Despite the fervent wishes of the world's mothers, tattoos aren't going away. They're growing in popularity, mainstream acceptance, and even physical size, reported tattooist Lal Hardy, practising his art in front of an inquisitive audience at last night's Dana Centre event. His barmy customer for this evening may have only walked away with a tiny ice cream (no flake) on the clavicle, but there's no ignoring the current unprecedented boom of this ancient art......

Love London as we do, we know that some of this city's tourist "attractions" don't exactly represent value for money. According to a survey by the Sunday Telegraph, London's fee-paying attractions are among the most expensive in the world. The newspaper compared the cost of visiting nine popular attractions in London and ten other cities across the world, and found that a sight-seeing trip here would trouble the family wallet by the sum of......

Science and art coming together is a beautiful thing. A totally wrong coupling that sometimes climaxes in an eruption of sci-art fusion magic. That's presumably what the Science Museum is after in appointing not onlya writer but a dancer in residence for the summer months. Contemporary dancer and choreographer, Athina Vahla "concentrates on epic, site-specific work taking a collaborative approach to create multi-media pieces." That's artspeak for mash-ups, right? Vahla is specifically working on......

A list of London's most popular attractions in the last year have been named. The British Museum took first place with almost 5.5 million visitors thanks to the help of a motionless army. Museum heads attributed the 12% spike in visitors to the First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army, the British Museum's most popular attraction since King Tut's goods were on display in 1972. If you want to go toe-to-toe with an army that won't......

Al Fayed and his Royal Ghouls conspiracy - Macca, Mills and the millions - enough already!! Science Museum specialists to strike over pay... Unsurprising since London's streets may as well be paved with gold Junior suffrage in action as Young Mayor of Tower Hamlets elected (are you registered to vote in May?) Eels attempt to put the Royal back in Festival Hall Image courtesy of Shutterbuguy via the Londonist flickr group.......

If you could get the Sarcasts (Digg), the Grunts (YouTube) and the Silent (Londonist’s forgotten readers’ forum) into a room together, what would you hear? The Science Museum might have the answer. New installation ‘The Listening Post’ slaps up random content from hundreds of chat rooms simultaneously, bringing you an orgy of words. “It is an awe-inspiring ‘portrait of chat’,” says the press release. Alan Partridge is having wet dreams. The installation debuted in......

Three weeks into the New Year, probably one week until payday and telly's rubbish (except for new CSI), the weather's grey and the detox is wearing thin. Don't give in to those January blues! Here's what can get you out of the house for not a lot of wonga this week. Monday: This is the most depressing day of the year. We've said it before but we're going to say it again because we......

Are you an unreconstructed, consumerist, couch potato with no social conscience? Excellent. Read on. Because the Rubbish Game wants you. We went to the Rubbish Game this week and, if only we hadn't got distracted drinking wine, we might have won it. Through 3 punishing rounds of stuff distribution we managed to zero our waste, creatively and cunningly disposing of it through righteous means. We dabbled in the recycling fair to win recycling tokens......

What stops you recycling? Are you lazy? Don't know where to start? Does your rubbish overwhelm you? The Rubbish Game wants to know. Then it wants to turn your rubbish around, with the help of the Binman of Love. It could get filthy. The Rubbish Game takes place on Wednesday 16 January at the Dana Centre at the Science Museum. It sounds a bit like Hungamunga crossed with the Krypton Factor and wrapped in......

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......

Alexis Lemaire saw to it that 'mathlete' irrevocably entered our vernacular when he broke the record he set for mental calculation at London's Science Museum. He correctly determined the 13th root of a randomly generated two hundred-digit number to the 13th root (now consider that your average calculator can't even determine things to 13 decimal places, never mind trying to calculate anything with a two hundred digit number). As the calculation only took Lemaire......

Gothamist learned about the craziest urban nightmare come true: A huge python found in the bathroom pipes. It was also a nightmare for some Yankees fans, as manger Joe Torre declined to come back and manage the Bronx Bombers. At least the city's attempt to give some direction to subway riders was interesting, pranksters went shirtless at the Fifth Avenue Abercrombie & Fitch and the I Heart Brooklyn Girls calendars came out. And just......

It turns out that being a genius doesn't mean you're a nice person. That's a lesson that the Science Museum reinforced today as they cancelled a talk by scientist Dr James Watson, winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize for his work in discovering the structure of DNA. Watson was scheudled to give a talk at the museum on Friday, but this was nixed after his controversial remarks in an interview with the Sunday Times.......

West End theatre is something probably most of us can't really afford that often, but if seeing the big shows is what rings your bell then you'll want to be heading down to Leicester Square this weekend. On Saturday and Sunday from 1230 - 6pm, West End Live will take over the square to showcase all the West End has to offer and in particular on the theatre side. A large stage will be......

