If you fancy seeing the rarest knob in the world, discovering the science
in your Sunday lunch, or hearing about deviant scientists, then head for
Scotland’s capital between Easter and 23 April. That’s when this year’s
Edinburgh Science Festival takes place, with 400 talks, 20 exhibitions,
a dozen or so conferences and ‘performances’.
The rarest knob in the world is part of what is claimed to be the most
complete collection anywhere of TV memorabilia. ‘You’ve seen the twentieth
century – now see the box it came in,’ says Bruce Durie, the organiser of
the festival.
As usual, the ‘Science Dome’ is catering for inquisitive children. ‘Friendly
explainers’ help visitors to investigate a host of scientific phenomena
with simple, interactive exhibits. For 50p, you can design a biosphere,
or ‘bottled planet’ containing algae and shrimps.
For jazz buffs, Humphrey Lyttelton, the broadcaster and jazz trumpeter,
will explain how musicians must change their role as a jazz band expands.
His ‘performance’is part of a theme on ‘size’. Peter Nelson of the University
of Edinburgh will be premiering his Gross Concerto of electronic ‘hyperinstruments’
on the ninth.
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There are regular talks such as ‘The Molecule Of The Day’, a conference
on pets, and lectures on ‘Love, Power and Knowledge’, examining the links
between science and feminism. ‘Heavier’ themes include toxicology, the global
environment, nuclear weapons and the origin of the Universe. For those who
want to escape reality, there’s an evening on the art and science of Scotch
whisky.
The festival takes over where the government-inspired Science Week covering
the whole of Britain leaves off. There may even be a postmortem of the Science
Week at a conference called ‘Building Bridges’ examining the popularisation
of science. And for those who really have had enough, there’s a play about
brain transplants.
Further details from the festival organisers. Tel: 031 557 4296, fax:
031 557 3743.
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
