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Science Museum Blog

By a guest author

The First Spacewalk

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.

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, […]

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, […]