Science Events in London: 4 – 9 June

A perhaps predictably slow week for events this week, with apparently half of London scientists watching the Jubilee or amusing the kids for half term, and the other half decamped to the Hay festival. So if you happen to be near Hay-on-Wye, you will have a plethora of choices, including a range of really interesting looking events from the Royal Society, but for those still left in London, sparser than usual pickings with some organisations including ZSL even cancelling scheduled events.

Hence, if you can help fill this week’s calendar, suggestions in the comments or by email are, as always, very welcome!

Wednesday

One for the parents amongst you; UCL’s Grant Museum offers an afternoon of activities to keep half term interesting with Extreme Animals. Specimens from the collection with help children meet some of the biggest, smallest, heaviest, lightest, strongest, cutest, ugliest, weirdest and wildest animals in the Grant Museum. 1-5pm; free and no need to book.

Alternatively the Royal Institution has a members only event for older children which sounds like it might be worth becoming a member for on its own. “Codes and information (or wicked wizards and devious dwarves)” will use a series of puzzles to investigate how communication systems detect and remove errors. 10:30 or 2:30pm; 8 years +; tickets range up to £10; book soon because there are only a handful of tickets left.

The Weekend

Saturday is Family Fun Day at the Royal Institution; 11am – 4pm will see a whole range of activities for children of varying ages around this month’s theme of Fabrics and Knitting. Tickets £10 adults, £5 children.

For a possibly rainer activity, the Wellcome Collection has a guided walk around Bloomsbury with Ros Stanwell-Smith of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, exploring stories of brains on Wellcome Collection’s doorstep. Saturday and Sunday at 11 – 12:30; tickets free but booking essential and limited to two per person.

Last but not least, this weekend is the first of the new event Dino Snores, an adult-only sleepover at the Natural History Museum. For the not insignificant price tag of £175, you get an evening in the museum with a three course dinner, all sorts of events and a cooked breakfast the next morning. Places limited. EDIT: This event has been postponed until Friday 17th August – ticket holders can get a refund or a place at the new date.

You can follow nature.com blog’s London Google calendar of events at https://blogs.nature.com/london/2011/05/17/scientific-events-calendar. Updated daily.


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As well as our regularly maintained calendar, you can find lots of other suggestions of science-y events in London. We have compiled a list of some other places to look: we will continue adding to this list, and please do, as always, send us additions for it:

Collections and calendars

Londonist recommendations: All things scientific, technical and geeky

Ian Visits: A calendar of all types of events in London, including science and engineering, with added editorial

Museums, societies etc:

Wellcome Collection: Regular events and exhibitions of a medical flavour at the Wellcome Collection on Euston Road

Royal Institution: Miscellaneous science and policy events

Royal Society: Science, policy and conferences

ZSL: Zoological Society of London; occasional events on conservation and zoology

Hunterian Museum: Part of the Royal College of Surgeons, with a treasure trove of specimens and surgical paraphenalia

University calendars (usually featuring dozens of events per week)

UCL

Imperial

LSE

  Read more

Science events in London: 28 May – 3 June

Monday

Do we need friends? That is the question that Professor Neil McCrae will be asking at the Royal Institution’s Cafe Scientifique as he leads a discussion inspired by his research into the social brain and the benefits to animals of social behaviour. 6:30 – 8pm; entrance is free and all are welcome to attend and encouraged to participate in discussion.

Tuesday

A really big name in world science comes to London: Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer, Director General of CERN. Speaking at the Royal Society, Professor Heuer will take a look at the big picture of the Large Hadron Collider, showing some of the most promising results so far. The event is free and open to all; tickets are first come, first served with doors opening 5:30 for 6pm. If you can’t make it, the event will be live streamed on the Royal Society website  and the recording available later in the week. Read more

STORIFY: TalkFest – Science Communication and Political Divides.

A common caricature of science is that it likes to think of itself as above politics; a disinterested, purely empirical interaction with the natural world. But what about the public communication of science? The May TalkFest event was held tonight at the Biochemical Society with guests Alice Bell, Simon Lewis, Steve Cross, Michael Brooks and Felicity Mellor asking whether science communication can ever be apolitical and whether it should even try. Read more

Science Events in London: 21 – 27 May

Monday

Gresham College opens the week with a medical science talk from Professor Pat Nuttall which will consider the likelihood of being bitten by a tick carrying the Lyme Disease spirochaete, Borrelia burgdorferi.  Lyme Disease is spreading across the Northern Hemisphere: what are our risks and what can we do to control it? 6pm near Holborn; free and no need to book.

Tuesday

A double bill of evening lectures at Imperial. Fist up, The cancer genome: An autobiography encoded DNA given by Peter Campbell of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Next, Professor Stephen Gentleman will talk about the link between traumatic brain injury and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s in Brains, Trains and Automobiles. Unfortunately you can’t take in both; the former is 5 – 6pm, the latter 5:30 – 6:30pm, both free and no need to book. Read more

Museums at Night: the highlights

A rare chance to see some of London’s most interesting haunts in another light this weekend with the annual Museums at Night. A national event co-ordinated by Culture24, this weekend, 18-20th May, will see over 200 museums nationwide open after hours for special events and activities. What’s particularly interesting about this event is that it isn’t only the large museums doing it. The Natural History Museum and the Science Museum of course already have their own late night events, but this is an opportunity to see some of the lesser known, but no less fascinating, museums.

For the full list of museums opening, see the Museums at Night listings; for those of you in London, we have put together a short selection of our personal London highlights:

1. The Royal Observatory, Greenwich. One of our favourite museums in London, the Observatory will be open until 8pm on Saturday 19th for a whole range of family and adult activities including a talk entitled, “Space is big…”, a planet-finder making workshop for kids and the opportunity to talk to astronomers about their work. All events are free except the planetarium shows.

