Science and Culture: Avant-garde outreach, with science rigor.

On a breezy, crisp evening in December 2015, about 70 party-goers, some bedecked in feathers and glitter, entered the legendary Carwash disco in London’s West End. There they buckled packs containing accelerometers to their waists and danced for science. Daniel Margulies, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and his postdoctorate Melissa Ellamil, were in the nightclub to study synchronous movement in a social context. The two hope the results, combined with future experiments using MRI scanners, will help them identify how different regions of a person’s brain are connected to each other: what scientists refer to as the “connectome.” To help make their giant dance experiment a success, the researchers teamed up with a science outreach and events outfit called Guerilla Science. The organization’s help was key. “It definitely was a bit more complicated than running a lab-based experiment,” recalls Ellamil, grinning. They could never, for example, have mimicked the club environment with music and a few lights in a laboratory setting, notes Margulies. Still, they kept to the usual research protocols, getting their plan approved by an ethics committee at Durham University and having subjects provide informed consent both when they registered online, before the event, and when they arrived at the club. It’s one of several unusual and carefully orchestrated events Guerilla Science has organized in conjunction with scientist collaborators. Such avant-garde approaches may seem far afield from science research. But the group aims to maximize its impact by taking the science to members of the general public who frequent entertainment events and venues, part of an attempt to meet a common outreach challenge. “The key thing with science outreach is not to preach always to the converted,” says Marcus du Sautoy, a mathematician and the professor for the public understanding of science at the University of Oxford.