Ever since humanity harnessed fire around a million years ago, people have put innovations to good use, such as cooking and keeping warm, along with bad, such as razing an enemy’s crops. Today, in Bletchley, representatives of key countries, technology organisations, academia and civil society met at an AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park to discuss the latest challenge posed by human ingenuity: how to ensure that nations and citizens globally can realise its benefits. Speaking at the U.S. Embassy in London before joining the summit, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris urged the internationa ..read more

The UK, as the birthplace of the industrial revolution, has a ‘moral duty’ to take the lead in efforts to curb climate change and ecosystem destruction, according to Lord Deben, who recently stood down as the Chair of the Committee on Climate Change.  But he said that it was difficult to see how the UK could influence other countries to cut their carbon emissions when the Government has announced it is seeking more oil in the North Sea. ‘We either do it together, or we will be destroyed together.’   Lord Deben, who encouraged all present to make climate change an election issue, was ..read more

A decade ago, Vint Cerf shared the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, receiving the award from the late monarch herself at an event in Buckingham Palace. Today, the new Engineers gallery in the Science Museum celebrates his achievement, and his vision to boldly take the internet where it has never gone before, across the solar system. Human stories like those of Vint Cerf are at the heart of the Engineers gallery, where visitors have the opportunity to take a closer look at iconic objects such as the first digital camera, and a miniature atomic clock that the entire GPS system de ..read more

We received a whooping 183 poems in response to our call-out to write a piece inspired by the astonishing and unique objects in our collection. All submitted poems were wonderfully creative, inspiring, funny, heartbreaking, inquisitive. Poems covered a huge variety of forms from ekphrastics to sonnets, odes to epigrams and vastly varied themes: the universe, knowledge cooking, travel, light, atoms, sand. Each poem represents an author discovering an object in our collection, really pondering it and then going on to research it. Poets wrote as if they were the object, or they considered the pro ..read more

By incorporating parks, trees, roof gardens and green spaces, a new study suggests that dozens of European cities could reach net zero carbon emissions over the next decade, with a handful of pioneering cities already on track for carbon neutrality. Published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the analysis by researchers from Sweden, the United States and China shows the ways cities harness green solutions can capture carbon emissions and help curb them. Not just a cool and shady oasis in the city, Stockholm’s Karlavägen contributes to climate-positive behaviors such as bicycling and walkin ..read more

Today’s Government announcement enables UK researchers to apply for grants, take part in research projects and collaborate with scientists working in the EU, Norway, New Zealand and Israel. The UK will also associate with Copernicus, the European Earth Observation programme, providing access to valuable earth observation data, which can help with flood and fire warnings. Speaking at the Science Museum, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Michelle Donelan MP said: ‘The Horizon programme is unrivalled in its scope and opens up a world of opportunity for cooperation on scien ..read more

A glimpse of the future of AI hardware has come with the unveiling of a prototype AI chip that is said to be more than a dozen times more energy efficient than current industry-leading digital AI. The analogue chip that could increase AI efficiency. Source: IBM. The secret of the chip is to return to the oldest form of computing, analogue computing, which carries out calculations by harnessing continuously-varying properties of the real world – whether by manipulating light, voltages, distances, the properties of materials, volumes of water or the rotation of gears. Perhaps the oldest sur ..read more

The world’s tropical forests are the Earth’s lungs, also storing  25 years’ worth of fossil fuel emissions in trees alone. But these lungs are under threat of overheating, according to a new study, because they are closer to a critical temperature than previously thought. Beyond that temperature, which averages at about 46.7 °C, photosynthesis will falter, the process by which trees use sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to create oxygen and energy. Today’s study, which is the first to show how close tropical forest canopies are to the limit, also found that there were disproportionately ..read more

B35 is a small and unassuming room in the basement of Blythe House, an object store in west London used by the Science Museum Group, V&A and the British Museum. Once you step inside its large metal door, however, the walls are lined with more than 350,000 black and white photo negatives, colour transparencies and prints on paper, spanning the 1880s to 2003.   Over the past five years, our team has studied, packed and transported around 300,000 objects from Blythe House to a new collection management facility at the Science and Innovation Park in Wiltshire. The vast majority of the Sci ..read more

Copy of a pocket medicine chest with the rod of Asclepius on lid. The original was found in Pompeii.The caduceus of Hermes The term ‘caduceus’ comes from a Greek word meaning ‘herald’s wand’ and refers to the staff carried by the ancient Greek god Hermes – called Mercury by the ancient Romans. He was messenger of the gods, protector of travellers, shepherds and merchants, as well as the protector of thieves, liars and gamblers. Terracotta figure of Hermes holding his caduceus, probably ancient Roman Hermes’ caduceus is usually represented as two snakes winding up the length of a central staff ..read more