View from the lab: Scientist or media tart? Here's your chance to have the best of both worlds (Filed: 13/04/2005)

Prof Steve Jones reports on The Cheltenham Science Festival's FameLab, supported by The Daily Telegraph

I never watched Pop Idol, for I am too much of a Bach fan (tragic, I know), but I recently heard a winning entry, which to my superannuated ears was so dire that I blanch to imagine what the losers must have been like. I have, on the other hand, listened to thousands of scientific talks and am equally amazed to see that from such infertile soil have sprung great communicators such as Adam Hart-Davis and David Attenborough.

Now comes an attempt to bring the two formats together. The Cheltenham Science Festival's FameLab, supported by The Daily Telegraph, NESTA, Channel 4 and Pfizer, offers young hopefuls the chance to become the new face of science by presenting their talents in front of a jury. After a series of knockout events (the public gets a say by voting for its favourites), followed by the final at the festival in June, the winner will pocket £2,000, take part in a lecture tour and get air time on Channel 4. As the rules say: "The judges will be looking for entertaining, exciting talks that engage the audience and can be understood by any non-specialist member of the public." The candidates have just three minutes in which to entertain, excite, engage and inform their audience.

What can one say in that brief moment? The art is to get as much information in, as lucidly as possible. My students accuse me of talking too fast in lectures (I blame them for listening too slowly) but even at my unreasonable rate I can utter only about 400 words in three minutes - half the length of this column. The central question, then, is what words to use, how to use them and whether to use any other tricks to help.

Should one ad-lib? I insist on having a set of notes in front of me - but during a lecture I scarcely look at them. It helps to have a few pregnant phrases at the ready. "It has not escaped our attention that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material" is the last line of Watson and Crick's double-helix paper. The sentence hints at more soon to be revealed, a clever tactic for those who want to impress.

Clarity is all important. The hardest thing is to see the camera and microphone as friends; to look and speak straight into glassy eyes and furry ears as if to undergraduates (not much difference, there, in fact). Another essential is to have a precise and agreeable mode of address - and here science can help. I share a building at UCL with the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics. It was founded by Daniel Jones, a friend of George Bernard Shaw and the model for Henry Higgins in Pygmalion. His successors' research can still help those who - like Eliza Doolittle - aspire to improve their station in life, nowadays not from flower-girl to lady, but from scientist to media tart.

Clarity on stage or on camera turns on the laws of language. Consonants are harder to hear than vowels for they are higher pitched and tend to be spoken more softly; an "a" typically sounds four times louder than a "th" in the same word. Unfortunately, they contain most of the information: remove the vowels from the first word of this sentence and we get nfrtntly; get rid of the consonants and we have uouae. Neither is simple to decipher, but the first makes for an easier guess than the second.

The clearest words and sentences, as a result, have a high proportion of consonants - which recommends maths as a topic for FameLab rather than otorhinolaryngology (although neither is famed for its ability to engage the public). People who hold their vowels for longer are easier to understand (hard to do in three minutes) and experiment shows that female speakers are more intelligible than men, which explains the Greenfield Effect.

People understand speech better when it is accompanied by gestures such as glances, nods and grimaces, which may be why some television producers are so fond of "walk and talk", in which the presenter strolls around the thing presented. Lip movements help too - so watch those moustaches! For FameLab, props are allowed (and already a physicist entrant has inflated balloons to the beat of a ghetto-blaster). Auditory scientists are particularly interested in how the ear perceives spoken language in a noisy background. Random noise, they find, is less distracting than well-structured sounds. And that gives the ideal presentation for the FameLab jury - borrow that ghetto-blaster and give a lecture on the perception of speech while playing a Bach cantata followed by a Pop Idol winner to show the power of music, as against cacophony, in obscuring the message of science.