Almost 200 events will take place across the island of Ireland over the course of the
week. To find out more information about events taking place near you or to register your
attendance log onto www.engineersweek.ie

This February, the National Library launches Particles of the Past – Phase Four of the interactive multimedia exhibition Discover your National Library at 2/3 Kildare St. To celebrate Dublin City of Science 2012, the exhibition will showcase a fascinating selection of science-related gems from our collections.

With topics ranging from 17th century home remedies collected by Robert Boyle to the engineering feat of Ardnacrusha, from a handwritten journal recording Captain Cook’s second voyage to early photography, the exhibition promises to be as eclectic as it is interesting.

Particles of the Past is an interactive exhibition so, in addition to viewing items in their cases, visitors will be able to examine them in greater detail by using innovative ‘Discovery’ touchscreens. Each item will also have an accompanying video where visitors can listen to an expert discuss the item in greater depth.

Finally, visitors can also look forward to the conservation and preservation elements of the exhibition where they can see how science is used here in the NLI to protect individual items in our collections so that they can be enjoyed for generations to come.

Small Science, Big Ideas is an informative and fun public education program designed to familiarize primary school children with basic scientific concepts and encourage them to develop their problem solving skills and sense of curiosity. The programme, established in 2006, consists of a hands-on workshop designed specifically for younger children (aged 5-12 years) and is facilitated by an RCSI scientist Dr. Maria Morgan. The workshop introduces participants to some of the ways scientists work and allows them to conduct simple experiments.

Edible: A new exhibition about food at Science Gallery, Pearse Street, Trinity College, Dublin 2

February 10, 2012 – April 5, 2012
Admission: FREE
http://www.sciencegallery.com/edible

A new exhibition that combines the imagination of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with the bite of Jamie’s Dinners will offer visitors to Science Gallery a taste of the future of food. EDIBLE will explore how we reshape the planet through the food choices we make. Colourful curator duo Cat Kramer and Zack Denfeld from The Center for Genomic Gastronomy have assembled a diverse group of artists, scientists, restaurateurs and foodies whose work is set to challenge our perception of what ‘edible’ really means.

Through a series of interactive exhibits that includes an 8-metre long inflatable stomach (pictured), unusual events, curious recipes and unfamiliar ingredients, EDIBLE will ask what a plate of food in the 21st century can tell us about ourselves.

Amongst many food-themed events on the menu for EDIBLE, Seattle Food Geek will be giving a food photography masterclass (11.02.12), Dylan Haskins and Aoife McLysaght will present an evening with David Rothenberg, exploring his new book Survival of the Beautiful (14.02.12) and Sue McGrath will return with her new all-ages show, Fantastic Food and Disgusting Digestion (16.02.12). – Book Events Here

This February, the National Library launches Particles of the Past – Phase Four of the interactive multimedia exhibition Discover your National Library at 2/3 Kildare St. To celebrate Dublin City of Science 2012, the exhibition will showcase a fascinating selection of science-related gems from the National Library collections.

With topics ranging from 17th century home remedies collected by Robert Boyle to the engineering feat of Ardnacrusha, from a handwritten journal recording Captain Cook’s second voyage to early photography, the exhibition promises to be as eclectic as it is interesting.

Particles of the Past is an interactive exhibition so, in addition to viewing items in their cases, visitors will be able to examine them in greater detail by using innovative ‘Discovery’ touchscreens. Each item will also have an accompanying video where visitors can listen to an expert discuss the item in greater depth.

Finally, visitors can also look forward to the conservation and preservation elements of the exhibition where they can see how science is used here in the NLI to protect individual items in our collections so that they can be enjoyed for generations to come.

For more details visit the website 

Europe’s Largest General Science Conference

Europe’s largest multi-disciplinary Science conference; Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF), comes to the Convention Centre Dublin this July. A large pull in the decision to award Dublin the opportunity to host ESOF 2012, is the rich cultural and artistic heritage that Ireland has to offer. To celebrate holding this prestigious event, Dublin has been self declared ‘City of Science’, will hold a calendar of events for 2012, and a ‘Science in the City’ festival that showcases both our scientific and artistic culture. But what is our centrepiece event – ESOF 2012 – all about?

