The brochures are out for this year’s Orkney International Science Festival, with details of over 100 events taking place over the seven days from 5-11 September.

Full details of the programme can also be found on the Festival’s website www.oisf.org.

The sea runs through this year’s festival, with subjects including Orkney’s seagrass meadows, 200 years of lifeboat design, and the story of the laying of the first transatlantic submarine cable by the steamship Great Eastern.

There are questions for discussion too. Is seafood sustainable? Could software development be a new Orkney home industry? And is there some unique use of AI that could give islands a special opportunity?

Participants come from many places. There’s news from Japan about using marine energy structures to grow rich seaweed forests to benefit sea life and fisheries. Five Malaysian researchers have stories of underwater world of coral reefs and the tapestry of life within and around them. From Finland comes an insight into how teeth can give clues to ancient creatures from the Ice Ages and other times.

There is a kaleidoscopic mix of exhibitions, with images of comets and the visit of a commemorative astronomical quilt, paintings of Orkney in solstice light and a ghostly ship trapped in Antarctic ice, photos of Orkney shore life and seaweed and the story of a Lancashire scientist who saved the sushi industry and who is revered in Japan with the title ‘Mother of the Sea’. 

The urgent need, locally and nationally, for greater self-reliance in food production is highlighted in a range of practical ways for action. The head gardener at Gordon Castle walled garden in Fochabers, Ed Bollom, shows the remarkable range and quantity of fruit and vegetables that can be grown on eight acres. Kirstie Campbell, founder of a social enterprise using sea buckthorn, shows how a plant that thrives on poor sandy soil by the sea produces berries packed with nutrition. Ann Roberts of the charity Think Through Nutrition highlights research showing that an improved diet can help with varied behaviour problems.

There is frontline research in gravitational waves and neutron stars, in detecting the faintest traces of DNA, in probing genetic links to disease and in news of plans to set up a moon base. There is the story of Orkney’s mains electricity and the opportunity to visit Kirkwall power station, and the opportunity too to walk on the site of the Ness of Brodgar and hear at first hand about this year’s excavation from the director, Nick Card.

Other experiences including swimming with gravitational waves, tasting tomatoes grown with and without rock dust added to the soil, setting off for an evening in Hoy and stories of traditional boats and cargoes, and two concerts in St Magnus Cathedral. One of these spans the works of some of the great organ composers, and the other introduces music by composers of today along the old sea-route linking Ireland, Orkney, Faroe and Iceland.

There’s also a look at Orkney’s Arctic past and to what might be in store, and a look into Orkney’s energy future; there’s also the story of an Orkney writer’s vision of time, and a Caithness writer’s journey up a Highland river in search of its source.

Click on this link for the Orkney International Festival’s website www.oisf.org.