Planetarium Nights
2022-08-05 19:30 - 22:00, 2022-08-12 19:30 - 22:00, 2022-08-19 19:30 - 22:00, 2022-08-26 19:30 - 22:00 (Australia/Melbourne) | Scienceworks, 2 Booker Street, Spotswood, VIC, 3015, Australia
Join Scienceworks’ popular Planetarium Nights programs to explore rare and rarely seen events such as a total solar eclipse, supernovae, and gravitational waves. Astronomers have a strange relationship with the idea of ‘rare’; something we seldom see on Earth may be commonplace at a universal scale. Museums Victoria astronomer Dr Tanya Hill has carefully curated a special selection of rare (or maybe not-so-rare) astronomical events for the show Ticket to the Universe. Or go on a poetic journey into the rarely detected phenomena of gravitational waves with the full-dome feature show Particle/Wave.

Science on Show
2022-08-13 11:00 - 14:00, 2022-08-21 11:00 - 14:00 | Melbourne Museum, 11 Nicholson Street, Carlton, VIC, 3053, Australia
Museums Victoria has more than 17 million collection objects, and we’re bringing out some of our rarest and most fascinating samples and specimens at Melbourne Museum for Science on Show. This event will feature curators and scientists delivering pop-up talks on their research, rare artefacts, and the stories behind them, and one of the rarest dinosaur fossils in the world – the most complete Triceratops skeleton ever unearthed, on display for your palaeontological pleasure.

Snap, CT Scan, Model, Predict!
2022-08-17 18:00 - 19:15 | Melbourne Museum, 11 Nicholson Street, Carlton, VIC, 3053, Australia
Learn what new technology can reveal about rare reptiles and frogs!
For a deep dive into some fascinating science, come to our National Science Week edition of MV Lectures to hear about how cutting-edge technology is helping to detect and study rare species. Hear from the scientists on a bold new research project combining the fields of palaeontology, macro-ecology, computed tomography (CT scanning), taxonomy and genetics. They will illustrate how museum-based work with large, data-rich collections and new non-invasive techniques can reveal more than ever before and built an interactive, online space for collection access.

RARE @ Parliament of Victoria
2022-08-21 15:00 - 16:30
Champions of conservation and biodiversity will gather at Parliament House for this vital Science Week discussion about the extinction crisis facing thousands of Australia’s native species, and what we can do about it.
Our State’s remarkable botanical and zoological collections are carefully managed by Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria and Zoos Victoria, while Museums Victoria maintains significant collections related to the natural history of our region and the wider world. These familiar institutions do more than offer an interesting place for Victorians to visit – they are also engines of research and field work, helping the State of Victoria to future-proof the unique plants and animals of our region against bushfires, floods, the ongoing impacts from our spreading towns and cities, our intensive farming practices, and our changing climate.
Our public science institutions all care for the rare – through the Seed Bank maintained at the National Herbarium, through activating the amazing network of community botanic gardens across metropolitan and regional Victoria, through the tissue and DNA samples cryogenically stored by Museums Victoria in a BioBank to safeguard the genetic diversity of threatened species, and through the captive breeding programs for species on the brink of extinction, diligently nurtured back to population health by biologists and ecologists at Zoos Victoria.
Join us for this RARE panel conversation, streamed live from Parliament House, to learn from the botanists, zoologists and collection managers leading this important work. Find out some of the ways they are planning to help our plants and animals adapt and persist through the multiple challenges in our immediate future.
Presented in partnership with the Royal Society of Victoria, the Parliament of Victoria, and the Victorian Parliamentarians for STEM for National Science Week 2022.
