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Science in the news

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.

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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