When: 28th March 2012 (Lates are held on the last Wednesday of every month)
Where: Science Museum, Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London SW7 2DD
£: Free but donations are much appreciated
What is it?
Every month the Science Museum has an adults-only late night opening with talks and activities all centred around a theme. This month’s theme was Science of the Future, so Contrary Life brought out its geeky side for the evening.
Firstly we attended The Future of Urban Transport, a talk given by Lawrence Marazzi of Agility Saietta motorcycles. The talk was more of a sales pitch for their electrical powered urban sports bike than a proper discussion of urban transport. It would have been more interesting to hear how all forms of urban transport will need to change in the future to keep London moving, especially public transport, as the majority of Londoners rely on it in their daily lives.
Following the talk we headed to the Computing and Maths section of the museum to try our hand at some art, with help from artist Kimbo Silver. We had a go at sketching some geometric shapes from the exhibits but alas I think our skills were a little rusty.
Leaving our not-so-creative side behind we hopped over to meet Mr Jones the ‘pregnant man’. Plenty of interesting questions were raised and there was quite a lot of scepticism around whether our society could ever cope with the idea of men carrying the babies in the future.
Finally we took part in Regenerate!, a stem cell based game and quiz hosted by the Euro Stem Cell project group. The game was a little fast-paced for us, and we did rather badly at trying to create as many new body cells as possible in a short amount of time. We fared a little better at the quiz afterwards though. The group then touched on the advances they were hoping to make in stem cell research, which I’d have quite liked to hear a bit more about. It was a nice easy way to finish the evening and although we didn’t win the chocolate eggs we still had a pretty good time.
Other activities during the evening included making chocolate balls with Molecular Gastronomy; making bow ties and fascinators as well as the regular silent disco and the pub quiz.
More info: www.sciencemuseum.org.uk