The CIB Margarita Salas participates in the Madrid is Science Fair.

The Margarita Salas Center for Biological Research (CSIC) participates in the 2023 edition of the Madrid is Science Fair, organized at IFEMA (Madrid) between March 23 and 25 by the Foundation for Knowledge Madri+d.

During the event, the attending public will be able to enter a huge brain to discover aspects of its functioning through a multisensory experience. The nervous organ will be the center of the CSIC stand, a space of more than 500 square meters that will also house an exhibition on the figure of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, produced by the Cajal Institute (CSIC), which brings together some twenty illustrations of the nervous system made by the scientist, as well as biographical photos and symbolic objects of his life, such as the Nobel Prize medal or some of his books.

At this stand, researchers from the CIB Margarita Salas will show the public microorganisms present in everyday objects under the microscope, such as fungi in food that have gone bad or those that live in rain puddles, and will use board games to explain the resistance of bacteria to antibiotics. Through simple experiments, they will tell how we are able to know the amount and type of bacteria we have in a sample, how bacteria breathe, and how the polymers they themselves produce are.

With activities adapted to different ages, they will explain how drugs are designed and how they travel through our bodies until they reach the place where they have to act. Attendees will also be able to see how fungi are useful to carry out different applications. A workshop will be held to extract DNA from cells and measure enzymatic activity using simple protocols.

CSIC's participation in the Madrid is Science Fair will include experiments, demonstrations, and scientific workshops led by researchers from six CSIC centers. In addition to the CIB Margarita Salas, the Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales (CCHS), the Instituto de Ciencia y Tecnología de Alimentos y Nutrición (ICTAN), the Museo Geominero (IGME), the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (MNCN) and the Real Jardín Botánico (RJB) will be present.

More information (in Spanish):

CSIC Press Release: link.

Tickets (free): link.