The June PubSci was a somewhat chaotic event as we tried an open-mic night. An edited podcast of the evening is available to hear at the Pod Delusion.

Our experiment for the evening was a simple reaction experiment that was meant to test the hypothesis that people’s reactions (measured by catching a ruler) would improve after one drink and then get progressively worse as they consumed more alcohol. Unfortunately the nature of the experiment made it difficult to keep track of exactly what was going on at times.

One factor that we failed to consider was the rate at which alcohol is metabolised (one unit per hour on average) so give the rate of alcohol consumption I’m not sure that many of our experimental subjects had actually increased their blood alcohol substantially over the course of the evening (sensible drinkers – who’d have thunk it?).

As a result, the averaged data from the evening looked like this (34 started the experiment of which 3 did not drink alcohol and 11 only had one drink, so were not included in the analysis, results are based on 20 drinkers – 9 female, 11 male) :

Not exactly unequivocal results, but at least they don’t contradict the experimental hypothesis.

Experiment aside, the open-mic format proved to be good fun and rather entertaining, but for July we plan to have a more structured evening hosted by our Designated Scientist Lizzie Crouch.

Lizzie is a self-confessed science geek who has spent 3 years working as a science researcher in factual television and is now studying Science Communication at Imperial College. She’s back from the Cheltenham Science Festival with a great booze-related experiment to get ideas (& the beers) flowing.

We’ll be starting at 7:30pm on Tuesday 5th July at the usual venue, Upstairs at the Ritzy. Come and join us for a free and informal evening of scientific thinking and peer-reviewed drinking.