By Roger Highfield, Director of External Affairs Google today celebrates the life of the Nobel-prize-winning chemist Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994) with a Doodle on its homepage. Here you can see the inspiration for the Doodle on what would have been her 104th birthday, her historic image of the three dimensional atomic structure of penicillin, which she deduced with a method called X ray crystallography. Because it was not possible to focus X rays scattered by the penicillin, Hodgkin used large […]
Explore the work of our contemporary science team who run the Tomorrow’s World Gallery. In partnership with the BBC the gallery inspires visitors with the latest scientific inventions and explores the impact they could have on our future.
Colin Pillinger, the planetary scientist, has died age 70. Pillinger, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2005, began his career at Nasa, analysing samples of moon rock on the Apollo programme, and made headlines in 1989 when he and colleagues at the Open University found traces of organic material in a Mars meteorite that had fallen to Earth. But he is best known for his remarkable and dogged battle to launch Beagle 2 Mars lander, named after HMS Beagle, […]
A major government campaign was launched today at the Science Museum to boost the numbers of young people —especially women — studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects.
Dr Tim Boon, Head of Research and Public History at the Science Museum looks back on fifty years of the BBC’s flagship science programme.
Corrinne Burns blogs on ADIOS, a GPS enabled javelin which helps tracks icebergs. You can see ADIOS on display in the Museum’s contemporary science gallery.
Dr. Harry Cliff, Curator of our Collider exhibition and the first Science Museum Fellow of Modern Science explores one of the most important discoveries of a generation.
Tilly Blyth, Lead Curator for Information Age, reflects on how the World Wide Web came into existence.
Martyn Harris, cyclist and entrepreneur, looks at how 3D printing inspired him to launch a new business. See more examples of 3D Printing in our 3D: Printing the future exhibition. My two lifelong passions are cycling and engineering. As a child I could regularly be found either riding my bike or constructing some new contraption out of lego. I started racing mountain bikes at the age of 13 and after leaving school, embarked on a four year apprenticeship to become a […]
Content Developer Rupert Cole explores the most famous science prize of all, and some of its remarkable winners. Today, science’s most prestigious and famous accolades will be awarded in Stockholm: the Nobel Prize. Before we raise a toast to this years’ winners in physics, Peter Higgs and Belgian François Englert, let’s take a look back at the man behind the Prize, and some of its winners. Alfred Nobel A Swedish explosives pioneer who made his millions from inventing dynamite, Alfred […]
Director of External Affairs, Roger Highfield, remembers Nobel laureate Fred Sanger.
Howard Covington and Prof. Chris Rapley reflect on the latest climate change report.
Suzy Antoniw, Content Developer in the Contemporary Science Team, looks at the creation of a new exhibition on 3D printing.