leads the pack for science at festivals this summer. Following its debut at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire last year, this fusion of music, science and culture tackles the big themes, from the depths of the oceans to how to leave Earth. And you can hunt for new pulsars with the BBC’s Sky at Night team, get your hands on some graphene in the Star Field, and explore earthquakes in the Planet Field.

Modesty aside, żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ” is at the festival in strength, so watch out for: , with Catherine Brahic on the unknown talents of the cave artists at Chauvet and Lascaux; Frank Swain becoming as he explores how tech is changing our bio natures; Penny Sarchet wondering – complete with dancing parrots, bopping seals and cat music; and Sally Adee explaining .

Up in the thrillingly beautiful Brecon Beacons in south Wales, is cranking out a wide-ranging space theme, as Explorer Dome turns the Omni Tent into a mobile planetarium. Or if you just want to dance or trance out, rock down to the algorave, where electronic music and visuals are generated live by algorithms.

Tents, talks and tests

That daddy of all festivals, , has its Green Fields host a science tent that offers festivalgoers the chance to experience a supernova explosion, explore aeronautics and astronautics with real rocket parts, and test how reaction times and decision-making change under pressure – or just get blown away with the Lego Wind-Tunnel Simulator.

What makes us who we are is up for debate at. There’s Theatre Re’s The Nature of Forgetting, which looks at the neurobiological research into dementia and real-life experience of it. Or you can check out the festival’s ongoing collaboration with the Wellcome Trust, through a host of talks and experiments in the Faraway Forest. For sheer fun, catch Unlimited Theatre’s How I Hacked My Way into Space, the story of one man’s adventure told from where it happened – his garden shed.

is still the newish kid on the block, but alongside music this year from Bonobo, Laura Marling and Michael Kiwanuka, it has old hand Guerilla Science bringing its unique sense of fun, with workshops on lucid dreaming and sensory speed dating.

Guerilla Science will also host a gig on attraction and identity at , featuring sensory speed dating and personality tests. And a special life drawing session will offer the chance to get a different perspective, with the audience trying to draw the world as perceived by people with perceptual disorders.

has some serious chemistry kit at The Apothecary, where you can make your own bath bomb, while the festival’s Sigma tent explores our obsession with bringing animals back from extinction and the experience of synaesthesia.

Smaller-scale highlights

Highlights among the smaller festivals include sporting a science dome as part of its Out of this World theme, visitors to Ìęsnuggling up for a more traditional picnic-blanket approach to stargazing, and offering the relaxingly titled Tea and Theoretical Physics.

Makerspaces are on the rise, with SHMakerspace and its 3D printers at in Guildford. But if you’d rather break something than make it, ’s Wrekshop might be just the thing – though you may accidentally learn some electrical engineering in the process.

There’s lots on offer for kids too, with offering woodcraft and stargazing. Or they could learn about bees in the craft area at , attend the Jedi Training Academy at Bluedot or take some classes in the genie labs at Always the Sun.

In the wake of the world’s hottest year on record in 2016, festivals are taking a more focused approach to climate change, with low-carbon energy topping the bill in the science and tech pavilion at this year’s in Anglesey. You can try creating kinetic energy on pushbikes, explore how water turbines work, and create and race F1 cars. Or if you’re feeling more contemplative, you can listen in to the story of local mathematician William Jones, the man who proposed one of the most useful symbols of all time – Ìęπ (pi).

Planes, trains and automobiles

If you fancy venturing farther afield, we have some top tips from mainland Europe for you. If you’re a serious Björk fan, hurry to Barcelona in Spain. She’s headlining with a 4-hour DJ set at on 14 June, and her .

The festival runs concurrently with the ł§ĂłČÔČč°ù+D International Congress of Digital Culture and Creative Technologies (at which Bjork will also speak). The congress has an and the (you-have-to-be-there) “phosphere” installation by Daito Manabe and his Rhizomatiks studio, inspired by the process of mineral crystallisation.

Along with a line-up boasting the likes of The Weeknd and Lorde, Danish has a dedicated makerspace, where you can draw with 3D pens, laser cut and – perhaps most important for the festivalgoer – Ìęmake your own solar-powered cellphone charger so you can snap selfies powered by the sun.

The festival has also teamed up with Stop Spild af Mad (“Stop Waste of Food”) and Det Runde Bord (“The Round Table”) to stop food waste, using excess food to provide healthy and nutritious meals for asylum centres and shelters. And it’s hosting żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ” favourites The Yes Men in its Art Zone.