What is ESOF?

ESOF – Euroscience Open Forum – is the biennial pan-European meeting dedicated to scientific research and innovation. At ESOF, leading scientists, researchers, business people, entrepreneurs, innovators, policy makers, science and technology communicators, and the general public from all across Europe discuss new discoveries and debate the direction that research is taking in the sciences.

The main event will be held in the Convention Centre Dublin and will attract over 5,000 scientists, business leaders, senior EU and Government officials, and the international and scientific media to discuss the best of European science. The programme will cover all of the current major global scientific challenges, including Health, Food, Energy and Climate Change. It will also look at fundamental issues such as The Life and Death of the Universe, Who are we?, Where did we come from?, and Where we are going?

Some of the Keynote Speakers at ESOF 2012:

Rolf-Dieter Heuer – Director General CERN

Craig Venter – J Craig Venter Institute – Synthetic Biology

Jean-Jacques Dordain – Director General of the European Space Agency (ESA)

Charles Bolden – Administrator of NASA

Jocelyn Bell Burnell – Discovered the first radio pulsars

Peter Doherty – Awarded Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology (1996)

Jules Hoffmann – Awarded Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology (2011)

James Watson – Awarded Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology (1962)

Mary Robinson – Former President of Republic of Ireland and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights

Bob Geldof – Human Rights and Political Activist

Commissioner Maire Geoghegan-Quinn – European Commissioner for Research, Innovation

Early Bird Registration

The ESOF 2012 programme will be officially launched in Vancouver later this month at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference. Early Bird Registration is now open for Europe’s Largest General Science Conference! www.esof2012.org

Working with 21st century materials
When the European Research Council (ERC) announced the award of a €1.5 million ERC Starter Grant to Professor Jonathan Coleman of the School of Physics, Trinity College Dublin it was recognition for the ground breaking work he and his team have been doing on the development of next generation materials at the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) funded Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices (CRANN).

The prestigious grants recognise scientists who are working on research with major potential and are awarded to only 300 top scientists across Europe, representing less than 10% of those who apply. More recently Prof Coleman work has been acknowledged with his announcement as the SFI Researcher of the Year 2011.

Prof Coleman’s main research theme is the study of one-dimensional nanostructures including carbon nanotubes and inorganic nanowires. The major breakthrough with which he has been associated is a new way of splitting layered materials to give atomically thin “nanosheets”.

This has led to a range of novel two-dimensional nanomaterials with chemical and electronic properties that have the potential to enable new electronic and energy storage technologies as well as new super-strong plastics. The collaborative international research project was led by CRANN and the School of Physics in TCD and the University of Oxford.

Coleman and his team invented a versatile method for creating these atomically thin nanosheets from a range of materials using common solvents and ultrasound, utilising devices similar to those used to clean jewellery. The new method is simple, fast, and inexpensive, and could be scaled up to work on an industrial scale.

The research has been compared to the work regarding the two-dimensional material graphene, which won the Nobel Prize in 2010. Graphene has generated significant interest because when separated into individual flakes, it has exceptional electronic and mechanical properties that are very different to those of its parent crystal, graphite. However, graphite is just one of hundreds of known layered materials, some of which may enable powerful new technologies.

“A nanomaterial is defined as a material that has a size in at least one dimension of less than 100 nm”, Prof Coleman explains. “For example, a nanotube made of carbon could be up to one centimetre long but its diameter would be incredibly small. It is a quasi-one-dimensional material. Quasi-two-dimensional materials are nanosheets which have a thickness of one nanometre and therefore might as well be two dimensional they are so thin. A human hair is 50,000 times as thick as a nanotube, for example.”

Graphene is one of these two-dimensional materials and it is its strength that makes it so interesting and useful. “It is the strongest material known to man”, Coleman points out. “It is 100 times stronger than steel.”

