This post is written by Alex, a 16-year old student who spent a week on work placement with the Learning team. The brain is one of the most complex biological organs in the world, and even today our understanding of it is very primitive, but recent advances in the field of neuroscience could help us unpick some of its mysteries… In Who am I? there is a little mouse with a big secret: its brain glows in a rainbow of colours. The […]
Micol Molinari, Learning Resources Project Coordinator writes about the Summer Science Exhibition at the Royal Society. The exhibition runs from 2-7th July and is free entry. Exciting, colourful, inspiring: fancy a little of that this week? You’re in luck. Every year, a specially selected group of researchers and technologists from across the nation, take over the Royal Society building and garden and turn them into an incredible celebration of scientific endeavour – the Summer Science Exhibition – filled with interactive exhibits, games, live demonstrations, prizes, and […]
Kate Davis, a Learning Resources Project Developer, discovers the story behind one of our more unusual objects. The fifth floor of the Science Museum is a fascinating area, full of gory and often unusual paraphernalia related to the history of medicine. One of the more unusual objects lurking in this gallery is the Drug Castle. Our knowledge of medicine and how civilisations have treated illness and disease stretches all the way back to the earliest writings on the subject from […]
Micol Molinari writes about the launch of Enterprising Science, the largest science learning programme of its kind in the UK.
From Keith Richards to Jordan, books about people’s lives fly off the shelves. But what if they looked like this….? Created from the Human Genome Project, these replica books (a printed version can be seen at the Wellcome Collection) show the sequence of 3 billion bases of DNA contained within a human cell. Who did […]
Would you expect to find human body parts in the Maths and Computing gallery? Bizarrely, you can find one half of Charles Babbage’s brain which was donated to the Hunterian Museum by his son Henry (the other half is still with the Hunterian). Many brains of ‘great men’ were kept in the 19th Century to […]
The Argo program was set up by a collaborative of research groups at the turn of the century in response to growing concerns about global climate change. Named after Jason’s “Argo”, a ship in Greek Mythology that undertook the treacherous voyage to capture the Golden Fleece, this ambitious program involves the deployment of data-collecting floats […]
When suffering from a headache or migraine most of us reach for paracetamol, or aspirin. But, would you consider removing a piece of your skull to reduce the pain? Trephination – or trepanning- involves making a small incision, by drilling or scraping, in the skull to expose the dura mater (the outermost, and toughest, of […]
How will we feed ourselves in the future? With more and more people on the planet demanding meat, whilst climate change threatens our environment and the price of food goes up, shouldn’t we be worried about where we will get our next meals? Yes. And lucky for us, there are teams across the world working on how we […]
Looking back over the centuries, how many crimes committed back then would have reached a different conclusion if they occurred today with the use of modern science and technology? Advances in Forensic Science means that crime-scene evidence can be accurately gathered and examined, from collecting DNA and fingerprints to gunpowder residue from armed robbery, kidnap […]
No, this isn’t about the Olympics… I’m sure you’ve all heard so much about Olympic fever (you may even be deep in the grips of it), so we’re going to give you a break from it for a minute. This is about climate change (and we’ve heard so much about that too!). That the climate has been […]
When you think of the world’s most famous brain, whose comes to mind? Freud’s? Einstein’s? Marie Curie’s perhaps? True, all these had quite a lot to offer in the grey matter department, but when it comes to offering the world a clearer picture of the human brain and providing vital insights into the formation and […]