In the picturesque Hungarian city of Sopron, boasts a spectacular line-up of international musicians and a host of cultural treats, from fire-juggling to the Always Drinking Marching Band. There is also a healthy dose of science, in the form of logic and action games, mini-lectures and spectacular experiments in the festival’s science centre – as well as programmes on innovation and natural sciences from the University of West Hungary.

on Óbuda Island in Budapest, Hungary, promises performances that explore what it means to be human. Perhaps the star of the show is , choreographer Mourad Merzouki’s mesmerising dance exploration of the boundary between virtual and real life.

Alongside some leading electronic artists such as Ben Frost and William Basinski, in Brussels, Belgium, is showcasing the best tech-art crossovers, displaying the work of this year’s STARTS prizewinners. These include I’m Humanity by Etsuko Yakushimaru, which explores the future of music by encoding it in DNA.

Turn technology on its head

Open source art

Video: Galloping horse the star of first cloud movie

From the ground, the green and white lights hovering above the city of Nottingham probably resembled a distant storm, but from the window of a Cessna 172 aircraft, the shape of a man on horseback could clearly be seen galloping across the darkened troposphere.

This green night rider is the result of three years of hard graft by artist Dave Lynch, scientist Mike Nix and maker Aaron Nielsen, pushing the boundaries of art and science.

Together they pulled off a world first in June when they managed to project moving images directly onto clouds from an aircraft.

And while fighting the elements, failed kit and lack of cash in their quest to see the rider in the clouds – a work they call Project Nimbus – they’ve discovered the real importance of collaboration.

Project Nimbus used a laser version of the zoopraxiscope, a device designed by pioneering 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge. So it was only right that they should also use his famous image a galloping horse, Horse in Motion, for the display.

“It was amazing,” said Lynch, who spent hours searching for the “right type of cloud” as he shot the video and Nix operated the zoopraxiscope. “After an hour of flying and almost giving up, we had come up above a cloud layer into peaks, swirls and canyons stretching out like an ocean, giving us the conditions we never thought we would see,” he says.

Gods of war

The journey started in 2007 when Lynch was studying for his master’s degree and came across a military paper entitled detailing work on weapons since the Vietnam War. One of them involved projecting an ancient god onto the clouds over an enemy city (whose public communications had been seized) in order to terrify the citizens.

Lynch was inspired by the idea, but soon found his early experiments in 2007 with a converted 16-millimetre cine projector with a laser light source impractical due to weight and power requirements.

After experimenting with projecting moving image loops of swimming dolphins from vehicles, he came across Muybridge’s work and ended up projecting the famous horse onto the streets of Leeds. By 2012, funding from the AND festival and the arts incubator Octopus Collective kickstarted three years of research into developing a modern zoopraxiscope.

In the 1870s, Muybridge was commissioned by a rich racehorse owner to study animal motion. He captured photographs of horses running on a track using multiple cameras and fast shutter speeds, and put them into discs to project from his zoopraxiscope. The iconic moving images that resulted, Sallie Gardner at a Gallop or The Horse in Motion, clearly demonstrated that the galloping horse takes all four hooves off the ground at the same time.

Sharp shooter

Lynch realised that for Project Nimbus only lasers could give the sharp image he needed, especially projecting onto the very tricky medium of clouds. His first zoopraxiscope was a lashed–together affair, made from bits of recycled technology, and a $35, 2-watt blue laser bought on eBay.

Lynch asked for help about laser safety and getting shaper images from Nix and Ben Whitaker, both in the chemistry department at the University of Leeds, and he was surprised to learn that Muybridge had inspired work in their field, too.

“It turns out that the field of ultrafast laser spectroscopy, which aims to ‘freeze-frame’ molecular motion, also draws analogy from Muybridge. Nobel prize winner Ahmed Zewail even referred to the same horse projection we used in his prize acceptance speech,” says Nix.

Slipped discs

The challenge was to work out how a zoopraxiscope’s projection mechanism worked in real terms. It took a conversation with Stephen Herbert, a specialist in early cinema who had worked on replica zoopraxiscopes, to show that the image discs and shutter slits needed to rotate in sync and in opposite directions.

The original Muybridge slit method blocked most of the light from the laser, resulting in a very dim image that would be impossible to see on a cloud, even at night.

