SCIENCE SHOWOFF curated by Prof Sophie Scott. March 17th, Star of Kings.

TICKET LINK: http://www.wegottickets.com/event/311118

BBBRRRRRRAAAAAAIIIIIINNNSSSSSS

Don’t worry. We’d never do a zombie-themed gig. ZOMBIES ARE SO OVER.

But we still love the brain, and that’s why we’ve teamed up with long-term Showoff Science Advisor Prof Sophie Scott to pull together a whole night of chaotic science cabaret around the theme of the brain. And it’s during Brain Awareness Week too!

The gig is on Tuesday March 17th in the basement of the Star of Kings. It’ll feature the following amazing brainy acts taking 9 minutes each to make something science-y happen on stage:

Steve Cross – comedian and Science Showoff’s MC. Might not have a brain given the rubbish that comes out of his mouth.

Sophie Scott herself – set details tbc

Sophie Meekings – I’m deaf. I study voices. This was a terrible decision. Let me amaze your ears with some cool demos I probably won’t be able to hear.

Mairead Macsweeney – An exploration of sign language and the brain.

Aaron Margolis – The Kohnstamm Phenomenon: we explain the science behind an old party trick, and demonstrate how your muscles can be fooled into moving of their own accord

Alex Leff – How we see the world and why it doesn’t disappear every time we move our eyes. Did you know that you can see everyone else’s eyes move but not you own? I’ll explain why that is and how our brain builds up a picture of the visual world piece-by-piece, yet we have the strong impression that we can see everything in front of us all at the same time.

Duncan Wisbey – “Alongside his acting career Duncan Wisbey has been an impressionist on programmes like Dead Ringers and the Big Impression, working with and learning from the best in the country, such as Alistair McGowan, Jon Culshaw and Lewis McLeod. Tonight he will show some of the tricks of the trade and reveal some of the fascinating things he’s learned about the brain from working with Professor Sophie Scott. He will also give a little performance and will happily take questions from the audience.”

Leun Otten – Leun Otten is a cognitive neuroscientist who likes to play with minds… and who will show you how your mind can play with you.

AND MORE TBC

Doors open at 7pm and the gig will finish around 10pm. Tickets cost £6 and we’ll be donating all of that money to a charity of Sophie’s choice.

TICKET LINK: http://www.wegottickets.com/event/311118

MY OTHER FUTURE with NESTA – 4th and 11th of March

We’ve teamed up with NESTA to explore what the future is really, really, definitely going to be like through the duel methods of FACTS and COMEDY. Join regular Showoff MC Steve Cross and a whole load of innovators, entrepreneurs and techy folk for two evenings of competition about things to come.

The first gig is March 4th at Sutton House in Hackney (an East London gig for all those who complain that we don’t get out to you enough!) and the second is 11th March at the Star of Kings. Each gig will feature 8-10 competitors battling it out to get you to believe in their vision of what happens next.

Full details and tickets for the gigs are available from:

http://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/my-other-future-futurefest-fringe-events

SCIENCE SHOWOFF BRISTOL 11 – March 19th, Grain Barge. SIGN UP TO PERFORM

Love Science?

Have something to say about it?

Looking for the nicest audience there is?

Based in the South-West?

I have news for you.

We’re coming back to Bristol for one of our bimonthly takeovers of the magnificent Grain Barge pub (it’s genuinely on a boat! It’s really exciting) for an evening of science-themed chaotic cabaret starring YOU.

Eight brilliant Bristolians (or those from nearby) are wanted to perform 9 minute sets of any kind about any sort of science. We welcome science presentations, demos, comedy, music, interpretive dance whatever you’ve got as long as it’s about science. This gig is perfect if you’re a scientist eager to get out more, a science teacher who wants to have an audience of adults for once, a science fan who wants to try a stage out for the first time, a musician or comedian with some experimental science material to try out or ANYONE AT ALL WHO LIKES FUN AND SCIENCE.

Signup here to perform: https://doodle.com/stsf8zyfrwupgxbs sets are up to 9 minutes long.

The gig is in the evening on Thursday March 19th (we’ll need performers from 6.30ish to 10.00ish) with doors opening at 7.00pm.

Would you like to know what it’s like to perform? Aoife will tell you.

SCIENCE SHOWOFF curated by the International Year of Light, Star of Kings, February 17th

Isn’t light amazing? Without light you couldn’t use binoculars to see an enemy helicopter approach. Without light you couldn’t train a laser on the helicopter to target missiles onto it. Without light the resulting explosion would just be heat and sound and no fun to look at.

