short science

The month of May (2009) saw us buried deep within the BBC at the Science Radio Unit, spending our days researching programmes such as Case Notes and Digital Planet. This might sound glamorous, but in fact meant that we spent a LOT of hours in a pokey room with no windows, watching hour after hour of archive footage of classics such as BBC Micro Live. And we underwent a transformation. This is no understatement - we were re-born as 80s divas with only radio in mind. Having finished our placement and with the summer stretching out before us, we decided to take everything we learnt at the BBC, and, throwing in some crazy science, decided to hit the airwaves here at Imperial. We wanted to take super-specialist science to a broad audience, in brief, interesting and relevant capsules of information. With one of us being a physicist and the other a medical doctor we felt that we should stick to what we know and allow our guests to bring a wider science perspective each week. Not being content with just our friends and families listening, we decided to get the Short Science brand out there! We designed and developed our own website (www.shortscience.co.uk) – needless to say with a strong eighties styling – got tweeting to anyone that would listen – quickly building up over 500 followers, and started our own facebook group to inform the masses about our upcoming shows. Most impressively of all, however, was our brave foray into the world of podcasting. Having discovered that our huge audio files needed hosting somewhere on the world wide web, we ended up using over five different web services to host the content, process the feed and short-circuit us straight onto the iPods of many. iTunes were so impressed with our noble efforts that after just three shows, they featured us as ‘new and notable’ on the science podcast home page! And you might ask, what could the future possibly hold in terms of dominating popular science university radio? The answer? Keep checking in to find out!