What do you get if you put Aberdeen, the British Science Festival, and dwarf elephants together? Isn’t it obvious? Hugh Falconer.

What do you mean you’ve never heard of Hugh Falconer? The man who was instrumental in introducing tea plantations to India? The man who, in 1842, brought back five tons of fossil bones to the UK from Pakistan and India, fossils which would eventually form a core part of the Natural History Museum’s collections? The man who Stephen J. Gould claimed was the first scientist to anticipate the evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium? Not ringing any bells? Poor Hugh Falconer – one of the most respected scientists of his day, but now he is largely forgotten."

Energy can never be created or destroyed. Instead, we convert it from one form to another. We convert electrical energy to heat energy in our toasters and we convert wind energy to electrical energy using wind turbines. But what about the energy that our own bodies produce, is there an efficient way of harvesting it?

We eat our dinners, which are digested into their basic components (sugars, carbohydrates, proteins etc.) to produce chemical energy. We then convert this chemical energy into useful energy to go about our everyday lives. "