Science Media Centre - Press Briefings

Our briefings for journalists fall into three categories - Horizon Scanning, News-Related Backgrounders and News Briefings.

These briefings fit well with the Centre's brief on a number of levels: helping us to provide the media with access to accurate, evidence based information about controversial subjects; enabling scientists to be more pro-active and on the front-foot about issues likely to arouse public concern; and helping journalists to scan the horizon and get background information on stories they will be covering in the coming months.

Having initially planned to hold a briefing per month, the Centre now has on average one a week. All are well attended by the national media and despite often being offered as backgrounders, most have resulted in positive media coverage. When the Centre solicited the media reaction to our first year's activities, the briefings won a huge vote of confidence with over 20 journalists from the national media saying that the briefings were consistently high quality and extremely useful for background and good stories.

The subjects for these briefings emerge from the on-going dialogue that the Centre's staff have with scientists, science press officers and journalists.

One of the advantages of the Centre's independence is our ability to bring scientists from different scientific institutions onto the same platform. For example our briefing on the science behind waste brought together four scientists funded by four different Research Councils; our briefing on the Hashmi case saw the family sharing a platform with the HFEA, the BMA and the IVF specialist form Nottingham.

The SMC hosted the launch of a 10-year study of mental health service recommendations in the NHS, and the effect the implementation of these recommendations has had on suicide rates across England and Wales. The authors of the report, published in the Lancet, included the National Clinical Director for Health and Criminal Justice Professor Louis Appleby.

An independent report from the Institution of Engineering and Technology, in association with engineering firm Parsons Brinkerhoff and requested by the Infrastructure Planning Commission, was presented at the SMC. The report examines the costs of the different ways of transmitting electricity across the UK to inform upcoming planning decisions for updating the grid.

Two leading experts came to the SMC to discuss research into the effects on the brain of the active component in magic mushrooms. A paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences disclosed the effects of psilocybin on the brain through fMRI scans, while the authors of a paper in the British Journal of Psychiatry suggest that psilocybin could be a useful tool in psychotherapy.

The Wellcome Trust held a briefing at the SMC for a significant funding announcement aimed at allowing Newcastle University to expand their research into replacing defective mitochondrial DNA in a human embryo.

The SMC hosted the Lancet for this briefing about the stall in the decline of the global abortion rate, and the increase in the proportion of unsafe abortions. These are among research findings from the Guttmacher Institute and WHO, published by the Lancet.

The SMC collaborated with the UK Space Agency on this briefing to update journalists on the status of the Russian spacecraft Phobos-Grunt, which was stuck in Earth's orbit since a launch anomaly on 9 November 2011 and predicted to imminently re-enter the Earth's atmosphere.

A new Royal Academy of Engineering report, Heat: degrees of comfort, addressed how feasible it might be to decarbonise 'low-grade' heat - mostly used in domestic heating.

The SMC invited two experts in the geology and geophysics of 'fracking' (hydraulic fracturing) to to brief journalists on the issues of seismic activity and methane leakage from to controversial issue of shale gas extraction.