The breakthrough was to replace the 14 slits in the zoopraxiscope’s shutter disc with 14 hemispherical lenses, replicating the slits by turning the circular laser beam into focused lines of light which sweep the image in place of the shutter.

The result was a sharp, bright image – even when projected onto the nebulous media of clouds at variable distances from the projector – in this case up to 50 metres away.

“Historical analogue technology was the only safe way to use a laser in the sky, as other laser projectors work by scanning an image using a dangerous pencil beam,” says Nix.

“To see the work purely as the spectacle of a horse a mile high on the clouds obscures the greater success of genuine collaboration,” Nix continued. Project Nimbus was involved in the formation of , which is exploring future collaboration between art, science and the maker community.

Lynch will be reviewing the three-year project for the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT), in Liverpool. He will be talking about his work at this Saturday, 4 July.

As for the future, Lynch says: “We’d love to collaborate with someone like flight pioneer Richard Branson to develop a digital art piece which allows us to interact and experience the world through cloud projections.” For more information:

Ready for your close-up? (Image: Tamsyn Challenger)

Social media’s just fun, right? No, says a new art exhibition: tweets and selfies are creating monoculture, an online equivalent to crops like rape seed

Pout. Thrust. Strip. Giggle. Pose. Cute. Is the selfie the aesthetic of our age?

If you somehow escaped your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine or YouTube being flooded with images of friends trying to achieve an alluring snapshot of self-representation, then you can’t have missed all those politicians and celebrities getting in on the act.

And nothing brings home how homogeneous it is like scrolling through selfie after selfie on a screen, to the comi-tragic accompaniment of 1940s US crooner Arthur Godfrey singing: “I’m a lonely little petunia in an onion patch.”

Mesmerising and horrifying in equal measure, this is part of an exhibition called Monoculture by , staged at Summerhall, one of this year’s venues at the UK’s annual Edinburgh Art Festival.

Monoculture uses agriculture as a metaphor: it is both a warning and a contributing factor. It asks: what happens to society when our cultural and physical inputs are monoculture, using the selfie and oil seed rape as examples.

Get your close-up

Grow your own art (Image: Tamsyn Challenger)

A raised bed of oil seed rape grown on site sprawls opposite some “skins” – white bodysuits bearing uniform faces. Nearby, a small room at the bottom of one of the venue’s aged stairwells houses the “photo booth”, a desk with the words “Lift me up” painted on top. It turns out to house primping implements – makeup, hairbrush, wet wipes and a mirror – ready to make you perfect for your selfie.

Most chilling is the Monoculture Playground, a beautiful, gruesome collection of medieval torture equipment, in white and Facebook blue. The intention is clear: the stocks, emblazoned with “Take your selfie here” have an enlarged arm hole on one side to give room to reach through to snap their shot. The leg stocks, which sport the word “Like”, evoke a sense of suffocation.

The piĂšce de rĂ©sistance, however, is Challenger’s new take on that horrific instrument of execution, the breaking (or Catherine) wheel.

For Monoculture, the wheel is exhibited horizontally at around waist height, with an overt nod to Twitter: “Please love me/Do not exceed 140 characters”. The message is clear: the quest for approval in a social media world where we have gamefied our aesthetic and verbal expressions of personality is a dangerous trap.

And there is some early evidence to back this up, with research showing that social media use can be a powerful influence on our psychology.

For example, Facebook use can make us miserable or happy: as emotions can spread across a network it could even be . This power takes on a more Machiavellian aspect when social media sites such as .

It is perhaps no surprise that Challenger includes video clips of a recent interview with Noam Chomsky, about his 1988 book Manufacturing Consent, on the effect of the media on societal attitudes and decision making.

These excerpts are shown with videos of dying bees, widely thought to be victims of intensive farming practices such as pesticide use, particularly in oil seed rape cultivation, and interviews with Mexican permaculture farmers extolling the virtues of crop variety and working with a diverse ecosystem.

Greek myth

It’s certainly true that . And Challenger isn’t alone in bringing the discussion to the fore. As : “Social media is to the Read/Write Web what sprawl is to the metropolis of modernity: a homogenous, cancerous, rhizomatic junkspace that expands exponentially outward on a sludgy wave of strip malls and sponsored links, greed and induced demand.”

