This year's Public Holiday May 4 saw another edition of the highly successful regional Somerscience STEM Festival (www.somerscience.co.uk), held at the Bath and West Showground in Shepton Mallet. A massive annual outreach festival with over thousands of visitors per year, Somerscience is Somerset's biggest celebration of science. The University of Bath Physics Department was represented by a large delegation from two research groups, with NanoBioPhotonics joining the delegation from Astrophysics in bringing their research to the public.

The NanoBioPhotonics research group invited visitors to explore the hidden world of light, matter and discovery through a series of interactive demonstrations under the slogan: “You never know where the next breakthrough will come from!” The group showcased the OpenFlexure Microscope, highlighting how affordable 3D-printed microscopes can support global health research. Visitors also explored the science of structural colour in the Botanical Photonics exhibit, where a giant bubble demonstrated how colours in nature can arise from microscopic structure rather than pigment. Hands-on activities included building molecules atom by atom in a race against the clock, examining crystals — including a meteorite sample — and competing to build the largest crystal structure using Geomag. Other exhibits explored moiré patterns in 2D materials and used a thermal camera to demonstrate how body temperature can be detected through emissivity. From sensing the handedness of drugs to moving individual molecules with light and mimicking nature’s own optical secrets, the group showcased research spanning from the atomic scale to the global. The Bath Optica Student Chapter also joined the festival with a playful quantum mechanics activity, allowing visitors to wear special glasses to “see” Schrödinger's cat.

The Bath Astrophysics Group once again joined forces with the Bath Astronomers amateur society (bathastronomers.org.uk). A new series of shows were devised for the inflatable planetarium. Prof. Stijn Wuyts and Dr Steve Davies gave a public science talk on "What our eyes can't see, a tour of the dynamic universe".

At the astronomy stand, visitors could experiment with hand-held spectrometers and see the spectral fingerprints of gas molecules floating in space. Thanks to the recent undergraduate thesis project from student Joe Broughton in Computer Science, supervised by Dr Martin Rey, it was also possible to don a virtual reality headset and explore a galaxy simulation from the inside.