Happy 2012 to everyone! The New Year Honours List has been announced and some will be starting off 2012 with new titles or new letters after their names. A number of scientists and medical researchers were honoured this year. Unsurprisingly the Science Museum’s medical collection has its fair share of sirs and dames as well as OBEs and Orders of Merit. Arthur Weston made a number of artificial prostheses while imprisoned in Stalag VIIIB/344 (Lamsdorf) during the Second World War. […]
We always knew our followers were a curious lot but now we have the stats to back it up! We started sharing Lunchtime Reading links on Twitter and Facebook back in June and here is a roundup of our the 10 most popular.
A pencil that does your homework for you, clouds that rain chocolate and a levitating chair – just a few of the ingenious inventions that have been dreamt up by visitors to our Launchpad gallery.
There’s a keyboard player and a drummer ready to play some uplifting tunes below a giant disco ball. No, I’m not talking about a 1970s inspired Glee episode. I am of course talking about our Garden interactive gallery!
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.