Tuesday, 1 December 2009
Looking for a gift for a someone who's a bit on the clever side? Oxbridge, PhD, research scientist, you know the type. Here are some ideas I came up with, some of them practical, so not so.
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Science Museum Membership. Free entry to exhibitions, IMAX 3D cinema and privileged access to collections at the famous London landmark. Gift membership can be for one to two people, or a family, and there is even a concession price for students.
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Subscription to 'New Scientist'. Make sure the scientist in your life has plenty of reading material with a weekly subscription to the world's leading science news magazine.
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Classic scientific publication. AbeBooks.co.uk have a huge collection of first edition, rare and out of print books. How about Charles Darwin's Origin of Species or, if you've got money to burn, an original from Sir Isaac Newton.
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Time on a supercomputer. With all those numbers to crunch, the scientist in your life could save years if you buy them a few hours on a supercomputer, where time is, quite literally, money.
Android smartphone. If you can't afford time on a supercomputer, what about a mini computer that fits in your pocket. Android phones, such as the HTC Magic, run on Google's open source software, so your scientist can tinker with the code until his or her heart is content.
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Charity gifts. Give something back to the scientific research community with a gift from Cancer Research UK, or support the developing world with charitable gifts from Oxfam Unwrapped, which go to communities in need.
Gadgets. There is a wide range of science based fun & funky gadgets available online. Iwantoneofthose.com has some of the best.
T-shirts, mugs, posters etc. Surely no scientist ever grows out of an Einstein t-shirt, or an E=Mc2 coffee mug, do they. Do they?
Visit to CERN Give your scientist a day out to remember with a visit to the largest, most complex experiment ever, the Large Hadron Collider, at CERN in Switzerland.
DNA Gifts. Here's something that truely is, by definition, unique. A gift created from a DNA sample. That's the appliance of science, that is.
