While our attention is on sociological and artistic dichotomies posed by the scientific community, there is yet more thought-provoking stuff scheduled for this evening. And a good chance to see a little known museum in our city too. Don't say we never give you value for money... The Grant Museum of Zoology is one of the University College of London (UCL) museums, originally founded for teaching purposes in 1827, and is packed with skeletons,......

Every day this month the Londonist team will be pointing you in the direction of a Christmas present that (with a bit of luck) you won't already have on your list. Climb up onto our collective lap and we'll see what we can move from our sack to your stockings... We recommended memberships to various arty places as Christmas presents earlier this week, but in terms of things you can wrap and place under......

For many of us ice-skating is a terrifying experience, bringing back memories of clinging to the edge of the rink, cold feet and humiliating wipeouts. We all know it's never as serene an experience as the Christmas cards make out, but there’s a veritable plethora of skating experiences to be had across London this snowy (hopefully) season. There are rinks with a touch of class at Somerset House (21 Nov - 17 Jan) or......

We're a little fed up of worthy awareness-raising 'days'. National Tuberous Sclerosis Awareness Week might be really important, but it doesn't really turn us on. National Ammo Day in the US sounds particularly unsavoury too - not just for the subject matter, but also, for some reason, because of the abbreviation. Over here, however, the rather wondrous Chocolate Week 2007 is almost upon us! Woo-hoo! Our excitement has been uncontainable. In fact, the only......

16. Strange Invaders Whilst residing at his terraced house in Kentish Town, during the 1980s, Christopher Fowler began to notice glimpses of unusual whitish creatures in his back garden. After finally finding the time to fully investigate, and to dismiss such possible hallucinations on his own behalf, Mr Fowler was astounded to discover several albino lobster-like critters, which plagued his yard for several months. A friend of Mr Fowler’s, whilst visiting one evening, almost......

In our minds, we don't normally associate museums with bouts of laughter. That is, with the exception of school trips where we desperately tried to keep ourselves amused/awake/alive as some old and dull man in tweed tried to educate us something similarly old and dull. We were particularly pleased to hear what they're up to at the Museum of London. They've embarked on a hefty two-year gazillion-pound refurbishment of the place and to keep......

How many hogs does it take to cleanse a whale? No, it's not a Zen koan. The glorious Victorian temple to murdered animals that is the Natural History Museum is cleaning up the whale exhibit in its Large Mammals Hall - using hog hair bristle brushes! But why hog hair brushes? There are many reasons, but mostly it's because using tiny, peculiar implements to clean the largest animals on Earth looks really impressive and......

When you're dreaming of your most fabulous night ever, we're sure that, like us, your ideal night out would include 500 Harry Potter fans, JK Rowling and the Natural History Museum. Until now, that beautiful dream looked like it would never come true, but Harry Potter geeks, you are in luck! Rowling's publisher, Bloomsbury, is offering 1700 lucky fans the chance to get a copy of the final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and......

The first rule about East End Brawl Club is... Drunk man ends up on church roof. No, it wasn't the Bishop of Southwark. Tina Turner to perform at the Natural History Museum. Can anyone think of a gag here, cos we're really scratching our heads. Bungle leaves council with four members (headline unconnected with the camp bear from Rainbow) Tehran gets fleet of London tour buses. Image of Regents Park bandstand courtesy of Baroness......

What with all the drinking and smoking, pubbing and clubbing, gigging and ligging, not to mention trying to hunt down old Big Brother housemates with a custom Ted Nugent bow it's a wonder Londonist ever finds time to stop and smell the flowers. Yet even we will occasionally take a break from our hectic schedules to grab a good noseful of nature's gentle bounty. Pretty, aromatic, occasionally nutritious, easily recycled and low carbon emissions;......

A statue of English footballing legend Bobby Moore has been unveiled at Wembley. The chairman of Crystal Palace is "bored" of giving evidence in court. Chelsea footballers had a bad night out. Poor lads. And finally in non football related news... The Natural History Museum is giving the remains of seventeen indigenous Tasmanians back to aboriginal Australians. Image courtesy of SlipStreamJC via the Londonist flickr group.......

The Beast of Bexley has been spotted again… … this time carrying off a bloodied, wailing infant in its foul, be-slavered jaws. Not really. But that would be really cool, wouldn't it? Or rather, no, that would be terrible and tragic and cause for sorrow. Is "be-slavered" a real word? No one can say for sure who or what the Beast of Bexley is, but two facts are undisputed: 1.) it has been seen......

What is more absurd than an oil company sponsoring a wildlife photography contest? Possibly someone destroying wildlife photography in order to protest an oil company sponsoring a wildlife photography contest. Protestors from the "Camp For Climate Action" smeared a substance resembling oil onto photographs displayed at London's Natural History Museum. The photos were finalists in the Wildlife Photographer Of The Year Competition, which was sponsored by multinational petrochemical company, Shell. So that's sort of......

We're back in Holborn again this week, with a view looking East down High Holborn itself, towards the City. The earlier image was taken in 1904, when horse-drawn wagons were still a common sight on the streets of London. Most of the buildings have been replaced - partly because of the heavy bombing sustained by this part of town during WWII. One noticeable exception is the single-storey building to the left of shot. This......

This Day In London’s History 1759: The British Museum in Bloomsbury opens its doors to the public for the first time. Some may feel that the British Museum these days is little more than a massive boast, bragging about how many cool things the British Empire has stolen from the rest of the world. But regardless of whether this criticism is fair or not, it’s hard to deny that the museum is still one......

