Desgranando Ciencia celebrates its tenth edition with a look at history and innovation for all audiences

27 January, 2025

  • The Granada science popularisation festival is celebrating its 10th edition at the Science Park on 16th and 17th May.
  • With the slogan ‘History(s) of Science’, it will combine the past, scientific knowledge, humour, art and entertainment.
  • Its tenth anniversary will be accompanied by that of other entities collaborating in the event: 30 from the Science Park, 50 from the Astrophysics Institute of Andalusia and 70 from the Zaidín Experimental Station.
  • Free of charge, the new event is organised by the association Hablando de Ciencia together with the University of Granada and the Science Park.

On 16 and 17 May, Desgranando Ciencia will once again bring together more than seventy representatives of the science communication and research community from all over the country. On its tenth anniversary, the science popularisation festival, a benchmark in Andalusia and attended by thousands of people since its beginnings, maintains its objective: to communicate the most innovative science to the public in short talks lasting ten minutes, accompanied by shows and parallel activities. In addition, it will return to the Science Park, the venue where it was born in 2013 from an initiative of local researchers and popularisers.

In this year’s poster we wanted to pay tribute to the scientists of yesterday and today. That’s why we have 4 couples from different fields: – Physics – Einstein and Ignacio Cirac (Director of the theoretical division of the Max Planck Institute since 2001) – Biology – Severo Ochoa and Francis Mojica (CRISPr is the greatest scientific advance of 2015 according to the journal Science) – Mathematics – Hipatia and Eva Miranda (in 2017 she became the first Spanish mathematician (and second woman after Hélène Esnault) to win the Chair of Excellence of the Paris Mathematical Sciences Foundation) – Astronaut – Valentina Tereshkova and Sara García Alonso (she is selected in 2022 as an ESA reserve astronaut).

In 2025, Desgranando Ciencia reaches its tenth edition accompanied by the anniversaries of the local scientific institutions that have come together to collaborate in its organisation. To begin with, the thirty years since the opening of the Granada Science Park, which incorporates the event into its programme of educational activities. Two of the CSIC centres that support the festival are also celebrating several decades of scientific activity in Granada: the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía and the Estación Experimental del Zaidín, fifty and seventy years old respectively.

History and science: looking to the past to understand the present and face the future

With free access for anyone interested, Desgranando Ciencia will cover a wide variety of branches of science with a programme made up of more than seventy representatives of the research and dissemination community from all over the country. ‘History(s) of Science’ will be the motto of this special event that will combine history, scientific knowledge, humour, art and entertainment. In a year of so many anniversaries, the festival will look to the past not for nostalgia, but to understand how humanity has come to the present and, at the same time, to try to face the future. This is reflected in the poster designed by the illustrator Miriam Rivera of the Biomiics project.

As Doc said in the Back to the Future trilogy: ‘We need a fluzo capacitor’. For this reason, many of the members of the RTVE programme of the same name, such as Miguel Ángel Cajigal ‘El Barroquista’ or Sara Rubayo, and popularisers such as Mikel Herranz (Putomikel) and the writer Espido Freire, will be taking part. They will bring history to the stage under the baton of Marga Sánchez Romero, vice-rector of University Extension, Heritage and Institutional Relations, as well as a populariser.

The rest of the Desgranando Ciencia programme will be made up of national popular science figures such as the psychologist Ramón Nogueras, the scriptwriter Raquel Sastre, Ana Cáceres (Mylestring), Angel León, Anabel Forte, Carlos Lobato and Arola Poch, among many others. As well as dozens of local communicators such as Luis Alcalá (current director of the Science Park), Susana Escudero, Francisco Herrera, Ruth San Pedro, Manuel González, Emilio García and Sara Cazzoli.

And of course there will be Artificial Intelligence, a LOT of AI. DaSCI researchers Francisco Herrera, Óscar Cordón and Práxedes Martínez will talk about some of their projects, but also the lawyer José Luis Moreno will talk about Superpowers thanks to AI and the ethical challenges in biomedicine.

And our colleagues Rocío Romero and Pakito Martínez could not miss the SintonIA Podcas that will be held live from the Science Park.

The show will also be guaranteed with theatre and surprise performances that will fuse art and science on the stage of the Science Park. As usual, the talks will be broadcast online via streaming through the official Desgranando Ciencia website and the Youtube channel of Hablando de Ciencia.

Desgranando Cómics, a competition to tell the story of science in comics

As a parallel activity, the Desgranando Cómics contest reaches its fifth edition to give illustrators, scriptwriters and anyone else interested in this format the opportunity to tell stories about the world of science in cartoons. The deadline will remain open until 31 March 2025 and will be divided into two categories: ‘Seed’, aimed at children under 16 years of age; and ‘Pinsapo’, aimed at an adult audience. The winning works will be announced on Friday 16th in the Science Park and will be awarded with prizes of economic value and lots of comics. The rules are available on the official Desgranando Ciencia website.

The competition is organised by the association Hablando de Ciencia and the informative project Ciencia en Cómics, and has the support of the Estación Experimental el Zaidín (EEZ-CSIC), the Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología (FECYT), the Asociación Española de Autores de Cómic (AACE) and the Granadian record and comic book shop Subterránea.

Desgranando Ciencia is organised by the association Hablando de Ciencia and receives the support of Granada’s entities such as its University, through its Scientific Culture and Innovation Unit, the Science Park and its recently created Scientific Culture Unit, and therefore the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECyT), the Andalusian Inter-University Institute in Data Science and Computational Intelligence (DaSCI-UGR), the Astrophysics Institute of Andalusia, a centre of excellence Severo Ochoa and belonging to the CSIC, as well as the Experimental Station of Zaidín and the Society for the Advancement of Critical Thinking (ARP-SAPC). It is also sponsored by the Faculty of Pharmacy, the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology 2 and the Free Software Office of the University of Granada, as well as Hero, the Institute of Child Nutrition. However, an event of this magnitude is possible thanks to the patrons who participate in the crowdfunding campaign, which will remain open until the event is held.

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