Reporting from the AAAS: Hollywood loves fusion!

The annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, otherwise known as “Triple A-S”, needs no introduction to those in science communication. It’s a key event to break new stories, exchange science communication practices and network with scientists and journalists from more than 50 nations during 150 sessions. This year’s AAAS meeting was held in San Diego between 18-22 February and tackled the theme of “Bridging Science and Society”.  It called scientists and journalists to reflect on how they can communicate their work in an understandable manner and how they could best collaborate in order to highlight the contribution of science in the public domain.
The session on the science of superheroes brought together academics, communicators and writers from the TV series “Heroes” to discuss how science gets reported on films and TV. Sidney Perkovitz, Professor of Physics at Emory and author of Hollywood Science, explained that science played a major role in 19 out of the 50 all time grossing movies. Currently, biologists and geneticists top the lists of evil scientists with stories of GMOs and cloning while fusion scientists, given today's energy crisis, score high marks for being portrayed as good just like “The Saint” and “Chain Reaction”, with Elizabeth Shue and Keanu Reaves respectively. “We want to harness the power of Hollywood to educate and inform” added Jennifer Oullette, Director of the Science and Entertainment exchange programme of the National Academy of Sciences.

Fusion was also widely reported in sessions that tackled physics, energy and climate change. The growing demand for a sustainable energy mix across the globe offered the possibility to speakers to talk about the different types of fusion (magnetic confinement or laser), its merits and the ITER project. For those who wanted to know more on the topic, US ITER offered with its stand a pool of knowledge about the ITER project through its interactive quiz, brand new 3D clips and set of fact sheets.  General Atomics also showed through a series of experiments how plasma behaves and how powerful magnetic fields affect objects. 

Next year’s AAAS event takes place in Washington D.C between 17-21 February and will address the theme of “Science without borders”.