Smoke, Issue 10 is on sale now. This 'love letter to London' is available from some good newsagents and bookshops, and a few more tawdry outlets for £2.50. Highlights include the Hampstead fish who are evolving to look like William Morris carpets, where to find an alternative universe in Hackney and a double whammy of London's campest statues. There are undoubtedly other good articles in there, but we've only read the first half so......

A century of plastic is being celebrated at the Science Museum! Eubank arrested after he drove his 32ft seven tonne protest lorry past an armed patrol, entered Whitehall and approached Downing Street. Again. Go to the Museum of London this summer, go to the requisite room and you shall see the skeleton of a headless Roman. Metronet are to 'streamline'. Ooo, ooo, aerodynamic tunnels allowing bullet train speeds? Nope. A crowded-platform's worth of redundancies.......

Space is the Virgin frontier. Richard Branson's much-publicised rocketship business, Virgin Galactic, is well into the development phase and should be launching next year for test flights. But if you can't quite afford the £100,000 asking price for a trip beyond the atmosphere, you can settle for a sneak preview of the ship at the Science Museum. Well, so the PR says. In fact, it's just a mock-up of the interior decor, designed by......

Congratulations to Stef Penney on winning the Whitbread Costa book of the year prize. Her novel, 'The Tenderness of Wolves' set in northern Canada in the 1860s was written and researched at the British Library. Walworth is not the best place to buy cosmetics unless you're a sucker for side effects. West Ham have been told they can't play in the new Olympic stadium. Iron Maiden will not be pleased. And bad news too......

Blakey and the rest of the RMT aren't going to like the sound of this: Like something plucked right out of a 1960’s sci-fi flick, the model of a Driverless bus wowed visitors at the Science Museum in London - where it is currently on exhibit - with its claims of reducing air pollution and traffic congestion, wrapped up in a slick, futuristic package. Driverless buses? But who will tell you that they can't......

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......

Lara Croft has always been ripe for a thorough going over - Douglas Coupland got there first with Lara's Book: Once I realised how big the Lara cult was I said, "d'oh!". I felt like I did years after leaving high school when I learned that just about everybody was having sex. And as with any sort of large revelation, once perceived, Lara became evident everywhere - almost total cultural saturation. And soon enough......

A few days back, we briefly mentioned the Cybersalon Artful Gaming event over at the Dana Centre. Unfortunately, given the sheer number of other sci-tech events last week, we didn't really do it justice. Step forward Lisa Devaney, who really, really makes us wish we'd gone... This week London debuted its first ever games festival with panels, workshops and a few industry schmooze events tossed in for those employed by the gaming world. Some attention......

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,......

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 Francis Crick’s Place in History at the Royal College of Surgeons, Monday Did you know that the co-discoverer of the DNA helix didn’t become a biologist until he was 31? And he didn’t even have a PhD when he received his Nobel Prize? There’s hope......

We’re back! Did you miss us? After nearly a month without any major sci/tech events, the usual venues are starting to awaken again following a summer break. So the Cogito returns, to appear every Wednesday and point you to the best London has to offer the inquisitive mind. Event of the week Future London: Footprints of a generation, at the Truman Brewery, 8-16 Sept. Had Google been around a couple of decades ago, there’s......

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 Isambard Kingdom Brunel: fame and fate, Science Museum It took 1000 men, four years, and 19 000 tons of steel. And that was just to reinforce his silly hat. But Izzy Brunel’s ocean liner, the Great Eastern, was a true wonder of the world 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. This week's summary was brought to you with the help of Inky Circus ....thanks Inky! Event of the week Pixar: 20 Years of Animation opens at the Science Museum this Saturday. Prebooking is strongly recommended cause, us inkettes dunno, it’s Pixar and they are easily the coolest geekiest most-badass......

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 Breaking the spell at the RSA on Monday Science and religion. The two have been at loggerheads since the garden of Eden. ‘Eve,’ says Adam, ‘Did you know that we were created by the Lord, in His image?’. After a long pause, Eve says, ‘Really?......

The Baker Street Planetarium is to close. Then reopen as a history of celebrities. If ever there were a sign of the times… Space is not something the capital does well. This Londonista remembers, as a child, being enthralled by the Science Museum’s space gallery. The model rockets, the lifesize lunar module replica, the space food. The actual capsule used by the Apollo 10 crew to fly to the moon and back (and that......

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 Speed Dating: Laws of Attraction, at the Dana Centre What is it with trying to pair off sciency types? First we had that shindig over at the British Library, now the Dana Centre have decided to see if cupid’s arrow obeys Newton’s First Law. On......