When Awesomeness met Epilepsy

One of the (few) perks of being a scientist is that these big biotech companies often come to the uni trying to convince us to use their products rather than a similar product from their competitors. Sometimes to convince us that they are awesome, they'll try to bribe us with food and little goodies - usually things like pens, notebooks, stressballs...I once scored two mugs from Corning and a pair of binoculars from Molecular Probes/Invitrogen.

Well Invitrogen came to uni about a fortnight/three weeks ago to promote something. I toddled along for the free cake (mmmm, cake) when I saw they had some cute stressballs. This was around the time I was having those nightmares, so I was pretty stressed. Anyway, I wanted a stressball but to get it, I had to fill in a questionnaire relating to what they were promoting.

I think the questionnaire went something like *Do you do PCR? (No!)* *Do you do protein analysis (No!)*...basically I answered No! to all the questions. I submitted the form, got my stressball, took same cake, was one happy Mally. A few days later, I got an email saying I had won a prize from answering that questionnaire and would I be around to receive it. I wasn't so it was dropped into my pigeon hole. Basically, it's a plastic beer glass that flashes coloured lights when you push a button at the base.

It was so cool, I took it to drinks for people to use!

The view when using it.

As awesome as the cup is, everytime someone tried to drink from it, I think our eyes started flashing and people got headaches. So awesomeness produced epileptic fits in all us science nerds but who cares? Free cup!!!