Talking about Colliding Galaxies on the Sky at Night

I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in filming for this month's Sky at Night. The theme of the show is Impacts, and I was invited to talk with Chris Lintott about colliding galaxies.

We filmed in Oxford in a back room at the Natural History Museum. It was a really fun experience for me, and fascinating to hang around and watch them film other segments for the show around the museum.

HST image of merging galaxies Arp274

The show will air on BBC4 this Sunday 8th June, at 10pm, and be repeated three further times on BBC. It will also be available to download via the BBC iPlayer. For more details on how to watch visit the BBC Website for Sky at Night: Impacts

Talking about Girls in Physics on BBC News Channel

Last night I was invited to talk about girls in physics on the BBC News Channel. It was an interesting experience - driving to Southampton for just a couple of minutes on screen, but I felt well worth it to help highlight this important issue.

Thanks to @billkeck2 for tweeting this screen shot of me mid flow!

A report (It's Different for Girls) was published yesterday by the Institute of Physics which showed that almost half of all state schools in England do not send any girls to study physics A-level.

This has been picked up very widely in the UK, following an excellent article by Pallab Ghosh: "State Schools Failing Girls in Physics". It was also covered by the childrens news show "Newsbeat": A-level physics turns off girls from studying subject.

 I was interviewed as a "talking head" by Joanna Gosling about the subject. She started by asking me if I was surprised by the findings (not really, although it's disappointing it's not getting any better), then we talked about what might be the reason. I thought there'd been too much teacher  bashing about this, and so instead I brought up the early gender labelling we apply to children (using my daughter as an example) which must contribute to girls thinking they shouldn't want to study physics. We then talked about good ways to encourage children to be interested in science, and finally she asked me why I went on to study physics - I talked about getting hooked by being able to explain things you can see in the night sky with physics. 

Edited to include the below clip of the interview: