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, […]
A major government campaign was launched today at the Science Museum to boost the numbers of young people —especially women — studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects.
Dr Tim Boon, Head of Research and Public History at the Science Museum looks back on fifty years of the BBC’s flagship science programme.
We’re getting great feedback from audiences attending The Energy Show, which is currently on tour around England and Wales. We’ve had one fantastic review in particular from seven year old Anna Sherriff that we’d love to share with you. Anna writes: The Energy Show was fun and exciting with lots of humour and giving a lot of fact as well. Personally I think there could be no improvement at all! The show was about two scientists doing lots of fun experiments, […]
A long black metal tube, slightly tapered and almost 9-foot-long lay on a row of filing cabinets at Blythe House, the Science Museum’s storage facility. The object was pointed out by John Liffen, the Museum’s Curator of Communications, who guided me during a research visit of the collections in 2008. It was all that remained of a mighty horn loudspeaker that was demonstrated in the Museum during the 1930s, John explained. A demolition accident had almost totally destroyed it in […]
Sophia Oelman works on the conservation team for Information Age, a brand new gallery about the last 200 years of communication and information technology, opening this autumn. There are a huge range of exciting objects being prepared for the Information Age gallery. As one of the six conservators working on the project, I have the privilege of cleaning, documenting and repairing the objects before they go on public display. My favourite object is the Super Selector Radio Receiver, made around 1927 in London by Selectors […]
Stella Williams from our Learning Support Team writes about one of her favourite Science Museum objects The VCS3 was more or less the first portable commercially available synthesizer, unlike previous machines which were housed in large cabinets and were known to take up entire rooms. It was created in 1969 by EMS (Electronic Music Studios), a company founded by Peter Zinovieff. The team at EMS used a combination of computer programming knowledge, advanced engineering and musical ambition to create a […]
By Pete Dickinson, Head of Comms at the Science Museum. What better way to round off events linked to our Collider exhibition about the world’s greatest experiment than with a special screening of Particle Fever, a documentary exploring the same extraordinary story of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN? Critics, such as the New York Times, have given the film rave reviews and there was a palpable buzz when Director Mark Levinson, was joined in the museum’s IMAX theatre by […]