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public understanding of mathematics

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This summer the Royal Institution is running a series of workshops as part of its Engineering Week where you will have a chance to try your hand at engineering and discover it is rocket science, underwater robotics, hip joint design, crash testing and much more!

How would it feel to look in a mirror and see not your own reflection but instead how you would look as the opposite sex? You can explore this strange alternate reality at this year's Royal Society Summer Exhibition where scientists from Queen Mary, University of London and University College London will use mathematical wizardry to produce gender reversed images of faces.

Airport security staff have a daunting task. With impatient queues looming over them they need to search x-ray scans of cluttered suitcases for several items at once: knives, guns and bombs. How can we ease their task and make sure they don't miss a crucial item? To find out, scientists are trying to understand how we humans take in visual information. The humble triangle plays a crucial role in the experiments they perform.

To coincide with the 100th International Women's Day two new competitions to find the best young female mathematical minds in the UK and Europe have been launched.

When insects go foraging, they zoom off from their nest in complex zig-zag paths. How do they manage to find their way back home? And how do they manage to do so along a straight path? These questions are explored in an exhibit at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition, currently taking place at the Southbank Centre in London.

Water is essential for life on Earth, and it is a resource we all take for granted. Yet it has many surprising properties that have baffled scientists for centuries. Seemingly simple ideas such as how water freezes are not understood because of water's unique properties. Now scientists are utilising increased computer power and novel algorithms to accurately simulate the properties of water on the nanoscale, allowing complex structures of hundreds or thousands of molecules to be seen and understood.

People have been using gold particles dispersed in water — gold hydrosols — for medical purposes for over 1000 years. Recently, hydrosols containing gold nanoparticles have become particularly popular because they have exciting potential in cancer therapies, pregnancy tests and blood sugar monitoring.

What have muesli, social networking sites and flocks of birds got to do with mathematics? Scientists and students from the University of Bath will be explaining all at the Royal Society's prestigious Summer Science Exhibition, which opens today.

This year the Royal Society celebrates its 350th anniversary and Plus is joining in the celebrations. The annual Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition is this year part of a festival called See Further: The Festival of Science + Arts, which explores the links between science and the arts. The festival is taking place at the Southbank Centre in London from the 25th of June to the 4th of July 2010.

The shadow of the late Martin Gardner looms large in Manchester this week as the workshop How to talk maths in public, organised by the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, draws to a close. The question on everyone's mind is "who will fill the enormous hole left by his absence"?

Maths conquers the summer festivals