Feel the Science: Exploring the Senses Through Physiology

Taking place last week Tuesday 12 August, academics from the University created an interactive exhibit of events at Manchester’s Science and Industry Museum, which was visited by over 500 visitors over the course of the day.

Accompanying the popular Operation Ouch exhibit, which is running at the museum all year, Feel the Science was a dynamic, hands-on citizen science event funded by the Biomedical Research and Innovation Centre (BRIC), which invited people to explore the powerful connections between human senses and the inner workings of the body.

Encouraging both adults and children to think about best practices to live healthier lifestyles to keep their hearts and blood vessels healthy, the team organised some fascinating hands-on activities, including:

· Music & the Mind and heart: Test how your body reacts to different music in our live citizen science experiment, discovering more about mind-body connectivity.

· Make Your Own Blood Clot: A fun, tactile activity with a serious message about stroke and sensory changes, where people can create their own “red slime” clot to take home.

Organising the event were Dr Samantha Borland and Dr Matthew Jones from the Biomedicine team at Salford, who originally delivered a modified version of the event earlier this year at Rochdale Science Extravaganza and wanted to increase public knowledge by also hosting the event at the Science and Industry Museum.

Dr Sam Borland said: “Our purpose for these events is to keep them fun. When we do this kind of event, we found that if you do it in a hands-on, engaging way, people will remember more information. Especially with children, it’s difficult to explain strokes and the way they work, so creating fun and interactive activities supports their understanding and brings awareness to these major topics.”

Accrediting the success of the project’s delivery to the ‘amazing group of student volunteers’ from the BSc Biomedical Science programme, PGRs (Bethan Samphire-Noden) and Dr Nicky Morgan (Senior Technician in Biomedicine), the academics were thrilled with the level of public engagement and encouraging response they received from them:

“I felt like a Scientist”

“Interesting, learned more than I realised”

“Excellent and friendly staff. My kids loved it”

“Then team were excellent and very informative”

“Really informative. Matt really eloquently explained how the heart works”

BSc student volunteers were; Hadeel Mohammed, Zara Batool, Isobel Prince, Faith Obidiegwu, Sidney Nkamigbo, Aya Mohammad Alhamad, Anadil Adnan and Maria Rodrigues Mota D Alva Teixeira.