Back in the UK, ready for Science in the Park

I had a really useful time at the 3rd International Conference on Food Digestion in The Netherlands this week. I heard about fantastic research, met great scientists and world experts, and came back with my head full of new ideas and possibilities.

Now, today, I'm preparing for a Saturday event I really love called 'Science in the Park'. It's an annual FREE festival of science for the whole family held at Wollaton Hall in Nottingham (also famous as Batman's house -- it was there that the scenes at Bruce Wayne's home were filmed for The Dark Knight Rises).

In my spare time I'm Secretary of the Nottinghamshire branch of the British Science Association, The BSA, and we've organised the Science in the Park festival for families and science lovers for the past six years. Tomorrow's event runs from 11am to 4pm at Wollaton Hall, across the road from The University of Nottingham's main campus, University Park. If you live nearby, come along! Here's a map: http://goo.gl/bbp0dh

This month I'm celebrating a year at the food and ingredients research company where I work, Eminate Ltd. It's been an incredible year in general. That's part of the reason I'm starting my ScienceJennie blog. I want to share some of the things I'm discovering, about science, my subject, and life!

In the past year I've completed my PhD and passed my viva (the face-to-face exam testing me on my doctoral thesis) and I'm working on some amazing projects. For Science in the Park, I'm taking most of the Eminate team to Wollaton Hall with me.

We'll be giving visitors the chance to try up to several real-life experiments related to food. We're calling it 'Science of the Bake' to show that every time you bake and make food, you're doing science!

 

If you like 'The Great British Bake-Off', you'll enjoy diving a bit deeper into bread for 'The Great British Yeast-Off', another set of experiments looking at what yeast is and how it works. Another experiment looks at the chemistry of cupcakes. It'll investigate all the clever processes that ingredients that go into gorgeous cupcakes.

Also, do you know what milk is? I mean, do you know what it really is, how it works and what the point is of separating curds and whey? That will be one of our experiments, called 'Micellar Milk'. We'll also show how to make rainbows in milk (yes, really!) along the way learning about things called surfactants and emulsifiers.

Come and meet us there and have a go. Find out more at https://www.facebook.com/NottsBSA

In case you can't come, I'll put pictures and more information up here next week. Also follow @sciencejennie on Twitter, here https://twitter.com/sciencejennie