chance for everyone to have a say about a hot science question.

The project will not only pose these questions and relay the doubtless fascinating answers, but use these voxpops in ways they are unaccustomed to.  I’m going to analyse them.

Gist: A scientific question or issue will be posed, comments and replies will be obtained, the results will be collated, presented, and analysed.  You will find out fascinating facts as well as some diverse opinions.

What I will do: Each week, I will pose a scientific question across various social media outlets, and also to real people in the real world.  I will collate the comments, present them, and try to tease out some sense or trend which, hopefully, will throw up some surprising results. These will be presented in a weekly blog. If this trial goes well, YouTube will be conquered.

What you will do: Watch out for the question each week.  On twitter, search for the hashtag #scivoxpop. Send an honest or witty reply, then wait to find out how you fit in or out in a blog here at the end of the week.  Tell everyone you know, and send me suggestions for future SciVoxPops.

First question tomorrow (Fri 9th Dec).  Hint: it will be a subject close to my heart to get the ball rolling.

VoxPops – literally Vox populi or ‘voice of the people’, is commonly used to describe the so-called man-on-the-street interviews carried out by TV and Radio journalists.  Whilst they often provide a light relief from the professional and often cutting reporting of journalists and people trained in public speaking, they are usually left at just that.

I would like to use a large volume of these to try and tease out trends in opinion, especially about scientific questions or issues. Sometimes it will be a matter of opinion, sometimes it will be a matter of communication.  Will we find the Higgs Boson?  What is the best source of energy? How old is the Earth? Which sci-fi movie taught you most? All of these questions can be addressed and gauged by YOU, the man (or woman or undecided) on the street (or in the lab or on the internet). I can’t wait to see the results.

In fact, the ‘wisdom of crowds’ – what we use these days in croudsourcing the best kind of DVI cable to buy and other Very Important Issues – was a concept first postulated by Sir Francis Galton way back in 1907.  He published his research in the journal Nature entitled, coincidentally ‘Vox populi’.  So this is my hundred-year-old tribute to Sir Francis, in attempting to harness the ‘wisdom of crowds’, using the VoxPoppery of today.

UPDATE: This week’s SciVoxPop is ‘Do you think there is life elsewhere in the universe?’ Answers here or on twitter, or if you’re shy email me…