Simply Brilliant, Sallis Benney Theatre, Brighton, February 22

Hello again, and welcome to my third and final review from the Brighton Science Festival 2012. This event was again a departure from the previous two, being aimed squarely at a younger audience. Of course, I was hooked the minute I saw Lego, but I'll save that for the actual review. So, without further ado, here goes:

The first thing that struck me when I entered the Sallis Benney Theatre for Simply Brilliant was a life-sized Dalek welcoming people with threats of extermination. That set the tone very well for the rest of the evening - Simply Brilliant was very much a family affair, aimed primarily at interesting the younger generation in science.

The main focus of the evening was a number of stalls set up in the theatre space. My first stop was Sussex University's own stall, where a couple of members of the Physics department were demonstrating spectrographs. Along with a name-that-spectrum competition, they were also giving out Blue Peter-style instructions for building your own (surprisingly effective) spectrograph from a cardboard tube and a CD.

Other stalls ranged from a demonstration of a 3D printer, to a competition to see who could build the most stable tower out of Lego (I got trounced by a couple of 12-year-olds, much to my inner child's chagrin), to a stall run by some Varndean College students armed with glue guns, demonstrating recycling by gluing together parts from old broken toys to make new ones. Through the course of the evening, I couldn't help but keep coming back to this one as it slowly evolved into something resembling Sid's bedroom from Toy Story.

Brighton Science Festival curator Dr Richard Robinson had his own stall as well - a collection of old toys, with an invitation for people to come and guess how their inner mechanisms worked. Dr Robinson seemed to be having as much fun with this as anyone else, revelling in the opportunity to indulge a lifelong habit of curiosity.

The evening was punctuated with a series of talks, the first of which was given by inventor Trevor Bayliss, probably best known for inventing the wind-up radio. Following Bayliss was Sussex Visiting Research Fellow Dr Jonathan Hare, who has done extensive research in the field of Fullerene science as well as being involved with TV programmes such as Tomorrow's World and Hollywood Science with Robert Llewellyn. The third and final talk of the evening was from Brighton University Physics professor Alison Bruce, a researcher with Brighton's nuclear structure physics group.

My final impressions of the evening as I prepared to leave were that while the talks had been intellectually nourishing, it was my childish curiosity which was most satisfied by the stalls in the main theatre. This was confirmed on my way out, as out of the corner of my eye I spotted one stall in the lobby I had missed on the way in. Sitting proudly atop a table was Robot Wars UK veteran Bigger Brother, practically a celebrity from my youth. I enjoyed the evening immensely, and would recommend it when it hopefully returns next year. I would suggest visiting as a group though, as the opportunity to pit your Lego-building skills against your friends is just too good to miss.

A brief word about some very cheeky composers

WARNING: The following blog contains material of an extremely geeky nature, which some readers may find incredibly sad.

Greetings all! I'm working on another blog post at the moment which will hopefully go up at the end of the week, but in the meantime I wanted to share an observation I made yesterday. Now in order for you to understand this fully, you need to listen to the first couple of minutes or so of this, which is taken from the Battlestar Galactica Season 2 soundtrack by Bear McCreary.

Better yet, listen to it a couple of times. Then follow this link for a program on the BBC iPlayer called "Nature's Great Events: The Great Tide". I was watching this last night and noticed around 39-40 minutes in that the background music sounded strangely familiar. Have a listen for yourself and see what you think. (By the way, the link probably won't work after Saturday 18th, as the program won't be available on iPlayer after that date.)

Incidentally, I had a look in the credits to see if Bear McCreary had been acknowledged at least as a creative influence, but alas his name was nowhere to be seen. I just wanted to put this out there to see if anyone else reckons their soundtrack writers cut a couple of corners. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

I'm sure I don't even need to say this, but I'm not responsible for the content of anything I link to in my blog, unless of course I've created it myself, which in this case I haven't. Please don't sue me.