Christmas is upon us and once again we will express our affection for friends and family through the giving and receiving of gifts. What could be more pleasurable? Unfortunately, for every perfect gift there will also be something boring or ill-fitting… or both. And for every sure-fire liquid gift for fun-loving Uncle Joseph, there’s the annual agony of finding something for your Gran. Really, what does she need at her age? But even the most desperately clichéd of standby Christmas gifts can […]
We love receiving letters from our visitors. In this letter, a girl called Molly asked us to track the adventures of ‘Flat Stanley’ for a school project.
Our Pattern Pod interactive gallery for kids aged 5 to 8 is all about patterns. Patterns that you can see, hear and touch.
A group of students aged 8 to 17 have spent the past three months working through the same set of tasks. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, but when you’re asking real, new science questions, no-one knows what the answer will be.
Think a science lab is full of glass beakers and Bunsen burners? You obviously haven’t been to Lottolab – led by Beau Lotto and this team.
Recently, one of my colleagues sent me this link to a small synthesizer hidden in a book. The synthesiser is a bought piece of equipment, but it’s designed to be hacked and modified by whoever uses it and this particular owner probably had a good reason to keep it hidden. Or he just thought it would be fun to stick a synth in an old book. Either way, this quirky instrument instantly reminded me of one of the objects in […]
100 years ago today, Marie Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, becoming the first person to win two Nobel Prizes. The citation recognised ‘the discovery of the elements radium and polonium … the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element’. Isolating radium from pitchblende was a laborious process, with a ton of ore yielding only a tenth of a gram of the new substance. In the early 20th century radium […]
Hamster-powered vegetable gardens, multi-tasking hats with limbs and rubber-producing clouds. Our visitors are a creative lot. Check out some of the crazy contraptions they’ve come up with.
Mick Jackson is a prize-winning author and screenwriter, who has recently become our new writer-in-residence. Throughout his residency he will be regularly keeping us up to date with blog posts – here’s the first.
Alexei Shulgin from media art production company Electroboutique answers some questions about the new pop up exhibition at the Museum.
Check out some pictures from our Robotville festival which features cutting edge robots from labs across Europe.
Alan Winfield is Professor of Electronic Engineering and Director of the Science Communication Unit at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Alan will be on hand to discuss the cultural relevance and impact of swarm robotics at Robotville.