This year’s Wisconsin Science Festival will explore staples of Wisconsin’s culture including beer brewing, supper clubs and football.
The Wisconsin Science Festival will be returning for its fourth year to share the state’s scientific discoveries with curious visitors of all ages and scientific backgrounds. The event, which includes free workshops, discussion panels, exhibits, film screenings, demonstrations and hands-on activities, will take place at the Discovery Building on campus and other locations from Thursday, Oct. 16 through Sunday, Oct. 19.
Attendees of Thursday’s featured event, Li Chiao-Ping’s Rise Over Run: Off the Wall Dances, will have the unique opportunity of exploring the Discovery Building by following the performers as they dance through the building.
“There’s value in working together,” Laura Heisler, director of programming at the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, said. “To see the building become part of a work of art was really magical.”
For the actively minded, the “Science of Yoga” at the Middleton Public Library will guide people through different poses with explanations of how each pose targets specific organs, muscles, heart rate and breathing. “The Physics of Football” uses basic physics to show how footballs fly through the air and how football helmets work to protect the players’ heads.
Friday’s featured event, the “Science of Supper Clubs,” is catered as three “courses” that cover the origins of everything supper club-related, from the signature Old Fashioned cocktail to fish fry. This event is one of many others in the festival that has an agricultural bent to celebrate the University of Wisconsin College of Agricultural and Life Sciences’ 125th anniversary.
Biochemist Mark Anderson and Steenbock’s executive chef, Chris Swenson, will be collaborating for Saturday’s late afternoon event, “Chocolate Emulsion: The Art and Science of the Perfect Hot Chocolate” to do a demonstration, discussion and tasting of the beverage. Heisler said the food and science worlds get each other.
“Over the last decade or so, there’s more people that are comfortable in that interdisciplinary space. Most of the collaborations are natural magnetism.”
The events go later into Saturday for science-curious night owls with Nerd Nite, an event put together in collaboration by The High Noon Saloon and UW.
“The tagline for Nerd Nite is, ‘It’s like the Discovery Channel … with beer!’ But it’s more akin to tipsy TED talks,” Ben Taylor, host of Nerd Nite Madison, said. “The goal was to find presenters whose work represented the research being [done] on the UW campus and the Discovery building.”
Nerd Nite attendees will gather to hear four informal science talks by math professor Jordan Ellenberg, biomedical engineering professor Kristyn Masters, and graduate students Emily Ruff and Eric Caldera.
The festival ends Sunday with a number of events that will continue to feature the diverse topics represented throughout the festival, including food (“The Essence of Coffee”), sports (“The Science of Sports” panel) and music (“MadFiddle,” a youth violin ensemble that performs American roots fiddle music).
At the Discovery Expo, which goes from Thursday through Sunday, UW researchers and volunteers will lead more than 60 exploration stations on rocket launching, DNA extraction and the human brain.
