The Focus Festival, the monthly magazine dedicated to science, returns for the eighth year from Friday to Sunday at the Science Museum and will be called “Focus Live Passione”. Three days of meetings, experiments, time travel, fun and artificial intelligence: there are more than 100 events, all free. You can register on the focuslive.it website
The aim of the Festival, which attracted 18 thousand visitors last year alone, is to make us reflect on the fundamental role that science has in helping us build our future. An opportunity for everyone to learn about the achievements of physics, medicine, biology or genetics. But also explore the complicated worlds of technology, computation and digital communication, with an eye on the environment: how much are we polluting it? How to contain the damage, at least that caused by the human species? Science is method, commitment and rationality but passion is the engine that, together with curiosity, motivates scientists. The start of the Festival, at 10am on Friday, is entrusted to Samantha Cristoforetti, the ESA astronaut who will talk about her “space passions”, recounting her experiences and where space research is heading.
The program will embrace many languages: music and nature, theater and biology, sport and technology or cooking with many authoritative voices. The director of Focus, Gian Mattia Bazzoli explained that «the common thread is passion, a theme that we feel is ours: it animates the Focus editorial team and we know it also belongs to the readers. But above all it is the characteristic that we have recognized in the many scientists, popularizers, astronauts, athletes and explorers who have been our guests. We saw them, knew them and observed them, there was always a trait that united them: an inexhaustible energy.” The protagonists of knowledge and institutions will alternate on the Main Stage. From the Minister of the Environment Gilberto Pichetto Fratin to Luigi Naldini, director of the San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy, from the Olympic champion Mara Navarria to the journalist Matteo Bordone who analyzes the thousand-year-old relationship between men and cats. Then the physicist Guido Tonelli who explores the wonder of the quantum vacuum or Massimo Temporelli who will talk about physics by drawing it. You can then listen to the incredible story of a musician who underwent brain surgery while awake by the neurosurgeon Christian Brogna. In the Speakers’ Corner you will be able to understand how artificial intelligence is able to prevent crimes and discover how organoids work. There will then be an immersive stage in the Outdoor Area.
You will be able to enter a tent used by researchers from Bicocca University for core sampling on glaciers or in Antarctica, travel through time to the Big Bang, test yourself with simulators or challenge artificial intelligence systems. And try climbing on an artificial wall, an exciting challenge.