Last Friday I spent a fascinating day at the Royal Society of Chemistry's swish headquarters in Piccadilly (to be precise, in Burlington House, to the right of the Royal Academy). The event was the final of  Chemistry World 's science communication competition . I really didn't know what to expect, but after a rather drawn-out arrival tea and coffee (because the judges couldn't make their minds up in the time available), the day began with short pitches from the 10 finalists who had written an article and now had presented a 'poster session' to the judges on their personal take on the theme of 'art and science.' RSC building to right of sculptury thing Now, to be honest, when I heard the topic, my bullsh*t detector went into overdrive. I find the money poured in to projects where artists hang around a science facility than produce some generally forgettable result that is somehow inspired by/linked to/giving extra depth to the work a little nau...

Diamond Light Source in all its glory It's not surprising that as a writer who specializes in science, I'm all in favour of the intersection of science and words. This can mean the sort of non-fiction writing I do, but equally could be science fiction or the rather intriguing category lablit - fiction with a science context, but not science fiction. (Take a look at the Lablit website for a clearer idea what it's about.) If you ever fancied writing either S.F. or lablit, there's a new competition called Light Reading that's just up your street. It's run by the Diamond Light Source synchrotron people, one of the UK's top physics research centres and has cash prizes from £500 downwards. What's not to love? Entries and more details at the competition website . Closing date for entries is 30 November. If you aren't familiar with Diamond, this powerful facility generates incredibly bright light from infra-red to X-rays and is used by thousands o...

Colliding galaxies Sometimes scientists are really good at giving names to things. 'Photon' springs to mind. What a great name, even if it did come from a chemist. Even 'quark' has a certain quirky charm (in-joke for the particle physicists there) - although Murray Gell-Mann intended the word to be pronounced 'quork' which, oddly, sounds significantly more like a meat substitute than quark. However, science types have to be having a good day to come up with something so effective. So I've a challenge for you. But first a bit of background. The main reason we know that the universe is expanding is that almost all galaxies are redshifted. The light from them is lower energy than expected, shifted into the red, because they are moving away from us. But a few galaxies are blueshifted. They are close enough that the gravitational attraction between them and our galaxy is more powerful than the expansion, so they are heading in our direction. Our nearest bi...

Anyone with a website likes to attract new readers, and one popular way of doing this is through a competition. It certainly draws people to the site, but the question is, how many of them are interested in the site itself, and how many simply want to enter the competition and totally ignore the site? I'd like to share some observations from the Popular Science site , the science book review site I run. We've just started a wonderful competition with the help of the Royal Society. They're offering a copy of every book on the longlist for the Royal Society Prize for S cience Books - a total of 13 books. All you have to do to enter is to sign up for the Popular Science newsletter . The theory is that this gets people along to the site, they sign up for the newsletter and they maybe take a look around. What's fascinating is watching the newsletter signups come in - and how quick the competition entering information circuit is to respond. There are a number of websites run...

I was slightly shocked to receive an email from a major publisher canvassing votes for one of their titles, which was entered for the Galaxy British Book Awards. This set of prizes seems to be the book equivalent of one of those 'people's choice' TV awards - the voting is done by the general public, and the shortlist is mostly celebrity vehicles or TV endorsed fiction. There was even a separate category just for the Richard & Judy bookclub selections. I suppose I shouldn't have been shocked by this attempt to drum up votes. There's a long tradition of advertising to encourage people to vote one way or another, and this was just direct email advertising. But somehow it doesn't seem the sort of thing book people do. Not us, you know? I duly clicked through and voted for a competitor to the book being pushed. As it happens both were from the same publisher (I'd be furious if I were the other person and found out that book A was being promoted above mine) - ...