COORDINATE – Risk, Uncertainty & Communication in Computing Systems 

[Member Hosted Meetup] For our latest meetup, we were very excited to bring you an amazing hands-on games workshop co-hosted by meetup member & software engineer Dr Ernest Artiaga.

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We cracked out some of our favourite childhood games to learn more about what a distributed system is in computing, how managing uncertainty and unreliability are an essential part of being a software engineer, and challenges in getting parts of computers which are not physically connected to each other to communicate information and take actions together.

Barcelona Science Festival (Social Group Visit)

The Barcelona Fun Science gang got together for a social Saturday-afternoon visit to the annual Barcelona Fiesta de la Ciencia, to check out the selection of talks, workshops, demonstrations, tours & artistic installations, all exploring science, technology and innovation in Barcelona.

Pint of Science 2018

We had great fun when the fab annual Pint of Science Festival visited Barcelona! Featuring more than 40 different talks across 7 bars, this 3-evening festival was a great opportunity to learn something new, meet local researchers, and ask questions all in the informal setting of a bar.

Hack Your Taste Buds

We got hands-on (tongues-on?) for April's workshop, with an interactive adventure into the science of taste, and to explore some unbelievable tips & tricks to hack (trick) your taste buds and change your sensory experiences.

In this hands-on workshop, we were exploring all about the science of how your sense of taste works, and how your experiences of food & drink can be influenced or changed through interactions with your other senses and your environment.

"It's all about Chemistry, Baby" - Quiz & Games, Love & Biology Themed

In this month's epic game-tastic quiz night, we got to grips with Love, Sex, Biology & numerous (well defended) baby aliens with our brand new set of trivia, hands-on games, puzzles and activities – this time learning all about the chemistry, biology and psychology around love, passion, and some of the many weird and wonderful animal behaviours in the pursuit of making baby animals!

We had so much fun with you all. Already looking forward to the next one!

Science-themed Game Night!

To kick off 2018, we're trying some new community activities! On Tuesday, 30 January we all met up in our partner bar, BlackLab Brewhouse for a social evening of strategy board games with a vaguely science-y theme.

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Featuring Epidemiology (Pandemic/Dead of Winter), Survival of the Fittest (Triassic Terror), Statistics (Skull), Mathemetics (Dobble), Engineering (Rhino Hero), and Genetic Mutation (Panic Lab!).

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500 Shades of Grey: Molecules, Sight & Colour Blindness

How does molecules help us to see, and why is the world colored differently for people who are color-blind?

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The best photo camera is invented by nature and we all come into the world with two copies of it installed by default. It is called "The Eye". However, sometimes the eye is not working properly. Why? Which parts of the camera are "broken" in color blind people? Can we treat color blindness? Why do discussions about "which shade of color this is" make no sense? Are there super-humans who see more colors?

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Huge thanks to fabulous community member and biophysicist Liudmila for January's fantastic guest workshop all about protein structure & function, photoreceptors, and genetic super-vision!

Quizmas Party 2017!

AMAZING night at this year's incredible Barcelona Fun Science Quizmas Party! We had so much fun with you all, and we loved seeing so many of our regular community members who were able to make it, along with lots of new faces.

Dust off your kazoos, calm your post-lego adrenaline, and keep your eyes open for more hands-on, marshmallow-throwing, music-playing, mind-boggling quizzes coming in 2018!

Huge thanks to Jing and the BlackLab team for hosting us, and the fabulous Rosa & Siobhan for their invaluable support, quiz brains, photo taking inclinations and dog-guessing skills.

Field Trip! MareNostrum Supercomputer

​Barcelona is full of amazing, exciting scientific institutions, innovators and world-leading research centers. Here at Barcelona Fun Science, we love creating opportunities for you, our community, to expore these spaces, connect with the professionals who are part of this, and have the opportunity to ask questions and be curious!

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In this spirit, we were very excited on our latest exclusive field trip - an extra-special out-of-hours visit to the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, home to MareNostrum, the most powerful supercomputer in Spain!

We joined Christina, Oriol, Sara, Ernest and the team for a fascinating guided tour, to learn all about how a supercomputer is constructed, the potential applications in modelling, and a birds-eye view of what a processing power of 11.5 Petaflops looks like! (eleven thousand trillion operations per second)

Out of Control! - The Cell Cycle & Cancer

In our latest fantastic hand-on session we were joined by amazing guest host, Sofia Lorenzo Gonzalez, for an interactive exploration of what makes up a cell, how cells grow normally, and ways in which this normal mechanism goes wrong in cancer.

Recurrence! (Epidemiology strikes again)

Welcome to 1850s London, where a deadly disease outbreak is sweeping through the streets of Soho, London. AGAIN!

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So much fun in our first Barcelona Fun Science Party Game trial session, investigating the mystery of this deadly outbreak! Andreas, Gema, Jorge, Siobhan, Mark and Tim - you were awesome, thanks so much for your help!

Flies, Model Systems & Glow in the Dark Larvae

Drosophila Melanogaster (Fruit Flies) are an essential tool in the study of genetics, development, behaviour, neurobiology and human diseases, and have been used by research scientists for more than 100 years.

To learn all about Drosophila as a model system, and why they are so important in biomedical research, we are very excited to have the opportunity to visit the Fly Lab at The Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) Barcelona.