London's Natural History Museum has agreed to return the bones of 17 Tasmanian aborigines, much to the chagrin of scientists who claim the remains are hugely important for research. The bones were collected in the 19th century and we're only just getting round to returning them thanks to a recent change in the law. Kind of eases the guilt we're feeling at still holding on to next-door's power tool, which we borrowed a couple......

Here's something you won't want to miss: A life-size woolly mammoth will visit Trafalgar Square on Wednesday 15 November to warn us that Britain may soon be set to suffer a peculiar and very savage climate change. According to Chris Stringer, Research Leader in Human Origins at the Natural History Museum, within the next 50 years we may have to adjust not only to baking summers from global warning but also to mortally freezing......

Event of the Week Battle of Ideas at the Royal College of Art, all weekend The Battle of Ideas is, according to their website, 'an annual festival of social, political, scientific, academic and cultural discussion'. In other, more juvenile words, it's a mass debate. And it's probably going to get quite messy. The panel-led discussions, organised by the Institute of Ideas, are designed to cut through the crap and get down to some genuine......

Event of the week Game On, Science Museum Remember that game on the ZX81 in which you had to manoeuvre a letter X through a minefield of dangerous letter O's? And the equally addictive follow-up, in which the Earth (represented by a series of hyphens) needed saving from a belligerent battlegroup of aliens (menacingly realised as a creeping cluster of hashes)? Ah, happy days. Well, apparently, gaming has developed somewhat since then. And we......

Event of the Week Confronting the Goldilocks enigma: why is the Universe so uncannily fit for life?, Imperial College tomorrow As topics go, they don't really come much bigger than this: The latest advances in cosmology have allowed scientists to piece together the story of our universe in unprecedented detail. One of the striking features to emerge is how the universe is exquisitely bio-friendly. Even slight changes in the laws of physics or the......

Our share of the ''mounting NHS debt crisis' is even bigger than previously expected according to new figures. The technical term for the situation appears to be 'meltdown'. Ken Livingstone has sent a 'message of support' to London's Muslim community to coincide with 70th anniversary of the defeat of Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts at Cable Street. A Natural History Museum curator has discovered a new species of bird while leading an expedition to the remote......

The poor Thames Whale was briefly back in the public eye on Friday, although looking a lot thinner than we remember: Pictures of the whale that became stranded in the river Thames, went on display at London's Natural History Museum on Friday. The 11-year-old female northern bottlenose hit the headlines in January after mistakenly swimming up the river. The display includes a video of work to preserve its remains. Sadly this was only a......

Event of the Week Structure and the Living Cell, Royal Society tonight The cell, despite its microscopic nature, is a vast, multiscale subject. Over the past 350 years, we've found increasingly tricksy ways of probing into cells at ever-deeper levels. Starting with a basic understanding that God's creatures are made of these little fuzzy circles, we moved on to catalogue all kinds of subcellular bits and blobs that function a bit like organs in......

These listings appear every Wednesday. If you want to let us know about any upcoming science or technology events, you can contact us on LondonistSciTech@Gmail.com Event of the Week Art of the Brain, tomorrow at the Dana Centre If we told you that the blurb for this event uses the words ‘brain’ and ‘be prepared to get messy’, you might imagine some kind of bloodbath introduction to the butcher‘s art. No such luck. Instead,......

Spotted (in two senses) on the corner of Cromwell Road and Queen's Gate (i.e. outside that cultural megosaur, the Natural History Museum). A quick Flickr search reveals that this is not the only one. Since mid-August, similar posters have been appearing all over the place. Definitive list Aldwych Brompton Road Cavendish Square Chelsea Bridge Road Chiltern Street (Marylebone) Cromwell Road Exeter Street (Covent Garden) Garrick Street Kingsway Latimer Road Portobello Road St Martin's Lane Let......

These listings appear every Wednesday. If you want to let us know about any upcoming science or technology events, you can contact us on LondonistSciTech@Gmail.com This is going to be the final Cogito for a few weeks. Most of the main science venues are taking a summer break, so this column will too. Before we go, though, one final week’s worth of sci-tech events. The Dana Centre has two gigs to round off July.......

People are on at us all the time to return the loot artifacts we have in our safekeeping despite the plain fact that if we returned them to 'foreign' museums they'd just sell the stuff for money to buy drugs. It rubs salt in the wound that no one attempts to get back the stuff stolen from us. Londonist feels it's time to take a stand - so on behalf of the capital we......

These listings appear every Wednesday. If you want to let us know about any upcoming science or technology events, you can contact us on LondonistSciTech@Gmail.com Event of the Week Dino Jaws at the Natural History Museum Nothing packs in the punters like a few animatronic dinosaurs. Well, nothing except animatronic elephants. So the NHM should see its attendances soar like a pterodactyl with the opening of its new Dino Jaws exhibition. It’s Natural History......

The Exhibition Road Music Day takes place tomorrow on (surprise!) Exhibition Road in South Kensington, the cultural saturation point of London that counts the Victoria & Albert Museum, Natural History Museum, Institut Francais, Goethe-Institut and Imperial College among its local businesses. Starting at 10.00am and going on until midnight or whenever the fat lady stops singing, this free event will feature a dizzying array of musical mayhem from across the world. The Music Day......

We had a schedule for last weekend, a full to bursting at the seams schedule that would guarantee a very fulfilling Culture Crawl for whoever dared to undertake it. Londonist attempted to Do It All - and these pictures are evidence that it is possible to take in some architecture, some performance art, some live music, a photography exhibition, hte cafe of a major national museum and a Korean opera all in one day and......