The British Science Festival has been taking place in Birmingham this week. Based around Aston University, the festival has brought a whole host of seminars, workshops and activities to make our brains ache, along with a chance to show that scientists can play just as hard as they work. Starting with this flash mob of dancing lab coats…

Already there has been plenty of interesting topics at the festival, including why exercise won’t cure obesity, how lasers are being used to explore the dark side of space, why finding love means loosing two of your best friends, and the preparation for an imminent British earthquake. The New Optimists also had a few events to coincide with the festival, including their book launch, and a panel event at Aston University.

But if you’ve been stuck at work all week, you can still catch plenty of things to do at the weekend, take a look at the online programme in full, where you can also filter out which events are suitable for your level of science knowledge and interests.

This is interesting. The New Optimists is a website and book, which records the answers given by over 80 scientists who were asked the question ‘What are you optimistic about?’

The idea for “The New Optimists” began in early 2009 with me (Kate Cooper) sitting in front of my laptop on the kitchen table, realising that web-based technologies had dramatically changed the publishing game. And that this gave me the opportunity to showcase some of the ground-breaking research going on locally at the 2010 British Science Festival in my home city of Birmingham.

If you’d like to hear more about the project, there’s a series of events happening around Birmingham to tie in with the book’s launch, which takes places on Tuesday 14 September at the Botanical Gardens.

This is followed by a Q&A session on 15 September at the Science Festival, Aston University, and a lunchtime session at Waterstones on 16 September with Kate Cooper and editor Keith Richards.

You can buy tickets to the launch here.