Have I played too much Call of Duty recently?

Science Showoff, the international (we have gigged in Wales and Scotland) chaotic science cabaret night has joined up with the International Year of Light to bring you a whole evening of fun-packed science performance with light in it. Well, most of you will be using your eyes to see the performances so light will be involved.

The gig is on February 17th (that’s a Tuesday) at the Star of Kings in London. Tickets are £6 (plus 60p booking fee) from here. All the ticket money is going to a charity chosen by Toby Shannon from the International Year of Light, which is Solar Aid. The doors open at 7pm.

“BUT WHO WILL BE SHOWING OFF SCIENCE?!?” you ask. Here’s who:

Steve Cross – your host and compere, science comedian and general troublemaker.

Toby Shannon – International Year of Light co-ordinator in the UK and general good egg.

Matthew Malek – Attaining EnLIGHTenment: This PechaKucha-style presentation covers the history of light in the universe. Starting from the very newest light, and travelling back to the footprint of the Big Bang, Dr. Matthew Malek covers light in all its luminescent glory!

Oli Usher - I’ve spent the last few years putting a positive spin on astronomy – so I’m going to see how much of that I can undo in nine minutes. Will feature: bad science, inarticulate scientists, priapic nebulae, boring discoveries, telescopes that burst into flames and unfortunately titled papers about Uranus.

Lex Webb – I’m going to talk about using light microscopy and fluorescent reporters in zebrafish to study gene expression during embryonic development.

Dr Prabhjot Saini (aka PJ) – Recently finished a PhD at Imperial College, but still working there as a post-doc because I love Chemistry!

Mike Sulu – Life when a university is your workplace.

Vivian Tong – I am a PhD student in the Materials Department at Imperial College London. Mostly I spend my days squashing small bits of metal and looking at them in big microscopes.

Lauren Gardiner – All life on Earth depends on plants. All plants depend on light. I specialise in plants from lovely sunny, warm places, places with LOTS of light. Except in the forest, which is mostly where my often misunderstood work as a botanist takes me.

Gemma Bale – Can you use light to measure brain activity? No? Well I can. I’ll be showing off science from my PhD at UCL, focussing (light) on blood, brains and babies.

Yamina Bakiri – How does your brain see?

Do buy a ticket and come and join us for a night where puns on the word ‘light’ will be strictly limited.

SCIENCE SHOWOFF BRISTOL 10 – Jan 22nd, Grain Barge

Hello Bristol!

Do you like science?

Do you like fun?

If you answered yes to at least one of those you’re our target market. And if you didn’t answer yes, then you’re our target audience to convert into a target market! We have got a gig that will suit you all PERFECTLY.

Tonight we fill the Grain Barge with science and comedy and chaos, and all for the low price of £5, ALL OF WHICH will go to charity. Tickets: http://www.wegottickets.com/event/303938

Here are the amazing science brains who will be taking to the stage to fill your mind with wonder and amazement:

Steve Cross – Science comedian, compere, troublemaker.

Will Davies – Eating healthily is one of the classic new years resolutions, and Will is here to help! With antennae!

Aaron Boardley – Ever got a song stuck in your head? We’ll either find out why that’s the case, or irritate the heck out of your ear canal in the process.

Clare Duxbury – The Audience Effect: Why you screw up more when people are watching.

Jon Chouler – Join me on an interactive demonstration (with lots of audience participation!) to show you how Microbial Fuel Cell technology works, and how it can potentially be used as a novel way to test fresh water sources in developing countries.

Audrey Nailor - “Why haven’t we cured cancer yet?” I WILL TELL YOU WHY.

Aoife Glass – Sliding through your skin, squirming through your guts or crawling through your hair. They might make you itch, but parasites are amazing beasties, and they’ve evolved to live in some of the most hostile environments of all; inside other animals. Prepare to feel just a little bit queasy.

Tim Maynard – Come and join Tim and some of his weird and wonderful six legged critters for 9 mins in the World of The Mini Beast. Your very life might depend on it!!

Sarah Snell-Pym – Ada Lovelace has become famous in Geek Circles in the last few year, the victorian lady who wrote the first computer programme – *before* there were computers.  But what is the story behind it all? Meet Ada Puppet and come on a whirl wind adventure involving maths, victorian society and the joy and sorrows of gambling.