Thoroughly modern myth (Image: Donna Leishman)

Two other works at the festival echo Monoculture’s message. Donna Leishman’s at is the social media retelling of the Greek myth of Daphne, with the wide-eyed protagonist posting selfies on her Front page – which looks rather uncannily like Facebook – while an amorous youth named PH chases her online. In the desperate voice of an unloved teen, Daphne is both vicious and vulnerable – but ultimately a victim. This work, like Monoculture, also reflects the issues of privacy and gender that are woven into our digital intercourse.

Seed of an idea (Image: Stuart Armitt/Edinburgh Art Festival)

From the other direction, Amar Kanwar’s work – exhibited as part of Where Do I End and You Begin – tells the story of the state of Odisha in India, a hotbed of unrest over mining and developments that have seen multinationals such as BP and Monsanto taking an active interest in the area and the rise of monoculture.

Kanwar’s 272 Varieties Of Indigenous Organic Rice Seeds, housed in a sanctum at the Old Royal High School, in Edinburgh, is an artistic seed bank paying homage to the decades of selective breeding that has produced a wide range of crops that flourish in the rich diversity of soils in the region. Exhibited with books and videos detailing heartrending social injustice and loss of knowledge, the works bring home the social and ecological effects of intensive, single-crop farming.

When Challenger asks: “What will happen to our minds and bodies if what we input has no variety?”, Kanwar’s work suggests the outlook may not be rosy.

So next time you update your Facebook status, remember you are part of a global social ecosystem – and your input helps decide whether it becomes a monoculture.

Tamsyn Challenger: Monoculture can be seen at the Edinburgh Art Festival, UK, until 26 September

People enjoying the Open Knowledge Festival (Image: Gregor Fischer)

Governments and big businesses want information to be free, but how will it work? A Berlin festival last week cast a friendly but critical eye over the idea

From science journals to research data, there is a movement towards setting data free for everyone to use. It is a fine idea, but how we get from A to Z is quite another issue.

This was the main theme of this year’s , which ran from 15 to 17 July at Berlin’s Kulturbrauerei cultural centre in Germany. żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ”s, activists, NGOs, artists, law-makers and policy wonks all descended on the second festival hosted by , a non-profit organisation that promotes the open availability and distribution of information.

There have been many open data, activism and hacking conferences over the last few years, but the atmosphere of this one was electric. For once, people believed that they might actually succeed in changing the status quo.

Industry is clearly paying attention, with sponsorship from Google and the investment firm Omidyar Network, and a keynote speech from Eric Hysen, Google’s programme manager for elections and civic engagement.

Businesses are also looking at the commercial opportunities afforded by open data. Take, for example, , which maps old photographs onto modern day sites to see how their locality has changed over the decades, or , which maps street parking from open data and went on to secure deals with Lexus, Audi and BMW.

Open path

Openness looks to be inexorable. Even Europe’s policy heavyweights seem to have caught the bug. Neelie Kroes, the vice-president of the European Commission who leads , was at the conference, meeting the movement’s movers and shakers face to face.

Where it affects the conduct and practice of science, the EC is cheering open data along. Over the course of the festival, people were asked what the EC should focus on to create a truly open scientific culture.

Creating an open culture (Image: Gregor Fischer)

For a start, anyone bidding for EU funding would do well to arrange . Open-access, free, papers reach the public; they gain more citations than the equivalent paid-for articles.The assumption – or the hope, at any rate – is that such research findings are reused more within the scientific community.

But open-access journals are only the first step on the road to an open system for science – and the route map is far from clear.

At last month’s – an annual gathering of laureates and young scientists – Nobel prize-winner , founder of open-access journal , insisted that researchers should be judged on the quality of their research, rather than the impact factor of the journal in which they publish or the reputation of their institution.

Critical spirit

Few would disagree with the sentiment, but were science to become truly open, how, and from whom, would researchers acquire their reputations? Would affiliation to an institution become more, or less, important? How would we assess publication in a traditional, high-impact journal, since, at present, it is hardly likely to be an open-source one?

The hunt is on for examples of best practice. Jenny Molloy, who coordinates Open Knowledge’s open science working group, recounted the work of at the University of Sydney, Australia, as anecdotal evidence of how open science can beat traditional science at solving problems. When they released all their datasets, Todd’s team found new collaborators and friendly interest from pharmaceutical companies – input they were unlikely to have received if they had followed traditional publication practices.

And recent research by geneticist Todd Vision and informatics researcher Heather Piwowar shows that publications accompanied by open datasets , which is better for science and scientists. Molloy told żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ” that she is now looking for more empirical data so she can evaluate how and when open science is more efficient than traditional science – something, she admits, that may depend on circumstances.

In the same critical spirit, , a network-based organisation exploring political, social and other non-academic uses of data, ran a session on when open data goes wrong. Unsurprisingly, the UK government’s was cited as an example. Due to share information across the country’s health system, it in the wake of PR blunders and public suspicion.

More than the inspiring atmosphere of the festival, more even than the presence of serious policy players and businesses, it was this sort of critical approach that turned what could have been dismissed as a congress of zealots into a rational and legitimate lobby for change.

Synthetic biologist Hamilton Smith wants to find the smallest genome that will keep a bacterium alive – and tidy up evolution’s sloppy work

You helped make the first synthetic cell, using an artificial version of the genome of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides. What are you doing with it?
Our goal is to throw away everything except the core genes that keep the cell alive, to make a reduced cell. Our best estimate is that we will end up with about 400 to 450 genes. To that end, we divided the synthetic genome into eight pieces and from each section removed all the genes we think are non-essential. Each of those eight pieces is viable when combined with the rest of the naturally occurring genome. The question was could we combine the eight pieces, have our reduced cell and be done?

And what was the answer?
It didn’t work. But we found a number of combinations that did work. So right now we have a half-reduced genome. That grows pretty well. We’re closing in on the full answer though.

What might a reduced cell enable?
Once we have it we can build on it. The interesting part is to add genetic sequences to enable the cell to grow in different environments, make different compounds, or use photosynthesis, for example.

What else could you do with it?
There’s no question we’re going to end up with a reduced cell with several hundred genes. We don’t know the function of about 100 of those genes, so right there we’re probably going to make discoveries about what’s truly essential. The other thing we want to know is, how plastic is the cell? In other words, how much can we rearrange the genes? Evolution has sloppily put them together. A lot of the cell’s processes are scattered around. We’re putting them together into one neat form.

So you’re tidying up the genome?
We want to see how much we can make it a more understandable genome. Genes to do with translation of DNA into proteins over here, cell replication over here, transport over here.

Synthetic biology is in its infancy. What else might help usher it into the mainstream?
The automation of the chemical synthesis of DNA. That’s the next big aim. What’s going to drive synthetic biology is cheap, accurate DNA synthesis. And not just short stretches of DNA known as oligonucleotides, but possibly entire genes. If you can do that with a machine, where you just enter your DNA sequence and the next day you have a piece of DNA 10,000 bases long that you can experiment with, then that will drive the field. We have a big operation aiming to automate DNA synthesis.

How might that transform the field?
I’m sure right now many young people could think of interesting genetic material to design but it’s too expensive. If it’s cheap and easy you can just keep churning out stuff. It would become trivial to design whole genomes after a while.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Bare necessities of life”

Will we soon be dancing to the rhythms of our brains? (Image: James Lange/pymca.co)

A neuroscientist and a musician explain how they built the Brain Stethoscope, which is both brain scanner and musical instrument

Why is a cellist and sound artist collaborating with someone who deals with brain disorders?
Chris Chafe: I am working with neurologist Josef Parvizi on what we think is the first – certainly the cheapest – device that turns brainwaves into both music and a powerful medical tool. In the process, I am making some of the best, most exciting electronic music of my life.

What led you down this path?
CC: I have been involved in other projects where I turn data into sound, for example the output captured by underground geophones from fracking, or complex structures in synthetic biology. This is called sonification.

Humans have great auditory acuity when it comes to comparing slightly mismatched things. We’re taking inaudible brain signals and making them audible through sonification. Then we feed them to the areas in the brain that recognise patterns in music. The result is our Brain Stethoscope.

What can the device do?
Josef Parvizi: We use EEG electrodes and connect them to a computer. An algorithm written by Chris then allows us to listen in to brain activity. I specialise in treating patients with intractable epilepsy, and we need EEG monitoring to see where the seizures are coming from in the brain. The Brain Stethoscope can help us find out whether a patient is having continuous seizures.

How does it detect seizures?
JP: Many times we don’t see any particular behavioural manifestation of seizures – falling down, convulsing and so on. This can be dangerous because you don’t know what is really going on with such a patient. EEG reliably captures seizure waves because they are synchronised, very high amplitude waveforms generated by the synchronised activity of billions of brain cells.