He explains that this is important for the development of new composite materials. Similar to the use of steel reinforced concrete in buildings or glass fibre reinforced plastics in other applications the immensely strong graphene sheets can be used to strengthen other existing materials.

“Take a polyester Coke bottle for instance”, he notes. “We make these by the hundreds of millions every year. If we were to add half of one percent of a current bottles weight in graphene we would triple its strength. That would enable us to use far less plastic in their manufacture. When you think about how much stuff is made of plastic and how much oil that consumes you get some idea of the potential importance of a material like graphene in terms of environmental savings.”

And the potential applications as a structural material only start there. “Why do cars have to be made of metal”, Coleman adds. “Once you start thinking about these things the possibilities are endless. You can strengthen a material considerably without adding to its weight at all.”

This high strength to weight ratio is due to the fact that it is made of carbon. “The carbon chemical bonding is pretty strong and it has a low atomic number meaning that it is not very heavy. Its density is about a quarter that of steel yet it is 100 times as strong.”

He points out that these properties have been known for some time, it has been a question of cost and availability. “People had known about carbon nanotubes for a long time but they cost tens of dollars per kilo to manufacture. Graphene costs just $5 now. It is manufactured from graphite which is a by-product of the steel industry and is a commodity material. Graphite is like sheets of graphene in a book and if you can separate those sheets you get the strongest material known to man. The Nobel prize in 2010 was awarded to a team who had developed a method to separate them one sheet at a time.”

Hardly economically viable but still the breakthrough that proved it could be done. What the team led by CRANN has done is to develop a method to separate the graphene sheets literally by the trillion. “We have now received EU funding to scale up the method and turn it into an industrial process.”

And graphite isn’t the only layered material out there which could enable powerful new technologies; nor is strength the only useful quality they possess. Coleman’s work in CRANN will open up over 150 similarly exotic layered materials – such as boron nitride, molybdenum disulfide, and bismuth telluride – that have the potential to be metallic, semiconducting or insulating, depending on their chemical composition and how their atoms are arranged. This new family of materials opens a whole range of new “super” materials.

Two of the materials that he is currently researching are bismuth telluride and molybdenum disulfide. Bismuth telluride is used to generate energy from waste heat, for example from car engines or nuclear plants and so on. Prof Coleman’s method of separating graphene using a liquid process could be applied to bismuth telluride, which could then be coated onto thin film substrates and attached to the side of a moving car or a nuclear plant to capture the lost heat energy and convert it into usable electrical energy.

These new materials are also suited for use in next generation batteries or supercapacitors which can deliver energy thousands of times faster than standard batteries, enabling new applications such as electric cars.

“There are many possible applications of these new nanosheets, including their use as thermoelectric materials. These materials, when fabricated into devices, can generate electricity from waste heat. For example, in gas-fired power plants approximately 50% of energy produced is lost as waste heat while for coal and oil plants the figure is up to 70%. However, the development of efficient thermoelectric devices would allow some of this waste heat to be recycled cheaply and easily, something that has been beyond us, up until now,” Coleman explains.

Indeed, these applications were seen as their most important use until recently. “A few years ago if you talked about graphene the discussion would have been around its use in transistors, sensors and other high tech applications”, he says. “There is a consensus building now that where it will change the world is its use in super-strong plastics. We could make planes or wind turbine blades out of plastic if we put in graphene.”

All of these new applications have been developed and breakthroughs achieved within six years of the initial work which won the Nobel Prize making these nanosheets true 21st century materials. For Coleman, he would like to see two things happening with these materials over the next few years. “I would like to see the processes developed which will manufacture the nanosheets in very large quantities and then I would like to see it demonstrated how graphene can be put in a wide range of plastics to increase their strength and reduce the amount of we use. If even a fraction of the potential uses comes to pass will all be using graphene and other nanomaterials in our daily lives in ten years from now.”

And that ubiquitous usage may well be almost entirely due to the research done by Jonathan Coleman and his team at CRANN in Trinity College Dublin.

So many people and organisations across Dublin and Ireland have joined forces in creating a  year long festival programme that combines the best of Irish culture, arts and science. Whether your passion is science, arts, culture or sport or whether you spend your time online or offline,  dreaming of the future or fixated on the past – come along to the Science Gallery the first Friday of every month to get to know us, but most importantly to get to know each other.

The tweet-ups are hosted by The Science Gallery a key hub for Dublin City of Science in 2012 which also happens to have the most delicious coffee (akin to rocket fuel), pizzas (that will transport your taste buds to the streets of Rome) and tasty treats in the cafe, should you get peckish.

For the twitter-ers, the bloggers, the facebookers, for those that are mourning bebo and even those that still use myspace – DON’T PANIC.  There will be wi-fi in @ScienceGallery just ask the kind faces at the front desk as you arrive and they will give you your wi-fi fix.

First Friday: March 2rd, 2012 at the Science Gallery

Directions to the Science Gallery

Say hello to us on twitter @dubscience2012. We look forward to seeing you there.

Image: Irish Science Blogger Humphrey Jones (The Frog Blog)

They were joined by over 400 guests from the science, culture and arts communities that have joined forces in creating a  year long festival programme that combines the best of Irish culture, arts and science –  the programme consists of  over 160 science themed events across Dublin and Ireland including  photographic and art exhibitions, several theatre pieces, film festivals, tours, trails and treasure hunts, street performances, science buskers, large-scale interactive installations, experiments, science carnivals, public talks, debates and workshops.

A selection of events were announced at the launch which included St. Patrick’s Festival which will bring science alive in spectacular fashion during Ireland’s largest and most visually impactful artisitc performance, the ST. PATRICK’S DAY FESTIVAL PARADE and a FESTIVAL TREASURE HUNT.

Other events include a key Dublin City of Science hub, SCIENCE GALLERY which will provides an interface for science with art, technology and design. Speaking at the launch Founding Director Michael John Gorman said “Dublin City of Science is a fantastic opportunity to ignite passion for science, technology and innovation in Ireland”.  Science Gallery’s flagship exhibition for the year, HACK THE CITY,  will invite a diverse group of participants from Ireland and beyond to use Dublin as a test-bed for urban innovation. By unlocking the city’s infrastructure and true potential, it is set not only to be a highlight of 2012, but to further reinforce Dublin’s position as an agile and innovative global capital.

DUBLIN MAKER FAIRE, THE ARK, ROUGH MAGIC THEATRE COMPANY and the RTÉ NATIONAL SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA were also highlighted during the launch. For an example of what’s on offer for the year ahead.  see our FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHTS (over 160 events to be announced throughout the year).

The main event for 2012 is the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) 2012  which takes place in the Convention Centre Dublin in July. Dublin won the right to host this event in a competitive bid process back in 2008. ESOF 2012 is the largest general science meeting in Europe and is held in a different European city every two years.

ESOF 2012 will attract the world’s top scientists to Dublin from 11^th to 15^th July. It is expected that over 5,000 researchers, policy makers and international science media will come to our shores in the summer for ESOF.

Speaking at the Launch Professor Patrick Cunningham, Chief Scientific Adviser spoke about the highlights that ESOF has to offer. ‘We have the world’s top scientists confirmed for the ESOF event in July. Notable keynotes include Craig Venter, Jean-Jacques Dordain of ESA, Marcus du Sautoy, Bob Geldof Commissioner Geoghegan Quinn, freshly minted Nobel prise winner Jules Hoffmann and Rolf Dieter Heuer of CERN. Also our very own Dara O’Briain will be significantly involved in a variety of ways at ESOF. I would like to thank Dara for all his time on this project and his future involvement.’

Prof. Cunningham continued: ‘2012 is the year where science becomes fun, exciting and entertaining for all and to show the world that Ireland is serious about science’.

Dublin City of Science Ambassadors: Dublin Goalkeeper Stephen Cluxton and Aoibhinn ní Shúilleabháin at the launch of Dublin City of Science 2012.