Royal Society of Chemistry Bill Bryson Prize 2013

This may be of interest to secondary school pupils:

RSC Bill Bryson Prize 2013

The RSC Bill Bryson Prize is designed to recognise and encourage excellent science communication in schools and colleges.The competition is open to students aged 5-18 with entries accepted in any format as long as they accurately communicate science appropriate for their chosen audience.

Recent entries have included videos, podcasts, posters, even cartoons and poems.

Theme for the 2013

For the 2013 competition we want your creative answers to this question How does science keeps us healthy?

How to enter

Entrants will be able to submit entries online from the beginning of March 2013, please check back in March for further submission details.

Deadline

The 2013 competition deadline is 31 March 2013.

Entry Information

Who can enter and what are the categories

Downloadable Files

Promotional Poster
Download this poster to promote the 2013 Bill Bryson Prize PDF (492k)  

PDF files require Adobe Acrobat Reader

2012 Winners

RSC Bill Bryson Prize 2012 winners

View the winning entries for 2012.

Contact and Further Information

Education Department
Royal Society of Chemistry, Thomas Graham House, Milton Road, Science Park, Cambridge CB4 0WF, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1223 432221
Fax: +44 (0)1223 423623
Email: Education Department

RI Christmas lectures

The excellent RI Christmas (Modern Alchemist) lectures are now available from the RI Archives.
Watch and enjoy!

British Biology Olympiad for post-16 UK students...

Note  that the end date has been extended to 21st Jan 2013...

British Biology Olympiad

Please submit a registration form as soon as possible and by 21^st January at the latest.

Open to all post-16 students in the UK.
Challenging the most talented young biologists.
Selecting students to represent the UK in Switzerland 2013 

Format and timetable

Round 1 - a two hour multiple choice paper taken in schools between January 31st and February 6th
Round 2 - a 90 minute written paper taken in schools between February 25th and March 1st
Finals - practical assessments and an additional written paper taken at the University of Reading from April 7th to 10th

Aims

The British Biology Olympiad challenges and stimulates students with an interest in Biology to expand and extend their talents. In offering a wider syllabus than A-level, it allows students to demonstrate their knowledge and to be suitably rewarded and publicly recognised by the award of medals, certificates and other prizes. It is hoped that competing in the Olympiad will encourage students already interested in this valuable, wide-ranging and rewarding subject to continue their study beyond A-level.
In addition to encouraging and rewarding pupils in their studies the BBO provides a means of selecting a team to represent the UK at the International Biology Olympiad. The IBO seeks to challenge by both theory and practical tests some of the top pre-university biology students in the world, with 60 countries taking part. The UK teams have had considerable success at IBO and we are very grateful to BBSRC for its continued support of the UK team's participation.

Institute goes "Gangham Style"...

Gangham style finally hits the Institute of Food Research - Something my colleagues
 whipped up for the Institute Christmas party. Who says scientists don't have a (warped)
sense of humour?
Seasons greetings to anyone reading this blog.

Launching Maths in Europe (@MathsInEurope) portal and Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013

Launching of the European portal for Mathematics on Facebook and Twitter. The web addresses arehttps://www.facebook.com/EUMaths andhttps://twitter.com/MathsInEurope, respectively.  Our Twitter name is @MathsInEurope. 

You can help us spreading the word by forwarding this message to your contacts, 'liking' our Facebook page , following and re-tweeting our Twitter feed.

This week we will be releasing Christmas Maths. The portal will be sharing maths news and maths media (no pun intended). 
The target age is younger adults and teenagers, including teachers and anyone with curiosity. If you teach we encourage you to share the info with your students. We are measuring how quickly we get to 1m 'likes'.

We invite you to join us promoting Mathematics in wider Europe: we encourage you to post messages in our Facebook page, mention us on Twitter and make us aware of the great things that are being done in mathematics across the continent.

To begin with we are collating information about UK activities under the theme Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013 (http://mpe2013.org/) for the main website Mathematics in Europe (http://www.mathematics-in-europe.eu/). 

Sound check day

12/12/12
Need I say more (Ok, I will - people are calling it sound check day and another 'End of the World day' to compete with 21/12/12 which in my opinion doesn't look as cool)
Whatever, I wish my readers a good day and hopefully we'll all meet again tomorrow :-))
For a nice debunking of "The Mayans predict that the world will end on xx/xx/xxxx" see the NASA video here . Interesting mathematical approach to calendar design and dealing with large periods of time...

Do you have any views on, or a story about, farming?

Do you have any views on, or a story about, farming?

Do you have any views on, or a story about, farming?

If you do, then this is to invite you to contribute to an innovative project to find out what people in the UK think and feel about farming. It is not an opinion poll, but is based on your experiences and thoughts about farming.

Your experiences may be your own, but we are just as interested in your thoughts on things to do with farming that you may have heard, seen or read (including on TV, in magazines, blogs etc).

Everyone’s contributions are important. So whether you are a farmer or whether your main connection with farming is simply the food on your table, please help us to learn from your thoughts and experiences.

To take part in the project, please click HERE or paste this link into your browser - http://eu.sensemaker-suite.com/Project/html/index.html?projectID=Farming. Depending on how much you contribute, the questionnaire should take about 10-20 minutes. We should be very grateful if you could reply by 16 December.

Your contribution will help us better to understand what farming really means to people in the UK.