World Science Festival Brisbane 2017 live blog: Day three

The clouds have set in as day three of the World Science festival draws to a close.

This morning Professor Alan Duffy joined the festival for breakfast to discuss dark matter and the future of physics.

Music abounded in the Queensland Conservatorium where the building filled with music as 84 pianists played simultaneously.

This afternoon, Queensland Museum's Senior Curator of Corals, Dr Bridge helped Brisbanites explore the "twilight zone" of the ocean, an area still largely unexplored by humans in the Let's Talk Coral discussion.

If you're looking for something to do tonight you can relax and watch fun, vibrant, science-inspired performances, poetry and music at Speakeasy Science from 7.00pm.

Alternatively, try the number one recommended event by Queensland Museum's CEO Suzanne Miller, The Future is in Good Hands, where you can meet four of Queensland's brightest under 17-year-olds to discuss the future of science with those who will live it.

Look out for Street Science! tomorrow, where you can get hands-on with science, or why not drop in to see insects with Bry the Fly Guy at the CSIRO tent.

Don't forget to tune in Saturday morning as we bring you everything day four of the festival has to offer!

The cells that created life on earth may have originated from outside this world, astrophysicist Alan Duffy says.

Friday's instalment of the Water Talks series explained the concept of "Other Worldly Water" and posed the question – are we all Martians?

Associate Professor Duffy spoke to packed room about whether life on earth could have originated from Mars.

"It is incredibly possible that this world could be hosting alien life right now," he said.

"This is not speculation, there is material from Mars in labs around the world."

Scientists are studying fragments of rock on Earth that have travelled through space from Mars that contain alien, atmospheric cells to investigate this theory.

Testing on animals is an outdated and inaccurate procedure given people are not "70 kilogram rats", an environmental toxicology expert says.

Animal toxicity testing has traditionally been used to ensure the safety of drugs, pharmaceuticals, and additives.

Griffith University Associate Professor Frederic Leusch said "in vitro" testing appeared to be the most likely alternative to animal toxicity testing in the future.

"In vitro modelling is where I do most of my work - we use cells of animals instead of using the whole animal to convert what happens in the cells to the entire organism," he said.

"Animal toxicity testing is still prevalent, but we are seeing a big shift towards alternatives based on ethical and scientific grounds.

"Humans are not 70 kilogram rats...when we're exposing a rat to a chemical, how do we know humans will react the same?"

Science students from Kingston State College were given access to explore the Qld Museum labs and specimen collections on Friday.

Expert staff from the Qld Museum navigated the students through the Arachnids, Entomology, Mammal and Marine specimen collections and provided insight into how they contribute to scientific study.

Not so well received along the tour was the Cane Toad specimen, fondly named "Yuck".

Money might not grow on trees, but clothes do. Ok, maybe not on actual trees - but do Ikea tubs count?

State Library of Queensland's Dr Peter Musk has found that by combining black tea, sugar, and yeast (and of course the Ikea tub) you can grow your own material at home and let your inner Coco Chanel run wild.

The result is a thick, skin-like material made entirely of cellulose, which you can dry down into something that closely resembles leather - minus the cow. Don't worry about sewing - before it dries, the cellulose is incredibly malleable and fuses onto itself.

Shirts, necklaces, even handbags - this material can be used for just about anything, and without using the 6000L of water it takes to grow and produce cotton.

Better yet: when you've worn your creations out or you want to make something new, you can chuck it straight in the compost and not worry about contributing to the ever-growing landfill.

So grab your ingredients and get funky with some cellulose.

Andrew Thomas reflects on being the first Australian in space.

Less than 10 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef can be seen from the surface, with the "twilight zone" yet to be explored, a coral reef expert told a packed crowd at the 'Let's Talk Coral' series on Friday.

Dr Bridge described the twilight zone, technically known as the mesophotic ecosystem, as the area between 50m and 150m of depth in the ocean - an area that is difficult to access by divers and deep sea technology.

Dr Bridge discovered, through an investigation of the Great Barrier Reef's twilight zone in partnership with Geoscience Australia, there were 1500 banks with a mean depth of 27 metres, which was double the amount the of banks that scientists originally thought the reef entailed.

"There is a heap more habitat out there than we currently realise...we only see about seven per cent of the reef from the surface," he said.

Automated vehicles could help prevent future terrorist attacks like the Westminster Bridge attack earlier this week, a drone expert says.

"I have to raise what's happened in London this week - people are using vehicles as weapons," Dr Ball told an audience at the Automated Autos session at WSF on Friday.

"If that vehicle had the control or the smarts of an automated system, would that person have been able to drive along Westminster Bridge, killing people, injuring people, doing what he did this week? "The answer is probably no, unless he could hack in."

The introduction of automated vehicles at a commercial level could save up to 1200 of the 1300 lives lost on Australian roads each year, fellow panelist and Telstra chief scientist Dr Hugh Bradlow said.

