Today’s engineers will need lateral thinking of the kind used by the great wartime inventor Sir Barnes Wallis if they are to respond effectively to challenges such as climate change, according to a Cambridge lecturer.
Roger Highfield is the Science Director at the Science Museum Group, a member of the UK's Medical Research Council and a visiting professor at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, and Department of Chemistry, UCL. He studied Chemistry at the University of Oxford and was the first person to bounce a neutron off a soap bubble. Roger was the Science Editor of The Daily Telegraph for two decades, and the Editor of New Scientist between 2008 and 2011. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, most recently Stephen Hawking: Genius at Work, and has had thousands of articles published in newspapers and magazines.
Dr Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, today declared that she would like to join the director of the Science Museum on a space flight during the launch of the museum’s most ambitious exhibition ever, Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age. With the director, Ian Blatchford, and Dr Tereshkova was Sergei Krikalev a veteran of six space flights and eight space walks who, until very recently, held the record for the amount of time in space – 803 days, […]
On 20 July 1969, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong made their historic Apollo 11 moonwalk, becoming the first two humans to set foot on another world. Yesterday Buzz visited the Science Museum’s Cosmonauts exhibition, which opens to the public on the 18 September and has at its heart the 3.5 ton Lunniy Korabl (“lunar ship”) – or LK-3. The single cosmonaut moon lander was built by the USSR in the same year that Apollo 11 took Buzz into the history books and was moved to […]
The ideas that fuelled the birth of the space age dawned much longer ago than many realise. In their research for our Cosmonauts exhibition, Science Museum curators traced the origins of the first great leap into space by Yuri Gagarin in 1961 to events that took place well before the turn of the 20th century. Russian fascination with the cosmos first flickered into life in the 1880s with the appearance in print of the first translations of Western science fiction novels […]
During the preparations for our landmark exhibition, Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age, we reunited Britain’s first astronaut, Helen Sharman, with her spacesuit around a quarter of a century after she first wore it for her pioneering mission to the Mir space station. Helen’s journey began in 1989 when she, then a food technologist, answered an advertisement that she had heard on her car radio: “Astronaut wanted. No experience necessary.” With Timothy Mace, she was eventually selected from over 13,000 […]
Roger Highfield explores how scientists are using computer modelling to better understand the evolution of cancerous tumours.
A few months ahead of the launch of the museum’s pioneering Cosmonauts space exhibition, the UK Space Agency has published its first National Strategy for Space Environments and Human Spaceflight.
As Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov celebrates his birthday (30 May), Roger Highfield, Director of External Affairs, spent a day with pioneering cosmonaut for the launch of Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age.
At a Hay Festival event sponsored by the Royal Society, Director of External Affairs Roger Highfield interviewed Andre Geim, the Nobel prize winner best known for his work on graphene, the subject of an exhibition that will open next year at the Museum of Science & Industry, Manchester.
To mark the birthday of Philosophical Transactions, Roger Highfield surveys the history of citizen science, which dates back much further than many realise.
When the House of Commons voted to legalise a revolutionary new form of reproductive medicine on Tuesday, it was a remarkable moment for science.
Roger Highfield, Director of External Affairs, writes about upcoming Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything.