Blogs from the Natural History Museum
Inspiring a love of the natural world
Our ground-breaking partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) is set to turbo-charge our community science programme. But what does this really mean and what’s changing? We sat down with Lucy Robinson (Citizen Science Manager) to ask all the important questions.
Continue reading “Our community science programme gets a boost from AWS”
By Samantha Luciano
Biodiversity biobanks are less well known than their biomedical counterparts, but they represent an invaluable asset for meeting the global health and environmental challenges of our century. Whether they are home to animal, plant or micro-organism collections, these infrastructures contribute to research and development in many fields, including medical and veterinary treatments, breeding and reproduction, environment and conservation, agro-industry and biotechnology.
The major advantage of biodiversity biobanks is the variety of samples and taxa present in these collections: tissues, fluids, whole specimens, cell cultures, DNA or RNA from most of the vertebrate and invertebrate species on our planet.
Continue reading “Biodiversity biobanks: an invaluable resource for the future”
Published by Leonie Biggenden on behalf of Learning Volunteer & Women in Science Tour Guide Joanna Tindall
As a taster for the free NHM Women in Science Tours, Learning Volunteers will be sharing blogs on some pioneering women of science. We can learn more about them, their work and share some information about the Museum’s displays and cutting-edge science. Our second venture looks at three great and inspirational women explorers.
Continue reading “Highlighting Histories: Women in Exploration”
Data management is a broad term. Here, Samantha Luciano, a second-year student of the MSc Biobanks & Complex Data Management of the Côte d’Azur University in France, talks about what it means in the context of a biodiversity collection. What is data? What is it used for? In what form(s) is it found? What do we do with it?
Continue reading “Why does data management have a crucial role in a biodiversity collection?”
By Director of HR Alison Lodge (she/her)
With Pride Month well underway, excitement building for the Pride in London’s first parade in three years and our rainbow flag flying proudly above the Musuem in South Kensington, it feels timely to share some recent LGBTQ+ initiatives at the Natural History Museum.
Continue reading “Pride Month and our Rainbow Museum “In my role as an assistant digitiser, I have been working to transcribe some of the Museum’s freshwater insects. Whilst looking at the labels of these specimens a pattern started to emerge around the types of data being recorded and I wanted to find out more.
Continue reading “Freshwater Insects UK vs the World | Digital Collections”
Although estimates of extinction rates vary significantly [1], anywhere from losing hundreds to hundreds of thousands of species each year, it is widely acknowledged that we are in the midst of a biodiversity crisis. Ensuring we deliver a wide range of conservation measures to protect species is key to halting this decline across all taxonomic groups. A growing area of research is focussing on biobanking as an effective way to deliver this. But what does this mean in practice, how does it work and why is it important?
What are microfossils and why should we care? Sometimes it can be difficult to make the case for a group of fossils which at their largest usually reach just 1mm (although some are actually much larger than this), but microfossils have and continue to play an incredibly important role in many areas of natural science research.
Continue reading “5 things you never knew microfossils were important for”
As International Women’s Day drew closer, and with preparations for the move of millions of collections well underway, it got me thinking about the role women played in the original 1881 move of collections from the British Museum in Bloomsbury to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, as well as their contributions to the early development of the collections and research.
Continue reading “Legacies from letters | International Women’s Day 2022”
In 2021 the Museum revealed plans to relocate 28 million specimens (approximately a third of the collection) from our stores to a new, purpose-built science and digitisation centre, to ensure their safety and accessibility for future generations. This mammoth undertaking has been enabled through a £182m investment from the Government Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. So, with funding secured, how do you set about planning not only our largest ever collections’ move, but arguably one of the largest collections’ moves ever carried out worldwide?