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Science Museum

Artworks, made from meteorites that landed on Earth 6,000 years ago, are on show in the Science Museum until 30 October 2011

It’s only four days until the Stitch London team will be joining us at the museum to stitch the world’s largest handmade solar system. From neurons to giant Jupiter, your skills are needed to help create this piece of art, so come down and join in!

In the run-up to the 50th anniversary of the first man in space the Science Museum’s Yuri Gagarin (drama character) has kindly agreed to blog about how he was selected and trained for his mission to space.

Our fifth floor gallery, The Science and Art of Medicine, touches on issues as emotive as abortion and third world health – so it is no surprise that it has been the subject of comment over the years. A recent blog post and subsequent comments on Twitter have breathed life into an old debate about the presence of content relating to living medical traditions in the gallery. First some basic scene setting for those who haven’t visited the gallery – […]

Can you imagine taking a jigsaw of over 6000 pieces apart just to move it to another location and put it back together? That’s just the task we’ve been set for one of the Science Museum’s most complex exhibits – James Watt’s Workshop, which is due to open in spring 2011. We acquired his complete workshop in 1924. It includes the doors, window, furniture, stove – pretty much everything but the kitchen sink. It was painstakingly moved in the 1920’s from its Birmingham location to […]

What would you do on your perfect bank holiday Monday? Well I don’t know about you guys, but as a kid I always dreamt about owning a Lotus and going for drive in the country. The Lotus Elan was originally conceived by Ron Hickman, the director of Lotus Engineering, in 1963. It was a deeply covetable sport car available in two models – one with fixed position head lights and the other with drop-heads. If the Lotus Elan is the dream, the […]

I love hammers, or to be more precise, I like hitting things with hammers. Be it nails, walnuts or – at some point in the long-distant past – brothers. So when I saw this giant steam powered hammer looming over me in Making the Modern World I had to learn more. It was invented by James Hall Nasmyth. He was born in 1808, and drawn to mechanics from a young age, making his first steam engine at the age of 17. […]