The bestselling author James Gleick last night won the world’s most prestigious science book prize with his revelatory chronicle of how information has become the defining quality of the modern age.
This post was written by Tara Knights, a work placement student with the Research & Public History department from Sussex University’s MA Art History and Museum Curating. These days most of us have a camera the size of our mobile phone. We can effortlessly take pictures of anything and everything, but what role did photography play in the lives of our ancestors? In this second of a series of blog posts, we will continue to explore the lives of our […]
Clack clack clack clack… ping! The sound of a typewriter sweeping across the page, already becoming a faint memory, will soon fall silent as the mass manufacturing of this technology ends in the UK.
New research from the Large Hadron Collider shows the newly-discovered Higgs boson is behaving exactly as expected. While this might seem like good news, for some people it is the opposite, because a well-behaved Higgs might rule out some intriguing new physics theories.
Ninety years ago at 5:33pm on 14th November 1922, the first British Broadcasting Company transmitter, 2LO, crackled into life.
Dr. Harry Cliff, a Physicist working on the LHCb experiment and the first Science Museum Fellow of Modern Science, writes about a new discovery at CERN for our blog. A new exhibition about the Large Hadron Collider will open in November 2013, showcasing particle detectors and the stories of scientific discoveries.
Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner visited the Science Museum today, where he told the museum’s Roger Highfield how, with only 10 minutes of oxygen remaining, he had just a few seconds to enjoy the majestic view of his home.
Phew..! Finally the moment you’ve all been waiting for: the resolution to last week’s incredibly dramatic cliff-hanger ending! Here’s the second part of our interview with electronic musician, circuit bender and all-round nice guy Andy Wheddon: Click here to listen to the podcast. Guest blog post from Robert Sommerlad, a musician and Science Museum research assistant.
Ghostly goings on dominated our Flight gallery last Friday as over 400 corporate members and members of the museum dusted off their finest spooky outfits to join the Development Team for their annual Halloween Evening.
Collecting stuff is generally the bit I like most about my job. That’s probably why I’ve got a bit over excited about the new acquisitions we’ve made related to synthetic biology – from no other than Tom Knight widely described as the “father” of the discipline. Synthetic biology is research that combines biology and engineering. Sounds like genetic engineering by another name? Well yes, but it goes much further. It looks to create new biological functions not found in nature, […]
It’s an amazing image to conjure with: the 23-year old James Lovelock, our most famous independent scientist, cradling a baby in his arms who would grow to become the world’s best known scientist, Stephen Hawking.
Lovelock told me about this touching encounter during one of his recent visits to the Science Museum, a vivid reminder of why the museum has spent £300,000 on his archive, an extraordinary collection of notebooks, manuscripts photographs and correspondence that reveals the remarkable extent of his research over a lifetime, from cryobiology and colds to Gaia and geoengineering.
At around 1.15 pm, on 21st October 1805, a small projectile (shown in the above engraving), fired at a range of about 50ft, passed into Admiral Horatio Nelson’s left shoulder and, ricocheting against bone, tore a path through his upper body before passing into his lower back. The musket ball took with it fragments of the his coat and its epaulette which remained attached after it came to rest. Nelson died a few hours later as the Battle of Trafalgar drew […]