site.bta16th Sofia Science Festival to Kick Off in Sofia

The 16th edition of the Sofia Science Festival will open at Sofia Tech Park on Thursday, May 14, the organizers from the Beautiful Science Foundation said. More than 100 researchers, engineers, and science practitioners from 12 countries are expected to take part in the event, participating in 135 sessions organized across five venues. Researchers from 14 institutes of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS) will also be featured at the festival, BAS representatives said.

The official opening ceremony is scheduled for 11:30 a.m. and will include an award ceremony for the winners of the Eighth Student Competition in Computational Linguistics, organized by the Institute for Bulgarian Language Prof. Lyubomir Andreychin.

The first day’s programme includes a wide range of highlights. Beginning at 3:00 p.m., visitors will be able to join a hands-on workshop on fossil hunting in sedimentary rocks, led by geologist Michael Sandy. At 4:30 p.m., Dr. Violeta Karailieva from the National Academy of Art and Assoc. Prof. Georgi Avdeev from the Institute of Physical Chemistry at BAS will present a discussion on the relationship between metallurgy and art from antiquity to the digital era. At the same time, Dr. Svetoslav Alexandrov from BAS will speak about the discovery of brown dwarfs and binary star systems from Bulgaria.

The evening program begins at 6:00 p.m., when David Nutt of Imperial College London will present the latest scientific findings on psychoactive substances and their therapeutic applications. From 7:30 p.m., a National Geographic Society documentary exploring the secret life of bees will be screened.

The festival programme also includes events in English, French, and Spanish, with simultaneous interpretation into Bulgarian. For the first time, some sessions will also feature sign-language interpretation. The festival will continue until May 17, when the Bulgarian final of the international FameLab competition will take place.