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October 2015

How about this for a sound business proposition? You spend £25 million excavating a 1‑kilometre tunnel and a cavern the size of the Royal Albert Hall deep inside a solid-rock mountain. At the same time you create an artificial reservoir with the capacity of 4000 Olympic swimming pools way up high on a barren Scottish mountainside. Then you install four giant turbines inside the mountain so that the water from the reservoir can flow through and generate electricity for the national […]

Our Ada Lovelace exhibition celebrates the bicentenary of Ada’s birth (10 December 1815) and opened on Ada Lovelace Day, an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths. When Ada Lovelace had her portrait painted in 1835, she joked that her jaw appeared so large that the word ‘Mathematics’ could be written upon it. Mathematics and science were Lovelace’s passions and were often at the forefront of her thoughts. She spent much of her time studying […]

It seems like everyone’s talking about sending people to Mars. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has just found evidence of liquid water on Mars today, Ridley Scott’s The Martian is bringing the Red Planet to life in our cinemas and you can see a spacesuit designed for use on Mars in our Cosmonauts exhibition. There is hope that we’ll be sending people to Mars for real in the next few decades – but when they go, will they be ready for […]