Hurray it’s almost time for the National Science and Engineering Week again. From March 12th until March 21st the University of Sheffield has once again teamed up with Sheffield Hallam University, local schools, industry, commerce and museums throughout South Yorkshire to celebrate the best in British research and innovation.

This year’s theme is Earth in support of the International Year of Biodiversity and the What on Earth project – an initiative ‘encouraging everyone to get outside into their gardens and local parks and take photos of the wildlife they don’t recognise’. If you come across something unusual (or not so unusual) head over to www.whatonearth.org.uk armed with your image and get it identified by a team of scientific experts. If anyone can help me out with the name of this flower I’d appreciate it:

I’ve also uploaded an image of some flowers to the site, which I grew last year. I’m desperate to know the name of them. If you have any suggestions please add an identification.

The program of events for the NSEW (mostly free and open to the public) includes a David Allen-Booth Memorial Lecture entitled Shapes and Patterns: Crystals, leaves, leopards and zebras by Professor Gillian Gehring, What on Earth… will we do about energy? by staff and students from the Mechanical Engineering Subject Group (Sheffield Hallam) and the return of Rock Around the General Cemetery.

The University Library in collaboration with the National Fairground Archive will also be taking part to celebrate the engineering feats of fairgrounds and roller coasters. I’m really excited about this one because we’ve been trying to think of ways to encourage our students to make use of this amazing resource for ages. Once the display is up I’ll get more details posted up here.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 10:45 am and is filed under Libraries, News, Sheffield and tagged as animals, biodiversity, biology, climate change, engineering, environment, fairground, roller coasters, science, uni. Print this blog post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.