Awesome review of Greenman Music Festival including a little bit about the Egg and Sperm Race. Yey for not being ‘boring’!

“Einstein’s Garden is one of my favourite parts of Green Man, where there are stalls and stands around with learning activities for kids. When I say ‘learning activity’, you think – ‘boring’. But actually there were stands called things like ‘The Egg and Sperm race’, and Cardiff and Bristol Universities teaching kids about the solar system and about how molecules in corn flour and water work. There were also enormous hula hoops to play with. It was awesome. My friend Matt compered at the solar stage there, and did some freestyle poetry about Higgs Boson. I’m not even kidding.”

http://plastik.me/green-man-fest-2012-mud-bath-central/

Thanks Helia Phoenix!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I’ve uploaded all the photos from this years Greenman festival! You can see them all here but I’ve included some highlights in this post!

Finally back into a work routine this week and cracking on with all the post-Egg and Sperm Race chores like writing blog posts, sending photos to people and the all so important evaluation and claiming back all my expenses. Its nice to get hundreds of pounds transferred to your account a week before payday, makes me feel rich for a day before I need to transfer it all to my credit card.

I’m finally home from Greenman and showered and dressed in clean mud free clothes. Its never felt better!! Especially after spending an hour trying to push our van out of the mud, in the rain. We finally got pulled out by a kind man with a Land-rover who was super nice! I don’t know his name but thank you nice man for helping us get out the field muddy puddle.

I’ve also just heard from the other party (Gemma and volunteers) on the bus that the driver took the wrong way home and they only got home about an hour ago. Mega transport fail today.

We did have a fantastic weekend though, so many amazing visitors came to our stall and played our game, even with all the rain and mud. The feedback you gave us was amazing and I’m still buzzing of it!

Einsteins Garden was great too. I got to hold creepy crawlers, sing science songs, make lung pictures and dress up in a deer skull – pretty random. Although my favourite stall was Journey of the Jobbie – the name sold it alone! It was such an awesome activity where you got to journey though the mouth and all the way down the digestive track and come out the “other-side” while learning about all the bacteria along the way. Being a microbiologist this made my inner geek really happy!

So work doesn’t stop yet, tomorrow I need to be up bright and early to unload this van and return it by 12 – I do not want to do this! Then I have a million photos to sort through and I took lots of videos thinking I would try and make a nice video like the Einstein’s Garden one – although we will see how successful this will be. I’m also right back to work in the lab in the morning. Yawn! in the mean time I’ve uploaded some of my instagram pictures of the weekend that I took before my iphone died.

So its off to bed now but more updates later in the week!

Night x

So right now we are on our epic road trip to Wales for Greenman!

I’m driving our giant uterus in a big van while Gemma and the volunteers bus is down!

Set off last night and currently swallowed up on the M6 and have drank pretty much all the coffee!

Awesome news!!!

The MRC are funding us again this year which means we have enough money to race sperm again!

Massive thank you to everyone at MRC for all their help over the last 15 months!

This week we received conformation that our funding application to the Society for Endocrinology was successful!! Many thanks to the lovely people over there who considered our application.

If you’re interested in science communication check out their website or if you want to know more about hormones they have a great public website You and Your Hormones.

Now we are all set to go to Green Man festival in August and are starting to get into full event organisation mode!

1 month to go!!

We submitted the Greenman Music Festival application this week. Please let us come back for another year!!!

We were brave and stood up to preform stand up comeday on front a crowd of festival goers all in the name of public engagement. Possibly one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever done! And i reckon everyone should do it because it is great!

Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee Bright Clubs are recruiting now so get in touch for more info!

Egg and Sperm race is a public engagement activity aimed at engaging music festival audiences in some of the more interesting, and important, aspects of human reproduction. We try to visit several music festivals each year to run the activity and we have a lot of fun in the process.

Now that Gemma and I are entering the second year of our PhDs we don’t have as much free time to dedicate to Egg and Sperm. We are now looking for a few volunteers to help us run the activity over the next year. We don’t pay but public engagement looks great on your CV and you will get to go to music festivals for free!

Send us an e-mail if your interested!

eggspermrace@gmail.com

Please can we have two Giant Uterus Plush Toys for Christmas?

One for Gemma and one for me!

Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease?