Science in London ‒ DAY 6

Mindful of all the world’s starving children I took great pains to communicate my desire for less food to the servers at breakfast. Although they are no doubt used to cleaning up dishes half-full of eggs and sausage afterward, they hesitantly agreed to this foreign request. After the regular morning socializing we migrated towards the Sir Alexander Fleming building for our first split into specialized lecture groups. I chose to attend Prof. Joshua Edel’s session on the challenges and techniques of nanotechnology used for detecting single molecules in solution – the ultimate needle in a haystack scenario!

We learned about the construction of nanopores and nanopipettes with apertures smaller than one-ten-thousandth the width of a human hair that sense the passing of single molecules.

Lunch on the Queen’s Lawn resembled a bustling penguin colony on Elephant Island (if you know what I mean) and our little game of tossing the Aerobie graced the crowded scenery with an occasional near-miss.

Unbeknownst to me, every lecture group was assigned the task of sharing what they had learned with the rest of the student body through non-traditional communication (song, drama, interpretive dance, etc.). My group used a combination of choreography and narration to illustrate the fabrication, functionalization and application of a nanopore for single molecule detection! Though I think ours worked rather swell, we were not even as creative as the group who acted out the genetic modification of mosquitoes, …

… and fuel cell technology through rap, …

and brain monitoring on babies etc.

We had a real jolly good time and the prolific engineer Sir Collin Terry concluded the session of hilarious and enlightening performances with encouragement and inspiration as to a room full of the future’s engineers and scientists.

At supper I sat with two participants from Malaysia, two from Indonesia, and one from Bulgaria:

We used Google Earth on my laptop to show each other our neighborhoods across the globe.

We had one last event today: the Great Crossword Treasure Hunt at the Queen’s Lawn:

This tasked the navigational skills of  five-member teams who embarked on a rat race around Imperial College in search of clues:

Unfortunately, with much back-logged work, I decided not to join the game but did offer some clues to passers-by. Tonight the Canadians Sonya and Josh paid a visit to our common room from their residence across the street. I learned some Portuguese from the Brazilians – some of whom are very new to English. We all pitched in some pounds and received pizza from an awkward Dominoes delivery moped at 11:30pm:

It had been a long day, but I finally realized two crucial feature of my oven-like room:

1. The window do open
2. There is a fan

I promptly kicked myself for sweating through the previous nights and had a jolly good rest…

Etienne