The story of Peter Higgs, who has just died aged 94, is one about the triumph of the human imagination: by articulating the power of thought through mathematics, Higgs captured the deepest workings of the cosmos.  Professor Peter Higgs, pictured in the Collider exhibition at the Science Museum, 2013. In July 2012, two separate research teams of thousands of researchers each at CERN’s £5 billion Large Hadron Collider reported evidence of a new particle thought to be the Higgs boson, technically a ripple in an invisible energy field that gives most particles their mass.  Though only on ..read more

Back in 2014, JAXA launched its asteroid explorer mission, Hayabusa2, with the aim of gathering evidence and data to better understand the origins of the Solar System. Critically, it is also testing and establishing deep space exploration technology. In June 2018, the Hayabusa2 spacecraft arrived at asteroid 162173, known as Ryugu. Hayabusa2 put a lander and two small rovers onto Ryugu’s surface and collected samples which were returned to Earth in 2020. These are now being studied by scientists around the world, and one of the samples is currently on display at the Science Museum. Hayabusa2 ..read more

Each workshop in Technicians: The David Sainsbury Gallery gives students the chance to meet a real technician and experience what it’s like to do their job through hands-on activities and a Q&A session. To mark the one millionth visitor milestone, we caught up with two other technicians who deliver our Meet an Employee workshops to find out more about what they do and their journey to becoming a technician.  Nusayba Abaas who is 22, joined HS2’s construction partner, Balfour Beatty VINCI SYSTRA (BBVS), as a civil engineering apprentice in 2021. She’s part of the engineering team build ..read more

This week the Science Museum opened a stunning new gallery exploring what is probably the most important question of our age: how can the world limit dangerous climate change by transitioning away from fossil fuels in meeting global energy needs? Fossil fuels still meet around 80% of the world’s energy needs. That is why the rapid but carefully managed shift to a low-carbon economy based largely on renewable energy can fairly be described as an Energy Revolution. It’s how our curators describe it in the title of the new gallery. Engaging the public in discussion about the quickest, fairest and ..read more

General Thomas P. Stafford. Source: NASA | Science & Society Picture Library Alongside fellow astronauts Tom Stafford, Gene Cernan and John Young, Stafford was part of the Apollo 10 mission, which performed the ‘dress rehearsal’ for Apollo 11 and the first Moon landing in July 1969. Apollo 10 tested all systems of the command and lunar modules at the Moon. Stafford and Gene Cernan flew the lunar module 14 kilometres above the surface of the Moon before returning to the Command Module. Visitors to the Science Museum can see the Apollo 10 Command Module (nicknamed ‘Charlie Brown’) on display ..read more

Energy Revolution: The Adani Green Energy Gallery explores how the world can generate and use energy more sustainably to urgently reduce carbon dioxide emissions from global energy systems and limit the impact of climate change. This free gallery examines this century’s defining challenge across three sections: In Future Planet, visitors can examine how climate scientists use mathematics and complex computer-based models to understand our planet, and what these tell us about the range of climate futures that might lie ahead.   In Future Energy, technologies – and the people behind th ..read more

I’m Professor Larissa Suzuki and am thrilled to be a part of the engineering workforce. I’m based at UCL and also work for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, plus hold a senior role in the tech industry. My current focus is on artificial intelligence, distributed and decentralised learning, and communication technologies, particularly applied to space exploration, with promising applications to solve many of Earth’s challenges, including creating smart cities, autonomous robots, and assistive healthcare technology. Today I have caught up with three fellow women engineers, Professor Rebecca Shipley, T ..read more

Magnus Hirschfeld. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Magnus-Hirschfeld Gesellschaft Magnus Hirschfeld (1868 – 1935) was a German Jewish doctor, sexologist and activist who founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (hereafter translated to the Institute for Sexual Science). Hirschfeld was one of the foremost researchers in sexuality and gender in the early twentieth century. Hirschfeld was gay but never publicly came out and did not mention his own orientation in his scientific publications on sexuality. It was, after all, still illegal to be homosexual in Germany d ..read more

Conservation teams in museums take great care of collection objects: their job can involve cleaning objects to get them ready for an exhibition, carefully installing them in a gallery display, or caring for them when they’ve suffered from the damages of time. But even when objects are sitting still behind a display glass, away from prying fingers or any exterior contamination, temperature and humidity are some of the invisible factors that conservators must keep in mind to preserve objects. Getting environmental conditions right and to a consistent level is extremely important when caring for ..read more

Last week, the Science Museum opened a new exhibition featuring 23 resplendent mechanical clocks on loan from The Palace Museum in Beijing and never before displayed together in the UK. The exhibition launch was celebrated with a special themed Chinese New Year Lates, where visitors had the chance to enjoy a spectacular lion and dragon dance performance in partnership with London Chinatown Chinese Association. The exhibition shines a light on the Chinese emperors’ obsessive collection of these remarkable clockwork instruments, as the origins of the unique trade, and the inner workings of the e ..read more