"You can't ride a horse down the freeway, why should you be allowed to drive a car?" he said.

Communicating science to the public can be hard. Climate change is the most notorious example, but the public debates around vaccinations and evolution have also exposed a lack of understanding of how the public engages with science.

The old way of communicating science was known as the "deficit model". It's the idea that the public has a deficit of understanding, so experts simply need to feed them more facts.

Sticking with climate change as an example, it's now clear that more factual knowledge of the topic does not make a person more likely to believe in human-induced climate change.

But scientists still generally favour focusing on facts and accurate reporting of science over other communication strategies such as framing messages to resonate with audiences' pre-existing beliefs.

The concept of framing assumes that the facts, unfortunately, don't speak for themselves.

Read more at The Conversation.

Keen to head to the WSF Brisbane Science Speakeasy at 7:00pm tonight? We have some five double passes up for grabs!

The event will be putting sexy back into science with poetry readings, performance, readings and comedy.

There are five double passes to give away so email scoop@brisbanetimes.com.au with your name, contact and best science joke to be in with a chance to win!

Tickets will be given to the first five science jokes, no matter how corny, that come our way.

Robots are closer than you think, according to social robotics pioneer Professor Mary-Ann Williams.

Speaking to a packed crowd inside the Griffith Conservatorium last night, Professor Williams said robots were already integral to the average Australian's daily life.

"A smartphone is more like a robot than a phone, the sensory technology responds and changes to the human it is closest to, people are already adapting to robotic technology and will continue to do so as it develops." she said.

Fellow panellist and political philosophy specialist Professor Rob Sparrow was less confident that Australians would sit idle as robots revolutionise life as we know it.

"We would never let people we haven't elected into power tell us they are going to radically change our social world, but when engineers tell us that the robot revolution is upon us and we can't do anything to stop it, suddenly we are idle in the development of our society? I doubt that."

University of Queensland journalist Bridget Sloan spoke with World Science Festival founder Brian Greene about how Australia has contributed to improvements in scientific discovery.

The Darkinjung people of NSW's Central Coast tell a Dreaming about spiders made by the stars, their golden webs stretch out from the stars to touch and connect every living thing.

For Karlie Noon, a proud Kamilaroi woman and budding Astronomer who was told this story, the golden webs remind her of quantum entanglement where whatever you do to one electron in this galaxy will be felt by an electron in a different galaxy.

"[The story] really affected and resonated with me and how I live my life," she said.

Ms Noon explained around a fire at Kuril Dhagun's Talking Circle in the State Library of Queensland the connection between scientific astronomy and indigenous astronomy by using estuaries as a metaphor.

"When the saltiness of the sea and the fresh water of the river combine they create completely different environments. It's a really abundant space," she said.

"I like to think the combining of western knowledge and Indigenous knowledge as having similar potential."

Early risers to the World Science Festival were dished up some digestible discussion on dark matter, interplanetary travel and the universe with their breakfast early Friday morning.

The atmosphere was light and casual as Professor Alan Duffy and Dr Harry Cliff discussed stars, planets and galaxies alongside dark matter, dark energy and the Higgs Boson.

"It (dark matter) is basically a new type of stuff," Prof. Duffy said.

"Very technical, I know, but it has gravity, and in fact without this dark matter in simulations the galaxies just don't even form, it's the gravitational backbone around which the galaxy grows."

The discussion then turned to the future of physics, with both physicists saying that they hoped for and expected many new discoveries in the field.

"What I would really like to see is something that would really just leave us baffled, because that's when the big breakthrough will come." Dr Cliff said.

Your Facebook likes are telling big companies more about you than you realise, according to panelists at the World Science Festival.

One of the most frightening topics to come up at Staying Connected: A Privacy Crisis conversation on Thursday night was the ability for companies to target political advertising based on easy-to-access social media information, such as likes.

Author and essayist Linda Jaivin said companies can target advertising to groups that, based on their likes, they can infer have certain political opinions.

She said there was evidence this had occurred with swing voters in both the 2016 US Election and the Brexit Campaign.

"They are gaming democracy, they are gaming our politics. Anybody with that much money and that system can actually push an election result that they want and that is incredibly worrying," she said.

Arts and Science will collide this week at the World Science Festival Brisbane, where a team of pianists will play music inspired by physics.

Associate Professor Vanessa Tomlinson and Dr Erik Griswold have teamed up to produce 84 Pianos, a musical "choose your own adventure", with different components of the piece being played by pianists across the Queensland Conservatorium.

"Using all the pianos at the Conservatorium in-situ, 84 pianists will literally sound the building with new music," Associate Professor Tomlinson said.

They will also perform Time Crystals, a composition inspired by the perpetually moving multi-dimensional structures proposed by Nobel Prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek.

Time Crystals will play at 4.45pm on Friday 24 March and 84 Pianos at 11.15am on Sunday 26 March at the Queensland Conservatorium.