CC: If you were just to convert raw brainwaves to an audio file, and hook up a loudspeaker, you would hear a low-frequency rumble. So we pull those signals into the more usual audio range by treating them as a modulation. It’s like photographers in a darkroom, enhancing contrasts to get at figures they want to portray.

How do you bring the patterns and variations in a recording to the fore and translate it into a more musical, listenable state?
We’ve chosen the output sound to be a singing voice, so it has a vowel quality to it – such as “aah”.

What does the brain sound like?
CC: All brain activity can be described in musical terms. A flat-line brain signal produces a dull, computery-sounding singing voice. Normally, an electrode channel has a bit of a wiggle to it and you’ll hear it modulate the pitch up and down. It modulates at a slow enough rate that we hear it as something like a vibrato or a pitch inflection.

It’s not all that unfamiliar, because of the happy accident that the speed of those undulations is in the range of the speed of the inflections you get in music. For a lot of these things, the proof is in the hearing.

Is it straightforward to use as a diagnostic tool?
JP: I asked 52 of my colleagues, medical and non-medical, to try it out. After only 30 seconds of training, they chose the correct answer about 95 per cent of the time when they heard eight clips we played to them. It shows that ears are absolutely amazing in differentiating between the sound of a seizure and normal brain activity.

Does this mean our ears are sharper than our eyes?
JP: Imagine you are in intensive care or an ambulance, and you really need to know if a person is having a seizure. Evolutionarily, ears are much more intelligent than eyes. In an emergency, we think that it is far more intuitive to hear rather than see if there is seizure activity.

What about the musical side of the collaboration?
CC: Some of the translations from brainwaves to music are producing extraordinary rhythms. It’s the music of the brain. I’m involved with free improvisation, which is often fast and has a lot of variation. Oddly, it resonates with the sounds that we’re getting from the Brain Stethoscope. It’s also very fast, and very intricate – and musically really exciting.

“Some of the translations from brainwaves to music are producing extraordinary rhythms”

Will we hear music made this way in a concert hall or club?
CC: I don’t think that incorporating it into a concert will produce the fullest impact, so I’m looking for a better outlet than a one-off composition. There is a considerable cognitive load in hearing a new form of music. Experiencing and appreciating something like this may take longer than the time available in just a segment of a concert. Maybe it would take a whole concert? Or maybe it belongs online.

Can anyone use the Brain Stethoscope?
JP: Yes. You can use it for biofeedback or neural feedback, where you can put an EEG band over your head, put on headphones and listen to your own brain sounds. Then you can try to alter it by thinking, and listen to the difference.

Why is it useful to be able to hear our brain at work?
JP: That is very important for patients who suffer from neuropsychiatric disorders or chronic pain, but it can also be used as a toy by kids who are interested in playing with their own brains and, hopefully, becoming more and more fascinated by the intricacies of our brain universe.

When can we get our hands on it?
JP: We have a real-time prototype. The next phase is making the electrodes more flexible and for it to run on a mobile device. That should be by the middle of the year.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Sounds like a brainwave”

(Image: Wilkinson Eyre Architects)

Seven years after it opened, and many millions of pounds later, the Wellcome Trust has put a new plank in its ambitious Wellcome Collection building in central London – with a new development that includes space for a controversial kind of research.

The trust , and is now taking things to another level with backing for interdisciplinary research into science, humanities and the arts. A bespoke space for this research, called The Hub, will open its doors in October this year as part of a £17.5 million development of the Wellcome Collection building (see artist’s impression, above). It will host a multidisciplinary team headed by social scientist from Durham University.

There have been many attempts to bridge the gaps between arts and science; gaps made famous by C. P. Snow in his famous . Often these attempts involve the kind of intellectual bravura exemplified by , or take the form of residencies for artists in scientific establishments, such as the Collide@CERN project.

City living

The first two-year project scheduled at The Hub is about busyness and rest in modern cities, and will bring together wildly different approaches from researchers from disciplines spanning neuroscience – of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Liepzig, Germany – to poetry – of the University of East Anglia.

City living has already been the focus of a similar endeavour – the BMW Guggenheim’s travelling lab project culminated in an exhibition and publication last year. But will the Wellcome Trust’s endeavours lead to any kind of , that unification of knowledge between the sciences and humanities envisioned by E. O. Wilson in his book of the same name?

