I’m delighted to be able to announce that we now have several of our keynote speakers for the Otley Science Festival 2011 booked and confirmed. The festival this year will run from Monday 14th to Saturday 20th November and we are very lucky to have been able to secure 4 evening slots on the Courthouse calendar. As before, the Friday and Saturday night will feature talks, but this year we also have the Thursday and Monday night available to us. So, without further ado, our Thursday and Friday speakers will be:

Prof Sue Hartley

The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures are an enormously popular event, that for many years were aired on the BBC. The speaker from two years ago was the quite frankly brilliant, Prof. Sue Hartley. If you missed her Christmas Lectures, and they were buried in the schedule on More 4, they are still available to watch on line here. My own kids have watched them repeatedly, I hesitate to say ad-nauseam. Sue is a great speaker and has agreed to come to Otley on Friday 19th November. She has not yet decided what she will be talking about, but it will feature her speciality of plant / animal interactions. What I do know is that is will be a great family event.

Everything and Nothing

Not meaning to drop names, but I bumped into Prof. Marcus du Sautoy getting onto a tube train down in London. Marcus is the Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, a mathematician of some note and a keen footballer. The last fact does not bear on this news, but the first two do. Marcus has teamed up with a bunch of artists to create a play inspired by Jorge Luis Borge’s story The Library of Babel. The performance, about the shape of the universe includes music, sculpture, drama and maths. On Thursday the 18th March, Marcus and the rest of the cast will be performing in the Courthouse. It promises to be quite an event and I’m thrilled that they have chosen to come and perform in Otley. I will post more information as we get it.

That’s it for now. More news soon on our big Saturday evening speaker…

Say hello to our new website, the place to come for information about scientific happenings in and around Otley. Clearly, and there is a clue in the name of the site, one of our primary aims is to provide updates on the Otley Science Festival itself. The festival is moving into its 10th year and as soon as we have any information about the programme for 2016, you will find it here first.

However, there is more to science in Otley than its festival. We will be posting on this site all the latest news about our quarterly Science Cafés: dates, names of speakers and topics covered.

Finally, I will be using this blog as a place to post interesting nuggets of scientific information I come across in my own work. An eclectic mix of, hopefully intriguing ideas, news about local events and things to watch out for – all with a scientific bias.

Above all, I hope this site provides the community, both in Otley and further afield with a hub for their scientific interests.

Thanks for visiting us, please leave a comment and keep checking back for updates.