How many organs can I donate and still remain alive? Can you make a phone call from a black hole? Could you power a town with lightning? What's the point of fingerprints? And is a chocolate teapot really useless?

 

These are some of the questions awaiting Cambridge University’s “Naked Scientist”, Dr Chris Smith, as he embarks on a national science week lecture tour of Australia between the 13th and 23rd of August 2010.

The purpose of the tour is bring science to a wider audience and to attract more young people to the discipline, something Dr Smith aims to do by delivering a volatile mixture of explosive science stage shows, audience debates and lectures.

A well-known name across Australia through weekly science contributions for ABC Radio National’s Breakfast programme, Dr Smith also appears each week on BBC radio across the UK with the Naked Scientists radio show, a multi-award winning programme he founded ten years ago that has since won 7 national and international prizes for science broadcasting.

Syndicated around the world, the Naked Scientists now reaches audiences of more than twenty million per week and, online, the programme has become one of the world's most downloaded science podcasts. It is also unique in being the only example of a global multimedia entity based within a university.

Dr Smith and his team, who are based in the University’s Department of Pathology, says the goal of the Naked Scientists "is to help people enjoy science as much as we do and, at the same time, to have fun."

"A key part of our weekly programme is answering questions that listeners send in from all around the world. And whether it's why worms don't drown during a flood, how fat you'd have to be to fend off a bullet with your beer belly or how hard you'd need to fart to achieve lift off, we can usually come up with an evidence-based answer..."

Now, touring Australia as part of National Science Week, Dr Smith hopes to emulate in front of live audiences the success of his radio productions and podcasts.

"It’s a huge honour that the organisers of the Australian National Science Week have invited me to do this, and I'm really looking forward to finding out just what questions - or perhaps other things - the Australians throw at me!"

Dr Smith will be kicking off the tour in Melbourne, Victoria, on Friday the 13th of August before visiting Adelaide from the 14th – 16th, Sydney on the 17th and 18th, Perth on the 19th – 20th and then finally Brisbane and the Gold Coast from the 21st and 23nd.

With more than 1000 events across the nation and reaching an audience of more than one million people, National Science Week is Australia's largest national festival.

 

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