Stand back and cover your ears – a trip to the theatre just got explosively exciting! The Energy Show is on tour around the country until July 22, when it returns to London for a spectacular final two weeks at the Science Museum. To mark the launch of this fun-filled show, we’ve teamed up with The Sunday Mirror to give one lucky child (aged 7 – 12) the opportunity of a lifetime – a walk-on part in The Energy Show […]
“If science is to inspire, engage and thrive, it needs its heroes more than ever.” This was the key message from Dr. Roger Highfield, our Director of External Affairs, and this year’s recipient of the Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal, at his Royal Society lecture ‘Heroes of Science’ earlier this week.
When you think of the world’s most famous brain, whose comes to mind? Freud’s? Einstein’s? Marie Curie’s perhaps? True, all these had quite a lot to offer in the grey matter department, but when it comes to offering the world a clearer picture of the human brain and providing vital insights into the formation and […]
100 years ago today, Marie Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, becoming the first person to win two Nobel Prizes. The citation recognised ‘the discovery of the elements radium and polonium … the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element’. Isolating radium from pitchblende was a laborious process, with a ton of ore yielding only a tenth of a gram of the new substance. In the early 20th century radium […]
Continuing with my Nobel Prize theme, I’ve been looking at the collections relating to Ronald Ross (1857-1932). Ross won the Nobel Prize for Physiology /Medicine in 1902 for his work on malaria. In 1897, five years after he started working on malaria, Ross established the life cycles of the mosquito. He proved the hypothesis of his predecessors Alphonse Laveran and Patrick Manson. Laveran would later win the 1907 Nobel Prize for his work. But he wasn’t the only one working on the […]
March is National Women’s History Month. To coincide with the centenary of the Nobel Prizes, it seems an ideal time to look at the achievements of Marie Curie (1897-1934). Marie Curie was the first scientist to win two Nobel Prizes – one in 1903 with her husband Pierre and the another in 1911 for Chemistry for her work on radioactivity. Like many of the objects Marie Curie used in her work, this flask has slight traces of radioactivity and needs to be […]