From the 11th-14th September, The University of Hull hosted the 179th British science festival. This was the first time the event had been in Hull since 1922. With events being hosted all over the city there was something for everyone, from modern slavery to robots, black holes. Being a science student myself I obviously had to see what a few of these events were about.
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The first event I went to was actually the first event of the festival called Unlocking the Secrets of the Canine Mind. With the promise of lots of cute dogs alongside a talk in to the latest experiment attempting to understand how they think, I was immediately interested. Run by the universities psychology department the talk was split in to three parts, each focusing on an individual area of canine behaviour. The first focused on ‘less is more’. To display this, a piece of sausage and a vegetable the dogs would eat, in this case carrot was used. When given a choice of carrot or meat the dogs obviously choose meat, but when given a choice of carrot and meat or just meat, surprisingly the dogs still picked just meat. This apparently is a common theme in humans also, and is thought to occur as unconsciously it appears more efficient for the individual.
The next speaker went on to talk about if dogs can understand human physical ques. This began with the basic pointing to a bowl and seeing if the dog went to that bowl. The answer in this case was yes, so the display? Was repeated but with only a glance at the right bowl. Again the dog went to the indicated bowl. This is a behaviour shown to be seen in a number of species, but surprisingly is not proven to be seen to be done by chimpanzees, our closest relatives. However there is a question surrounding if the dogs actually understand the cues or if it is just a learnt behaviour.
They next went on to describe how a series of tests had also been conducted to understand how dogs recognise human emotion. This looked at the way dogs recognise sounds and facial expressions. This was done with dogs looking at screens displaying an emotion, either happy or angry, and playing an associated sound. The sound was in a different language to avoid a train word influencing the dog. Once the sound was played the dogs went to the emotion it believed was associated with, the results showed they were pretty good at it. The experiment was repeated with photos and sounds of different emotions in dogs, the results displayed that they were also capable of detection in their own species, and were even better at it than they had been with humans.
The next speaker touched on answering the main question from the second speaker’s talk, do the dogs made a conscious decision of just learnt from repeat behaviour? To test this food was placed the other side of a fence. To allow the dogs to get the food it was placed on a piece of tissue that stuck out to the other side of the fence. A few of the dogs worked out how to get the food, so to test if it was just repetition the experiment was repeated but the connection, i.e. the tissue was cut. As the dogs continued to pull the paper instead of realising the connection was cut it could be said the behaviour was repetitive learning, not understanding.
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A second event that stood out to me straight away was CSI of The Sea. This talk was focused around a live dissection of a porpoise which had unfortunately become beached and died on a Devon beach the day before. With the university having a huge focus on the #plasticpledge, and it currently being a big national campaign, I along with many of the others believed that plastic would be one of the main causes of cetacean deaths. However it was explained that instead PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), a man made substance that was banned in the 1980s, still have a major effect on British sea species. Comparatively, on a global scale reduction of plastic waste is desperately needed, and is one of the major killers of marine life.
As the disection went on the speakers described all the different organs and the issues that may have influenced the porpoise’s death. It appeared on the specific specimen that there was an infection through the lungs, with parasites in the stomach along with a number of other organs. The last organ looked at was the brain, whilst looking at the skull the morphological structures of echolocation, particularly the monkey lip could be seen.
Beaching of cetacean however is not always a bad sign. The last pod of killer whales around Britain is in Scotland. Previously, killer whale beaching would occur across the country but no longer occur because the whale populations no longer exist. Beaching occurring indicates that populations in the area still exist. _______________________________________________________________________________
Following the dissection, we did The Deep Late. This gave free entry to the expedition part of the deep, where the dissection had also been hosted. The deep is one of my favourite places to go in Hull, so any opportunity I get to go visit I take. With a massive range of species, including a number of jellyfish, loggerhead turtles and penguins there is always so much to see.
Inside the deep a number of further events were going on, one of which was Relaxing with the Fishes. This looked in to the calming effects of watching marine animals at an aquarium. Heart rate of a volunteer was measured before the experiment. Next a film to cause that person to feel more excited or sacred was shown, increasing heart rate. Finally the person was sat in front of one of the main tanks to see if heart rate dropped. All of this took place in a tent to avoid distraction. The results seen indicated that the aquarium did in fact aid calming. Other event on at the deep included, Glowing in the Deep, looking at jellyfish luminescence and The Dark Radio: In to the deep.
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Having the festival so close by made it so easy to get to events and I really learned a lot. I hope to attend the festival, wherever it may be again in the future.
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