We need your help to come up with a name for our new live gaming festival. We’re looking for a name that sums up the adventurous nature of this real life gaming experience.
Behind every Museum object there can be dozens of stories about the people who made and used it, or are otherwise linked to it. In an upcoming exhibition about the relevance of our collections to family historians we’re going to use one object to illustrate that fact – and we’re hoping that you might be able to help us out. We’re going to take this doctor’s bag and unpack some of the personal histories that are connected to it. It […]
This time of year, gowns and mortar-boards are rented in their thousands in preparation for graduation ceremonies around the country. For medical students, after five years of undergraduate study you can probably imagine their relief. Obtaining a degree in medicine has been the mainstay of the medical profession for centuries. However, licensed and strictly regulated medicine hasn’t always been the most dominant with competition from a range of other practitioners or widely available for all. Even in the history of […]
We’re teaming up with Stitch Science for a weekend of science stitching. Come along to help make a giant stitched model of the solar system or help us out by sending some plastic bags to make plastic yarn.
Stewart Emmens takes a look at the death of one of the greatest enemies of smallpox, Edward Jenner.
Meet the Chronophage beast, who chomps down on each minute, devouring a whopping 86,400 seconds each day.
After nearly a century’s banishment, one of the most notorious of all alcoholic drinks is set to return to its… er… spiritual homeland, France. Distinctively green and extremely powerful, sales of absinthe have been banned there since 1915. Its geographical origins may lie in Switzerland, but absinthe is forever associated with the bohemian and artistic circles of Paris of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Not that it was a peculiarly French habit. With its main ingredients of fennel, anise and the […]
Would you like to co-create an exhibit in our new temporary exhibition together with other musicians and curators from the Science Museum? Then drop us a line before 30 May (noon) and let us know why you love electronic music.
Working in a museum presents all sorts of opportunities you never thought possible. But I imagine few curators have uttered the sentence: “I’m just off to Holland to pick up Napoleon’s toothbrush.” This is exactly my task next week. It’s been on loan to the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden and is normally on display at the Wellcome Collection. Regular readers of this blog will know we like an anniversary and it just so happens that Napoleon died on 5th May 1821, […]
We sometimes find that objects in our collections suddenly become newsworthy because of events beyond the Museum. This beautiful, but small and unassuming, object on display in Cosmos & Culture is now one of them. It’s a prototype gyroscope from the Gravity Probe B experiment, which has been testing predictions made by Einstein’s general theory of relativity: that a massive body such as the Earth should warp and twist the space-time around it. Four spheres like this one – among the most […]
The 3rd May marks the 60th anniversary of the Festival of Britain. The Festival celebrated the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851 at Crystal Palace as well as advances in British science, technology, manufacturing and art. You won’t be surprised to hear that some of our objects were displayed there. On first look, these fabric samples appear to be simple circular designs. To the trained eye however, the pattern is based on the structure of haemoglobin produced by x-ray […]
Meet Jon, the man tasked with making Lates great.
He’s been working away on the programme for this month’s Space-themed Lates (Wednesday 27 April 6.45 – 10pm) but he’s taken a break to tell us what he’s got in store…