Week 5 - Science Museum Lates

Just about the most fun you can have in a museum - good crowd, great atmosphere, and science - the science of zombies no less, need I say more?

This week, on a dark winter Wednesday evening I found myself in South Kensington, where there was a strange feeing in the air. Heading down past the impressive Natural History Museum there was a deathly silence as the museum had closed for the evening. Turning the corner and heading towards the Science Museum however, there seemed to be a disturbance - some people seemed to be protesting and trying to gather support for their cause. Getting closer and their cause became evident as the Pro Zombie Action Group (PZAG), also noticeable was a large number of the walking dead waiting to enter the museum for Science Museum Lates - the science of zombies! 

Fun is pretty much guaranteed with a tagline like that

As with a lot of other attractions around London, Lates at the Science Museum (run on the last Wednesday of every month), offers an evening of adult only environment to enjoy everything the museum has to offer as well as some special events that usually revolve around a theme, this month revolving around zombies. As well as all the usual exhibitions and the themed events there is also a bar, a (silent) disco, a pub quiz and for this month a fancy dress prize for the best dressed zombie. Best of all, it's all free!

When we arrived we managed to get in fairly quickly when the museum reopened in the evening at around 6.45. Having a quick look at the special zombie-related events on offer we decided to try Compete, Cooperate or Die! - a mass participation game/science experiment looking at how people behave and work together. The premise being that we were a group of survivors who all had a choice of whether to hide or to fight the oncoming zombie horde amassed outside the science museum. If you chose to fight you would get more points if there was a large group of people fighting with you (more likely to survive as a group) and if you chose to hide you would get more points if there were fewer people hiding with you (it's easier to hide in small groups). The aim of the game was to get as many points as possible whilst trying to help the group to win overall. This was good fun, but not as interactive as we'd all hoped with all the scenarios the same, rather than different scenarios each time.

Secondly we went to go see the Punk Science show, which is a 'comedy science spectacular' though very loosely tied to science in the museums IMAX cinema. In the show the was a bit of slap bass, some zombie shooting, a pyrotechnic mini-explosion of hydrogen, some basic biology all contained in a humorously enjoyable live show. 

Unfortunately the show overran quite heavily we found that most of the rest of the events had finished, so we just wandered a little around the museum until we came upon Drawn Together where an artist (why they were at the science museum is still a mystery to me) was encouraging people to draw something zombie related. Needless to say my effort was pitiful and likely ended up straight in the bin, however we did have a bit of an artist amongst our group - Hermione, as you can see:

Having seen and read about the Google Chrome lab experiments at the museum I decided to have a look at them once I got home. One of the labs - Sketchbots allows you to upload a photo online and have a robot draw your picture in sand inside the museum, once it's done they email you the video of it in action, you can see the robot's impression of me below:

Overall a great fun as a night out, made all the better for lack of children, but limited only by the amount of time available. Having never been to the science museum before I would have liked a bit more time to explore some of the standard exhibits, but not wanting to overdose on science (as if that's possible) it's something that can be saved for another time.