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October 2016

What’s the connection between the Great British Bake Off and nineteenth-century chef Alexis Soyer? Well, I guess the blog title gives it away: food consumed – not literally – but as public spectacle. Outside of the more intimate settings of our home kitchens, the return of Bake Off to our TV screens shows that there is a real appetite for what is frankly (light entertainment) food porn watched by millions. In Bake Off a series of amateur bakers are challenged by […]

Astronauts Tim Peake and Tim Kopra wowed hundreds of school children with tales from the International Space Station (ISS) on the same day the European Space Agency (ESA) attempted to land the Schiaparelli module on Mars.

The Science Museum’s Head of Communications, Peter Dickinson, responds to concerns raised about an image used in the marketing campaign for our new interactive gallery. Wonderlab: The Statoil Gallery is extraordinary; it is a gallery designed with the sophistication to impress one of the UK’s most respected architecture critics, the Observer’s Rowan Moore, while at the same time prompting Time Out to write: “If Stephen Hawking and Willy Wonka designed the ultimate science playground then it might go a little […]

The quest for artificial intelligence is gathering pace, with research groups worldwide in both universities and industry making huge advances in the development of sophisticated neural networks – inspired by the architecture of the brain – that may one day give computers the capacity for independent thought. Recent developments in machine learning and the proliferation of smart devices interconnected via a global high-speed network are already starting to enable far greater interaction between machines and information – what many call […]

With the museum’s Director of External Affairs, Roger Highfield, and Prof Ed Dougherty of Texas A&M, Peter Coveney of University College London has written a critique of the blind use of big data in biology. Here Prof Coveney sums up their paper. Visit the Our Lives in Data exhibition in the Science Museum’s Wellcome Wing and you will see a section on the revolution in genetics. Today it is cheaper than ever to read a person’s entire genetic code (genome), […]