The Naked Scientists - An Interactive Platform for Public Engagement with Science

In partnership with the BBC we aim to produce a series of audience-interactive radio programmes and webpages which will increase public awareness and stimulate debate about engineering and the physical sciences. This project will build upon an existing initiative we have developed in Cambridge, called the Naked Scientists, which uses three routes of engagement including audience-interactive science radio shows and podcasts, an interactive website, and Cafe Scientifique debates, to reach audiences of half a million people per week.Each weekly hour-long live edition of the Naked Scientists radio show will contain a digest of topical science news stories, the answers to science questions submitted by listeners, an interactive kitchen science experiment for listeners to try at home in real-time alongside the programme, and an interview with two or more guest scientists. Throughout the show the audience will be encouraged to call in to talk directly with the guests, on air, and to ask them questions about their field and their work.In addition we will also make a second weekly radio show which will be dedicated to coverage of the engineering and physical sciences. This programme will run in parallel with the first and comprise a thirty-minute audience-interactive science phone-in with a guest engineer or physical scientist. This person will take questions live from the audience and we will aim to feature a different guest from a different research discipline, including the industrial sector, each week.These radio programmes will be broadcast live by the BBC eastern region to audiences of over 100,000 people and will also be archived on the Internet as downloadable podcasts to reach an additional 40,000 listeners weekly.We will also produce a weekly ten-minute science commentary for national UK broadcast on BBC Radio Five Live which will contain coverage of topical science news stories and include interviews with scientists from engineering and physical science backgrounds.To further extend the reach of the material we develop we also intend to set up an audio download service to provide a weekly catalogue of freely-available science news stories that can be downloaded from the web as audio soundtracks and inserted into radio programmes on any radio station, including commercial stations, UK-wide.Based on our previous experience, and BBC-audience data, we anticipate that with these initiatives we will reach people aged 11 and up, of both sexes, and from all backgrounds. (55% of BBC local radio audiences are from social classes C2DE, 45% are from ABC1, and the average listener age is 50. National station BBC Radio Five Live draws the majority of its audience from social classes ABC1, with an average listener age of 35. We aim to use both of these channels).