"No nerds allowed" declared the poster announcing FameLab at the Cheltenham Science Festival on Saturday. The six finalists in this talent competition for budding communicators gave their presentations before a panel of five judges, while the audience joined in by voting on electronic handsets. Hosting the event was the inimitable Quentin Cooper, presenter of BBC Radio 4's Material World . He described FameLab as a kind of Pop Idol for the science media. Actually, one or two of the finalists did display a trace of nerdiness, but the winner - Mark Lewney - was as un-nerdy as you get. Strumming his guitar to illustrate his brief exposition of the physical basis of music, he won over a diverse audience including many young people. If science is to reach out to new audiences, Lewney is just the kind of presenter it needs.
Veteran science communicator and fertility expert Lord Winston looked uncomfortable. "When are you going to grow up?" he asked Lewney. But Lewney was unfazed. "Never," he replied. A gust of fresh air is finally blowing through the musty halls of science.
That same spirit of iconoclasm and fun animated the whole festival, now in its fourth year. Cheltenham directors Frank Burnet and Kathy Sykes, together with this year's guest director, film producer Lord Puttnam, put together a sparkling five-day programme of talks, interactive exhibits and other events aimed at people of all ages. Lord Puttnam led three fascinating debates - two about science and film, and one about the coverage of science in the news media. Highlights included Lisa Randall, glamorous professor of physics at Harvard University, presenting her ideas about hidden extra dimensions of space, and novelist Philip Pullman discussing the science of belief with Lord Winston.
In another event exploring "new frontiers of taste", chef Heston Blumenthal served a selection of carefully prepared foods to 300 guests to accompany an investigation of umami, the flavour produced by glutamate. Cooks had long known about sweet, sour, salty and bitter flavours, but umami wasn't identified by scientists until the 20th century. This confluence of chemistry and cooking, dubbed "molecular gastronomy", proved that science need not be indigestible.
Meanwhile, engineer and artist Sarah Angliss was turning people into cyborgs. By fitting volunteers with simple devices hacked together from mobile phone vibrators, burglar alarm spares and metal detectors, the idea was to endow them with new sensory powers such as the ability to sense magnetism or to see behind them. These weird animal-machine hybrids lent an eerie feeling to the festival as they blundered around with their headsets and buzzers. After several days, they assembled in front of a curious audience to talk about how the devices influenced their feelings and behaviour.
Popular science has often been accused of dumbing down. But the Cheltenham Science Festival somehow pulls off the trick of making it accessible and fun without shying away from the complexities of real research. It achieves this, in part, by providing a range of events for people of different ages, from the interactive children's exhibits in the "Discovery Zone" to the sophisticated talks for intelligent adults. Sadly, the key teenage audience is less clearly catered for. But FameLab should go some way towards redressing that.
Dylan Evans is senior lecturer in intelligent autonomous systems at the University of the West of England.