Discovery Zone

Event details

Find out about some of the exciting research being carried out in York. With lots of hands-on activities, this fun event - held in the heart of the city - is suitable for the whole family.

Why not come along and talk face-to-face with researchers about how their cutting-edge work is improving the world we live in?

Activities include:

Analysing the Past: The chemistry of a bog body

Advances in science and technology help us every day, but how can we use them to understand the past? Join us to find out what we can learn from analysing a 1,000 year old body preserved in a bog - from its age to its last meal.

Communicating with Quantum

Find out about the weird and wonderful world of Quantum Physics and some of its fascinating applications. Discover how new technologies that use quantum physics will enable secure communications, with hands-on demonstrations involving lasers, quantum entanglement and ultrafast rabbits! Ask all your quantum questions to the Experimental Quantum Communications Group from Physics at York and the UK Quantum Communications Hub, and find out what the technology of the future will look like.

Crafting the Eighteenth-Century Letter

Letter-writing was a key part of children’s education in the eighteenth century, but it was a far from simple craft. From the making of the pens to the sealing of the letter, writing to a friend or loved one in the eighteenth century involved many different forms of engagement. This activity will journey through the craft of writing, folding, sealing and posting a letter just as people of all ages did three hundred years ago, in order to highlight the material experience of eighteenth-century letter writing.

Discovering our Universe

With fun-filled, interactive activities, discover how telescopes use different types of light to find out about the origins of our Universe. Join the Department of Physics to learn about the James Webb Space Telescope that launched on Christmas Day, and get hands-on with rainbow glasses, infrared cameras, and making your own bracelet that detects the Sun's UV light.

Engineering a Better World

Come along for fun activities with a range of interactive programmable robots!

Fantastic Fusion

Will fusion one day solve the energy crisis? How does it work? Discover the processes that power the Sun with researchers from the Fusion Centre of Doctoral Training and find out how scientists are building ‘mini-suns’ here on Earth.

How to Feel Like a Viking

Do you know how a Viking feels? Happiness, sadness, anger and jealousy … The Vikings felt all of these emotions and more. But Vikings had unusual ways of expressing themselves - and the sagas tell us all about it. Come and join us to learn how Vikings felt!

Indoor Air Science

How do we monitor air quality? Meet scientists from the Wolfson Atmospheric Chemistry Laboratories to find out, and try your hand at our pollution experiments.

The Magic Chair

Come and have your photo taken in the ‘magic chair’. We can make you look bigger or smaller! This visual illusion involves two aspects of visual perception. First, we all know that people further away from us will have a smaller image on our retinas, but we compensate for this by what is called size constancy. We see people staying the same size regardless of how far away they are from us. Secondly we know a great deal about our surroundings and when the legs of a chair appear to match up with a seat of a chair, our brain assumes we are looking at a chair! Therefore the people in these picture must be the same distance away from us, at the chair - and therefore we must see them as very different sizes. We have the props, dream up your own picture in the magic chair!

Psych!York

How do you recognise faces? Or understand speech or body movements? Why does the brain work the way it does? These are just some of the many questions we are exploring at the Department of Psychology at York. Come along to Psych!York to find out more about the amazing things your mind and brain can do! Try our demonstrations or talk to our wonderful psychologists to learn more about their fascinating research. We have activities for all ages!

Synthesise!

Join the pioneering AudioLab team to find out about music technology. Come along and get hands-on experience playing with synthesisers, learn about the history of electronic music and discover the science and engineering behind it.

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