7 November

New York City's The Museum of Modern Art opened to the public on this day in 1929. Affectionately known as MoMA, with 300,000 books and exhibition catalogues, 1,000 periodical titles, and tens of thousands of works of architecture, design, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, films, and electronic media, it's among the world's largest and most influential contemporary art museums.

MoMA is also one of the most visited, attracting over a million visitors a year, including as an event space. In 2007 it was the venue for the launch of St-Germain liqueur, so our own Simon Difford can boast that he has mixed cocktails in the grand halls of MoMA. (And no, that doesn't make him a "piss artist!")

We're celebrating this very special museum, rather appropriately, with an Artist's Special Cocktail.

We're remembering science's first lady

The first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win two Nobel Prizes and the first independent woman to be entombed in Paris's famous Panthéon, Marie Skłodowska-Curie was born in Warsaw, Poland, on this day in 1867.

Over her career, she discovered two elements, radium and polonium, pioneered the study of the atom, founded a science dynasty and drove ambulances among the trenches of World War I. We are remembering this Franco-Polish citizen of the world with a Champs-Elysées, a cognac creation named for her adopted home, Paris.