Science and Curiosity Festival
This year the SLIM team and members of staff from the School of Life Sciences took part in the Explorers Fair during Nottingham’s Science and Curiosity festival demonstrating microscopy using a variety of different approaches The Science and Curiosity festival is an annual event in Nottingham in February (during the Schools’ half term break) and is a week-long series of events bringing Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths to the general public. The SLIM stand included a water drop laser microscope, a simple construction using a drop of pond water that acts as a lens when pointing a laser through it to magnify micro-organisms moving within the drop. There was also a home built microscope using a tiny computer called a raspberry pi and a more advanced laboratory fluorescence microscope.
It was a very successful day with many people visiting the stand to have a go at using the microscopes to image a variety of samples including butterfly wings, flies, pond water and numerous creepy-crawlies borrowed from the Open=Laboratory stand next to us. It was encouraging to see and talk with so many interested parents and children and to introduce them to the fascinating world under the microscope.