2. The Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons. Nature London has posted about the Hunterian Museum before because it really is one of London’s hidden gems. This Friday evening, 6-9pm, there will be a host of talks, activities and archival displays that will look at the life of Thomas Wakley, surgeon, Lancet founder and medical crusader. Free; not suitable for children. Read more

Storify of the 2012 Science Communication Conference Day 2 #scicom12

Tuesday saw the second day of the annual two-day Science Communication Conference organised by the British Science Association in association with the Wellcome Trust.

The conference aims to address the key issues facing science communicators in the UK, bringing together people involved in public engagement.

This year’s theme is ‘Impact‘ with the conversations focusing on the various ways to measure public engagement activities, as well as how research scientists and engineers will consider the impact agenda of their research. Read more

Storify of the 2012 Science Communication Conference Day 1 #scicom12

Yesterday saw the first day of the annual two-day Science Communication Conference organised by the British Science Association in association with the Wellcome Trust.

The conference aims to address the key issues facing science communicators in the UK, bringing together people involved in public engagement.

This year’s theme is ‘Impact‘ with the conversations focusing on the various ways to measure public engagement activities, as well as how research scientists and engineers will consider the impact agenda of their research. Read more

Science Events in London: 14 – 20 May

Monday

Fiction Lab, the monthly book club at the Royal Institution is on as usual this month with, When The Killing’s Done by T. Coraghessan Boyle the book of choice. 7pm start; free and all welcome.

Tuesday

Another History of Science workshop at the Royal Society tonight on what we can learn about some of the lesser known scientists of the 19th century from their collections of papers, writings and art donated to the Royal Society. These workshops are free but small affairs, limited to 15 people, so you need to book in advance. Read more

Science Communication Conference 2012

A very short post to remind you that Monday is the first day of the annual two-day Science Communication Conference organised by the British Science Association in association with the Wellcome Trust.

Held at Kings Place, the conference features two days of sessions with speakers and panel events on a whole range of topics all loosely themed around this year’s theme of ‘Impact’. Organisers describe the theme as aiming to discuss the various ways to measure the impacts of public engagement activities as well as how research scientists and engineers will consider the impact agenda of their research.

Sessions begin at 9am and if you don’t already have your ticket, you can follow all the action on the conference twitter feed @SciCommConf and on the hashtag scicom12.

Science Events in London: 7 – 13th May

Tuesday

 “Why is there structure in the universe and from what does it arise?” is the question from the Royal Astronomical Society this lunchtime, when Dr Simon Mitton will take us on a journey through the history of astronomy as it tries to answer this most fundamental question of all; why is there something rather than nothing? 1-2pm; no need to book.

Wednesday

If you’re one of those people who has always wanted to know about Black Holes or String Theory, but it seems too late to ask, the Royal Society is the place to be tonight with Rothschild Visiting Professor Andrew Strominger of Harvard University giving a public lecture explaining those very things. 6:30 – 7:30; free and no need to book.

Thursday

“What you see depends on how you look: Time & space in scientific imagery” is the lecture by award warning author and Professor of the History of Science Patricia Fara at the Royal Institution tonight, where she asks how we can represent time and space in two dimensions and whether all reality is subjective. 7pm start; tickets £10.

Friday

The usual lunchtime lectures: the battle between Helvius and Hooke for the future of astronomical instuments at the Royal Society (1-2pm) and how Bayesian Probability and artificial intelligence meet in the Xbox at UCL (1:05 – 1:50pm). Both free.

A brand new event opens to the public tonight which seems quite special: the Imperial Festival. Two days of celebrating all things Imperial College, with demonstrations, displays, shows and interactive activities, all open to the public. Just a sample of the activities includes a special Science Showoff (in pop-up pub, the Haemo Globe Inn, of course!), pop-up surgery where you can see medics showing their response to a heart attack, Soapbox Science, in which researchers take to their Soapboxes and making your own planisphere. Suitable for the whole family and free to attend; 6-10pm tonight and continues all day on Saturday.

The Weekend

The Imperial Festival continues today, running 12-6pm with a huge range of activities, including a talk by Eugene Cernan, the last man to set foot on the moon. Completely free; drop in any time but see the website for the programme details.

The Wellcome Collection continues with its series of neuroscience themed events to support its current brain exhibition and today looks at puppetry and how tiny changes in angle can completely change what we think we see. With Stephen Mottram, puppeteer and Paul Downing, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Bangor University. Saturday, 3-4:30pm, free but book in advance.


You can follow nature.com blog’s London Google calendar of events at https://blogs.nature.com/london/2011/05/17/scientific-events-calendar. Updated daily.

————————————————————————–

As well as our regularly maintained calendar, you can find lots of other suggestions of science-y events in London. We have compiled a list of some other places to look: we will continue adding to this list, and please do, as always, send us additions for it:

Collections and calendars

Londonist recommendations: All things scientific, technical and geeky

Ian Visits: A calendar of all types of events in London, including science and engineering, with added editorial

Museums, societies etc:

Wellcome Collection: Regular events and exhibitions of a medical flavour at the Wellcome Collection on Euston Road

Royal Institution: Miscellaneous science and policy events

Royal Society: Science, policy and conferences

ZSL: Zoological Society of London; occasional events on conservation and zoology

Hunterian Museum: Part of the Royal College of Surgeons, with a treasure trove of specimens and surgical paraphenalia

University calendars (usually featuring dozens of events per week)

UCL

Imperial

LSE