Wow. Robotville at the Science Museum this weekend looks fantastic!

Their Robotville Festival is being attended by more than 20 robots from across Europe and the UK. We hope they’re all nice and friendly towards each other! The festival celebrates European robotics culture and advances in robotics design and technology.

Robotville is a free event, open until Sunday 4 December. Visit www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/robotville to find out more.

London’s Science Museum was full of woolly monsters at the weekend as Stitch London took up residence to explore science through craft.

Stitched Science included an exhibition of scientific objects made by knitting, crochet and sewing, from embroidered cells to a rather charming knitted Professor Brian Cox. The highlight was the incredibly beautiful Orion Nebula pictured above, which was knitted by Lisa Bentman.

Craft workshops took place under a large knitted solar system. The workshops included pompom planets, knitting Mars monsters, recycling plastic bags into yarn and cross stitch classes. In case you’re wondering how scientific this actually was, I joined the Knit a Neuron workshop and while we knitted, PhD students explained enthusiastically how neurons work and their role in the brain. The Woolly Thoughts workshop explored maths and the science behind altered perspectives.

If you’re sad you missed the opportunity to make a Martian at Stitched Science this weekend, the Science Museum will be holding a Real-Life Gaming Festival at the end of September where you can enjoy being chased round the museum by aliens and rope other visitors into playing games you’ve invented.

www.sciencemuseum.org.uk Free entry. Real-Life Gaming Festival 28 September – 2 October 2011.

Today a new exhibition opens at the Wellcome Collection looking at drugs. High Society is a typical show for the Wellcome: attending a preview yesterday, I found the idiosyncratic splicing of art, literature, medicine, social history and anthropology I’ve come to expect from the institution.

High Society’s claim is that every society is a high society: your early morning coffee is no different to drinking kava in the Pacific, chewing betel nuts in Asia, or coca leaves in the Andes. Time and geography produce different substances, but the use of drugs in society is universal, everyday, and stretches back through history.

And the very first display case sets the scene perfectly. Alongside a crude 21st-century crack pipe is an intricately carved pair of betel nut cutters from 19th-century India, and Chilean trays for hallucinogenic snuff dating back as far as 400AD.

Later, you can see an opium ball, about the same size as a baby’s head, from the 19th century; Mervyn Peake’s Caterpillar illustration from “Alice in Wonderland”; and bronze crack-pipe sculptures by Keith Coventry. There’s syringes, laudanum bottles, photos of magic mushrooms, NHS pamphlets for parents worried about drugs. And work by Dante Gabriel Rosetti, the original manuscripts of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas de Quincey, a note on Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes craving “mental exultation” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan.

Highlights for me included the incredibly modern-looking lithograph “Morphinomane” from 1897 by Eugène Grasset: pain and anguish stretch through the girl’s face as she drives a needle into her thigh. Delightfully silly is a coloured aquatint entitled “Doctor and Mrs Syntax with a party of friends, experimenting with laughing gas”. Tracey Moffat’s hauntingly bleak “Laudanum” series of big, black and white photographs certainly make an impression. And the Joshua Light Show by Joshua White makes for a delightfully trippy museum moment.

Altering one’s mental state is a universal impulse, the exhibition suggests. The following sections, dedicated to Apothecary to Laboratory (tracing the history of early folk remedies to the garden shed where Alexander Shulgin made MDMA, or ecstasy), Collective Intoxication (looking at communal drug taking), and The Drugs Trade (mainly examining the Opium Wars) seeks to gently alter your state of mind about drugs as a whole.

Later, placing Prohibition posters alongside what modern society deems to be “harder” or “illegal” drugs poses many questions. The final section, called  A sin, a crime, a vice or a disease? after a quote by the British doctor Norman Kerr in 1884, doesn’t seek to find answers, and you’re sure to leave this thought-provoking exhibition with the issues High Society raises whirling in your mind.

High Society is at the Wellcome Collection until 27 February. Look out for the brilliant-sounding High Society Events Programme. More exhibits from the show can be see on The Guardian website.

Here are a few of our top picks:

1. Striking Your Own Chord: Journeys into Musical Plagiarism
Why do people plagiarise music? George Harrison was once found guilty of “unconscious plagiarism” in a law suit which cost him a million dollars. In this free lecture for adults, neuroscientists and musicologists explain why plagiarism is pretty likely to happen and give you the chance to try out karaoke pods to find out how unique your music writing skills are.
7-9pm, 17 March at the Science Museum. Free

2. Subterranean Tours
Paying £5 to crawl down an abandoned tunnel might not be your idea of fun, but it will be worth it when you get to the other end and find yourself in the former Grand Entrance Hall of the Brunel Museum. This subterranean amphitheatre has been inaccessible for 140 years and is now open for you to explore.
Afternoons 13-21 March, don’t wear your favourite trousers.

3. Behind the Scenes Tour – Kew’s Herbarium, Library, Art and Archives
This is a real treat – take a sneaky peak at the secrets of The Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew! Kew have collected 7 million herbarium specimens and 200,000 artworks during their 250 years and the collections are usually only available to view by horticulturalists and historians. Tours are free but you need to book in advance.
16 March www.kew.org

4. Geek C’est Chic: Fashion in Science and Science in Fashion
Forget leggings, jeggings and treggings, the hottest garment you could possibly be seen in during National Science and Engineering Week is your lab coat. At Geek C’est Chic, London fashion designers will be redesigning the lab coat for the modern scientist. This simple protective garment will be transformed, not just in fashion terms, but using the latest nanotechnology and “smart” materials.
7.30pm on the 19 March at the Bethnal Green Men’s Working Club. Free.

5. Geek Pop presents … The Science Sessions
One of the best nerdy parties in London, the Geek Pop science night promises science songs from Helen Arney, Spirit of Play singing about quantum physics, and rock god Dr Stu and the Neutron Stars.
7.30pm on 18 March at The Miller. Tickets just £2 from www.geekpop.co.uk

National Science and Engineering Week runs from 12 to 21 March 2010. Find out more information about the events mentioned and check out everything else going on in London at www.britishscienceassociation.org

There’s an attractive looking ice cream van parked outside the Royal College of Art (RCA) in Kensington Gore this week. But if you venture inside you won’t find the usual 99s and ice lollies.

Instead you’ll be greeted by RCA students Cat Kramer and Zoe Papadopoulou, dressed in retro ice cream seller’s outfits, who will introduce you to ice cream-scented clouds and smoke-filled ice cream cones.

It’s all part of The Cloud Project, which aims to increase public engagement with new technologies such as geoengineering and nanotechnology.

Cat says, “There’s a lot of emerging technologies that people don’t really know about. We want to bring this discussion to a wider audience.”

Cat goes on to talk about how diet food is made tastier, the pros and cons of genetically modified food, and the techniques scientists are using to try and control our climate.

Ice cream lovers won’t be disappointed. You’ll be able to get real ice cream, along with an explanation about the manufacturing process and the creation of nano (very small) ice cream crystals.

There’s a group of experts lined up to give talks at the ice cream van, including Dr Steffi Friedrichs, Director of Nanotechnology at the Industries Association (1 Jul, 1.30pm) and Dr Rachel Edward Stewart, molecular gastronomy expert (date to be confirmed).

The Cloud Project is part of Show RCA, the Royal College of Art’s annual graduate show, which runs until 5 July.