Interdisciplinary spaces are not new, as a forthcoming exhibition at shows by highlighting the long-forgotten . The room was set up in London in 1957 by and , just after Snow started to discuss his .

The room was intended to bring together artists and scientists to share their knowledge on specific topics, but it disappeared with barely a trace after two years of struggling to survive on a shoestring budget, while Snow’s discourse has lived on, albeit often in a misappropriated form.

Pop-up lab

The Hub stands a better chance than many interdisciplinary centres because it is backed by a wealthy institution, with each two-year project endowed with ÂŁ1 million.

And there is another promising angle to the renovation: it includes a new attempt to reach out to the public, through a new Reading Room. This is designed as an interactive space to engage visitors with items from the Wellcome Collection, and act as a gateway to the building’s library. There will also be fun in store as the Reading Room will act as a pop-up lab for experiments run by the Hub team where the public can take part.

On the face of it, then, the Hub seems to offer a taste of something new: a stable research environment in an established institution with a hefty dose of public engagement, and, at least for the first research project, an accessible theme which is well defined enough to be manageable and broad enough to be interesting.

Or so hopes Clare Matterson, director of medical humanities and engagement for the Wellcome Trust. “It provides the intellectual and physical space for scientific, artistic, historical investigations that I don’t think could be done elsewhere.”

CultureLab will be watching with interest.

, chief medical officer for England, thinks society needs to wake up to problems with body weight, drinking and e-cigarettes

What is the biggest health challenge that we face in the UK?
It is the normalisation of unhealthy behaviours. We have normalised obesity, and over drinking, and we are normalising e-cigarettes. We have normalised not taking sufficient physical exercise and the expectation that when people go to their doctors, they will walk out with a prescription for antibiotics, even though antimicrobial resistance is a problem.

Why are you against increased use of e-cigarettes?
If they were properly regulated as a medicine and we knew what was in them and the dose of nicotine, then they might play a useful role in stopping smoking. But they aren’t, so at the moment we don’t know their safety or the dose they deliver. They are often aimed at children with their flavourings – not only menthol but cookies and cream and bubblegum. They are sold rather cheaply and many of them are made in China, so I worry about what is in them. We have even got a verb for e-cigarette use: to vape. I am worried about normalising once again the activity of smoking. This matters particularly with children and adolescents.

So you are worried this could be a rerun of socially acceptable smoking?
Yes. Have you seen the adverts for e-cigarettes? They make them look cool and chic. In the Metrocentre in Newcastle they have a vaping boutique, which looks like a perfume boutique.

Do you think the UK has a problem with body weight?
Two-thirds of adults in this country are now overweight, and one-third of children. We have evidence that people don’t recognise that being overweight is unhealthy. They don’t think about the consequences, the increased blood pressure and risk of stroke, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer. There is a showing that 77 per cent of parents with overweight children didn’t recognise they were overweight. We have normalised being overweight and even obese.

How do you get people to stop denying weight problems?
We are measuring children in primary schools, though there is evidence that some very large children opt out. People increasingly get their height and weight checked when they go to see their doctor. Middle-aged and elderly people get offered an NHS health check every five years. People can also check their own body mass index (BMI). They just have to put BMI into Google and they will find the NHS Choices site and they can calculate it. It will tell them whether they have a healthy BMI or not.

BMI is sometimes criticised as a poor guide to health. Is it reliable?
It is a very good start. There are exceptions – if you are a body builder with a lot of muscle then it might be different, but that is a small minority. It is a good start and people should not shirk it.

Clothes-shop mannequins have got bigger too. Does that need to change?
We need to make people aware that a healthy weight is not overweight and the mannequins in dress shops showing large sizes rather than a range of sizes can contribute to this.

Could bringing in a sugar tax help to curb obesity?
This is a last resort. I want people to take individual responsibility, I want families to take responsibility, communities and society – and that includes industry. So if we move to a sugar tax, it would be a last resort and we haven’t started working on what a sugar tax could be. We know that the fat tax in Denmark failed, we know that the tax on sugary drinks in France has had no impact, so we would have to investigate very carefully what impact a sugar tax here could have. At the moment it isn’t on the table.

In what circumstances would a sugar tax be an option?
We would need to build a public coalition for it, which there isn’t at the moment. You would have to have a government that felt they had public support and believed in regulation. We now have a generation of children who, because of their obesity, lack of physical activity and other behavioural issues, may not live as long as their parents. Maybe that will shift society.