So…The BBC:

Pretty big subject matter to be honest, I think I’ve started a bit broad, I’ll narrow it down…

So…BBC science:

There, I can work with that. As far as the BBC’s “Inform Educate Entertain” slogan is concerned, science articles more than easily have the first two aims covered, and it is at the third that they seem to hit a snag.

The main vibe I got from the lecture was that writing about science is a balancing act between how much information you want to convey to the reader, and how you can keep them interested in what your saying, and with science it must be said it can sometimes be harder to  break down the jargon than if you were learning computer programming, in French.

I like to include little opinions or personal feelings to make what I say more relatable, but the BBC, as the speaker made clear in her bit about different writing styles, is limited by it’s vow of impartiality in this respect, writing without taking sides can sometimes seem quite drole, as everyone loves a conflict.

As the speaker made clear though, the way the BBC deal with this is by using the internet’s multimedia capabilities, combining video, audio and text together and using the best qualities of each. Having the scientists appear as people in the video will also make it more relatable, which has already emerged as a key theme that I reckon is gonna continue through these talks.

I know that “The Human Brain Project” was mentioned in the BBC lecture, but I feel it’s an impressive enough endeavour to be worthy of another mention, I mean it’s going on for ten years, I’m sure I’m not going to be the only other media source covering it.

The Human Brain Project is for me one of the most exciting undertakings in recent times; we’ve reached a point in the understanding of ourselves where we know so much. Yet compared to everything else the brain is a relatively unknown entity.

That’s hopefully about to change, when on the 7^th of October 80 universities started research into how to reach a much deeper understanding of the brain than anyone ever has before, and to create a computer system capable of performing tasks in a similar way.

But there is one issue with this idea of producing a model, there isn’t a single computer in the world that can even cover the brains functional capabilities, the brain reaching a staggering one million gigabytes of information storage capacity. Some people even believe, perhaps correctly, that the brain is too complex to understand itself, these concerns about computing capacity remind me of what I learnt about the Human Genome Project.

In the case of the HGP, both computing and human genetics helped each other take great leaps and bounds to achieve something no one was sure could be done at the start. Something I hope to see from this potentially pioneering project.