Tickets: http://www.wegottickets.com/event/303938

The gig is at the Grain Barge in Bristol on January 22nd. Doors open at 7pm with the gig starting at 7.30. We should be done by 10 and there will be an intermission. Tickets are £5 (all of that money goes to the Bristol Nature Network)

Science Showoff at the Bloomsbury Theatre – February 4th

Ticket link: https://www.thebloomsbury.com/event/run/14158

Science Showoff is a chaotic science cabaret where you can get your geek on for an evening, safe in the company of hundreds of like-minded souls*. Join ten of London’s best communicators of science for a night of jokes, demos, music and entertainment in London’s best science performance venue.

Performing tonight are:

Dr Steve Cross - geek comedian, troublemaker and Head of Public Engagement at UCL
Dan Schreiber – science comedian, QI Elf and host of There’s No Such Thing As A Fish
Simon Watt – science entertainer and presenter of Inside Nature’s Giants
Dr Emily Grossman – science educator and regular guest on the Alan Titchmarsh Show
Matt Allinson – PhD student at Imperial College
Sarah Day – science communicator from the Geological Society of London
Prof Sophie Scott – UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
Dr Martin Zaltz Austwick – UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis
Dr Claire Asher – UCL Genetics, Environment and Evolution
Dr Sarah Bell - UCL Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering
Sadie Harrison – UCL Science and Technology Studies

The gig is at the Bloomsbury Theatre, on the 4th February 2015, with the show commencing at 7.30pm. Tickets are £8, all of which will go to charity.

*There is no empirical evidence that humans have souls

 

SCIENCE SHOWOFF curated by Hannah Fry. Jan 19th, Star of Kings

Tickets: http://www.wegottickets.com/event/302573

Maths. It’s a word we hear a lot. We all know that maths is the plural of math. It’s what happens when more than one math gets together. But what is a math? Join us on January 19th for a special chaotic science cabaret extravaganza to find out.

Tonight’s very special not-at-all-on-the-spectrum maths lineup has been put together by the frankly astonishing Dr Hannah Fry, the acceptable face of numbers in the UK. She’s chosen her favourite incredible acts to take us into the frightening world of quantitativeness, as well as having a notoriously maths-phobic MC forced upon her. Tonight you’ll see:

Steve Cross – Comedian and compere. Nerd and math refuser. Doesn’t know pi. Has eaten pie.

Elise Bramich – Probability and the apocalypse. You do the math.

Maddie Moate – Maddie Moate is a science and technology presenter, blogger and YouTube educator. Maddie is currently blogging about the ‘Connected Home’ for ao.com and presenting the BBC’s ‘Earth Unplugged’, a YouTube channel exploring and answering weird and wonderful questions about the natural world.

Thomas Oléron Evans – Scissors-paper-stone. Just a game of luck, right? So how come there are computer programmes that can beat human players with ease? And how should you play in a round worth twenty million dollars?

Jen Rogers – Jen Rogers will be combining everyone’s two favourite subjects: statistics and speed cameras, to explore the confusion between causality and chance.

Rob Eastaway – Rob Eastaway, author of numerous books including the bestselling Why Do Buses Come in Threes? and Maths for Mums and Dads, will demonstrate the magical maths behind the riffle-shuffle of a pack of cards.

Katie Steckles – Katie Steckles is a mathematician based in Manchester, who visits schools and science festivals around the UK to talk about maths. She enjoys baking things in the shape of maths, and trying to solve a Rubik’s cube in increasingly awkward situations.

Ben Sparks – Pretty Irrational: How can maths be irrational? What does irrational even mean? Is there a “most irrational thing”? Is it pretty? May contain music and hypnosis.

Sarah Wiseman – When reading numbers, we don’t HAVE to think about them mathematically, I know that is a blasphemous thing to say. In this set I’ll talk about the different ways we can think about numbers, and what can happen when the number reading process goes wrong.

Adam Townsend – The maths of chocolate fountains:  Delicious, obviously, but can you do a PhD in it? We’ll find out how to make predictions for chocolatey flows, and then work out (a) whether we can use other types of chocolate, (b) whether we could make a pioneering ketchup fountain, and (c) why chocolate fountains fall inwards, not directly downwards.

Plus More!!

The gig is on Monday 19th January, at the Star of Kings on York Way (nearest tube Kings Cross), with the doors opening at 7pm.

Tickets are on sale from http://www.wegottickets.com/event/302573 for £6, with all of that money going to Hannah’s chosen charity, London Youth.