{"id":4691,"date":"2010-08-29T13:53:44","date_gmt":"2010-08-29T05:53:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/science-gets-the-naked-treatment\/"},"modified":"2022-12-07T13:06:32","modified_gmt":"2022-12-07T05:06:32","slug":"science-gets-the-naked-treatment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/science-gets-the-naked-treatment\/","title":{"rendered":"Science gets the &#8220;naked&#8221; treatment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A Cambridge University virologist popped into Curtin University recently to end National Science Week with a bang.<\/p>\n<p>Dr Chris Smith is known throughout Britain as the<em> naked scientist<\/em> for his knack on the BBC series of a similar name of stripping science down to its bare essentials.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_5659\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-5659\" style=\"width: 150px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/13\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/dr_chris_smith_flame.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-5659 \" title=\"dr_chris_smith_flame\" src=\"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/13\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/dr_chris_smith_flame-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"Image of Dr Chris Smith creating a &quot;tornado flame&quot;\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-5659\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Dr Chris Smith creates a flame tornado <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>During an hour-long lecture where he barely stood still, Smith bedazzled an all-ages audience with his combustible experiments.<\/p>\n<p>Items from an unsuspecting gherkin to a pair of Ray-ban sunglasses were sacrificed for science.<\/p>\n<p>Curtin Science Outreach Coordinator Emma Donnelly set the scene by pointing out the emergency exits, just in case.<\/p>\n<p>Showman-like Smith warmed up with the old daffodil-in-the-dry-ice experiment before unleashing more complex procedures amid a flurry of one-liners.<\/p>\n<p>By passing a charge through a gherkin impaled on two forks to produce an orange glow, he proved that the pickled vegetable was full of salt. This is a microcosm of how known colour reactions of different chemicals under heat were used to determine the composition of the sun.<\/p>\n<p>At another point Smith converted a webcam into a heat-sensing camera by disabling its infrared sensor and attaching a pair of lenses he\u2019d lifted from a perfectly good pair of Ray-bans. All this to demonstrate that old incandescent light globes frittered most of their energy away in infrared light that humans can\u2019t even see.<\/p>\n<p>The point Smith was trying to prove when he poured liquid nitrogen into a bin of soapy water was lost in a loud explosion, but nobody in the exhilarated crowd seemed to care.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>National Science Week 2010 ended with a bang, thanks to England&#8217;s naked scientist Dr Chris Smith.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4275,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"_oasis_task_priority":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_research-areas":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"research-areas":[],"class_list":["post-4691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campus-and-global-community"],"acf":{"post_options":{"":null,"additional_content":{"title":"","content":"","image":false},"related_courses":false,"credits":{"author":"","photographer":"","media":false},"display_author":true,"banner":{"image":false}}},"featured_image":false,"author_meta":{"first_name":"Curtin","last_name":"University","display_name":"Curtin University"},"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-20 18:51:33","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4275"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4691\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4691"},{"taxonomy":"research-areas","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-areas?post=4691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}