The Chancellor, George Osborne, has announced his ambitions to create a northern “supercity” to rival London as a global hub by building HS3, a high speed rail link between Manchester and Leeds. He was speaking, appropriately enough, at our sister museum, the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, which tells the story of where science met industry to create the modern world and, as the Chancellor himself highlighted, is the site of the world’s oldest surviving passenger railway station. His […]
Roger Highfield discusses the Longitude Lounge at the Science Museum
Project Curator of The Rubbish Collection, Sarah Harvey, considers how art can inspire us to question our everyday relationships with ‘rubbish’.
Playwright and novelist Michael Frayn discusses his most famous work in conversation with the Director of the Science Museum.
Ulrika Danielsson reflects on the first woman to travel into space.
This summer the Science Museum is doing something crazy. It is allowing members of the public to rummage through its bins, writes artist Joshua Sofaer.
Selina Hurley, Assistant Curator of Medicine, takes a look at the story behind a new addition to our collections.
In the ghostly black and white footage of the first ever spacewalk, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov floats in and out of frame. It is a haunting sight, especially when you learn Leonov did not think he would be able to climb back inside the spaceship.
Lord Rees, Astronomer Royal and Chair of the Longitude Prize 2014 Committee, blogs on the launch of the Longitude Prize 2014.
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 […]
More than 350 of the Science Museum’s most ardent supporters last night celebrated what Director Ian Blatchford described as an “exceptional year” for the museum, and the contribution of Chairman of the Board of Trustees Douglas Gurr. The event was also distinguished by a speech given by the Director of the world’s most prestigious institute of theoretical research. Usually, the man to hand out the honours at the Annual Director’s Dinner, Dr. Gurr was last night on the receiving end […]
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, […]