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We were joined by Panos Giannios, a scientist studying cell & developmental biology at IRB, for an interactive hands-on session about genetic crosses (choosing which flies will make baby flies to study genetic patterns), using fluorescent labels to see individual proteins in developing fly larvae, and how super-high resolution microscopes allow us to study flies on a cellular level.

Outbreak! An epidemiology mystery

​Welcome to 1850s London. Queen Victoria is on the British throne, the Industrial Revolution is at its peak, and a deadly disease outbreak is sweeping through the streets of Soho, London.

In this extra-special mystery session, we were joined by Dr Cristina Bocanegra from PROSICS, expert in International & Humanitarian Medicine and Infectious Diseases to investigate this mysterious outbreak, and learn all about the key ideas in modern day epidemiology.

Pint of Science Festival 2017

This year, we were really happy to be involved in the fab annual Pint of Science Festival! Featuring more than 40 different talks across 7 bars, this 3-evening festival is an great opportunity to learn something new, meet local researchers, and ask questions all in the informal setting of a bar :-)

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For this year's festival, we got hands-on with molecular spherification, talked Nanomaterials with a packed bar, and ran a huge 'Hack Your Taste Buds' session - thanks so much everyone for coming!

Diabetes, Cancer & All about Cells @IRB Open Day

Rachel and Antonella from Barcelona Fun Science had an amazing time at this year's Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) Open Day. We got hands-on and helped make nearly 200 edible animal cells with both kids and adults, while learning all about cells being full, dynamic and flexible.

Hack Your Taste Buds

Fantastic turnout for our second March workshop, all about senses, taste, how you can manipulate your sensory experiences, and why strawberries are so sneaky! Loads of experiments, loads of curiosity & questions. The Barcelona Fun Science Team had so much fun with you all, thanks for coming! Great to see some new faces from the #FOODMOB gang too.

DNA - what even is it?

DNA - you hear about it in the news, you see diagrams and illustrations of it, everyone is talking about it related to health, medicine, your personality and your family. But what actually *is* DNA, how do we know anything about it, and why does everyone make such a fuss about it..?​

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Whodunnit? - Forensics & Crime Scene Science

In our latest amazing evening session, we got to grips with some hands-on crime scene science by taking on the role of Crime Scene Investigators in the aftermath of a mysterious crime. The Barcelona Fun Science gang played games, solved crimes and learnt all about forensic techniques, including the science of fingerprints, how to use chromatography to identify the author of a poison-pen letter, and the physics of blood spatter analysis.

The Science of Cheese (again)

So good we did it twice...

The Science of Cheese - Christmas Party!

What a night! The Barcelona Fun Science Meetup celebrated our great big Christmas party in style with an incredible activity session and guided cheese tasting at La Republique du Fromage. We learnt all about the science behind how cheese is made, and all of the different ways that we can make cheeses, and what makes them look, feel and taste so different!

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We made a mess with our own ricotta, shook things up a little with handmade butter, andwere having so much fun that we stayed til Midnight on a Monday night and missed the last metro home!

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Bring on 2017....

Drones & Flight

We made a poll on our fab Barcelona Fun Science Facebook community and you voted…our  amazing November event was all about Drones & Flight!

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We learnt all about what a multicopter (drone) is, how they work, and what it feels like to fly one… We also crafted our very own mini-helicopters to play with the key principles behind how flying things can use rotors to get up in the air (and how they stay there!). 

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Scientific Thinking & Electromagnetic Trains

A fab session using an electromagnetic train model to explore the key principles of the scientific method, and creating, testing and playing with our own homemade train sets!

Black Holes, Lasers & Lycra - Understanding Gravitational Waves

An interactive adventure with lasers, lycra, slinkies and more, to explore the phenomenon of gravitational waves; what they are, how they happen, and why they were in the news recently. 

An exciting collaborative event, featuring the team from the BIBAFOODS EU scientific research network.

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Together with 6 awesome young researchers, we explored different ways that foods can be modified to solve challenges in nutrition, food products and drug delivery.

With hands-on chemical and gastronomic experiments in a real-life laboratory, and an exclusive guided tour of the Institute of Advanced Chemistry of Catalonia (iQAC), it was a fantastic evening. 

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For more information about the BIBAFOODS research program, you can check out their website or Facebook.

Our July workshop was all about  'Engineering, Tall Towers & Marshmallows', packed with hands-on games, competitive challenges and fun activities all about structures and forces. 

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• What factors influence the height and shape that buildings can be? 

•  How can we see these factors in real-life?

• Which shapes are strongest, and why?

• When are children better at engineering than adults?

• How are marshmallows related to any of this?!

We all met up on Monday 2nd May to get to grips with density, meet some new people and experiment with amazing multi-coloured liquids.

• What is density, and why does anybody care?

• How do you make a salt water rainbow?

• How light really is Coke Light?

• Can you make a lava lamp? And how does the science of this help us to understand cleaning up an oil spill?

• How do you make the perfect layered coffee?

In our very first public session on Monday 21st March, we spent a great evening getting our hands into science, learning something new, drinking free beers and meeting new people.

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• What actually is a bubble - how are they made and what makes them pop? 

• What causes the amazing shapes and patterns within a bubble? 

• How many bubbles can you create inside each other? 

• How can you make a bubble bigger than your body?

• Do you want to watch videos of bubbles in space?