We say, we say, we say: What’s black and re(a)d in your lunchbreak? No, good fellow, the answer isn’t Londonist. We do rather refer to a mysterious new lunchtime visitor to the Natural History Museum. Whilst exploring their lunchboxes, entomologist’s at the august establishment have observed an as yet unidentified flying object in the museum’s grounds, a wee red and black buggy thing. Experts believe that the tiny insects (which are the size of a......

The artwork that will adorn the ceiling of the first gallery at the Natural History Museum is a tree. Not, I'm afraid, the one we were bigging up the day after the launch of Darwin 200. But a tree nonetheless. A "17 metre-long permanent installation" of a tree, "cut lengthways to include the roots, trunk and branches." Wowsers. Artist Tania Kovats' concept was selected by judges from 10 proposals and will be unveiled on......

A sixteen year old is up in court charged with handling £100,000 worth of Class A drugs. Was a time when 16 year olds were more worried about girls and spots. Hm. And this is all wrong: a girl up in court accused of killing another girl over a man… ..whilst another alleged cat-fight sees a teenager set on fire in Eltham. There’s a bit of confusion over the introduction of new photo-cards for......

Last night, we attended the launch of Darwin 200 at the Natural History Museum. If he was still alive, Charles Darwin would be an actual living legend, due his 200th birthday on 12 February 2009. Clearly he's dead but that's no excuse not to have a national programme of activities around his life and work, especially since it's also nearly 150 years since the theory of evolution was pronounced and "Origin of the Species"......

"Oh, the flesh-eating beetles are in there," shrugs our guide, pointing to a locked door. This is the Darwin Centre, where a gruesome surprise lurks around every corner. The annexe to the Natural History Museum holds some 22 million biological specimens bottled up in jars - it's like walking into David Attenborough's Facebook account. Much of the collection is freely available to anyone who wants to see it, and is stored over eight floors,......

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.......