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engineering

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 […]

The finalists have been announced for engineering’s answer to the Oscars: the Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Award. Here, the Chair of Judges and leading nuclear engineer, Dame Sue Ion DBE FREng, describes the three finalists for 2015 and the importance of engineering innovation in society.

Held in the conference centre at the National Railway Museum, the Science Museum Group’s Annual General Meeting gave staff an opportunity to share the ambitious strategic plans being shaped at the Group’s sites around the country and, in Crossrail Chairman Terry Morgan’s presentation, to hear how Europe’s largest construction project is being kept on time and on budget. Alongside Mr Morgan, the other highlight of the day was the formal introduction to the Group of our new Chairman, Dame Mary Archer.

A long black metal tube, slightly tapered and almost 9-foot-long lay on a row of filing cabinets at Blythe House, the Science Museum’s storage facility. The object was pointed out by John Liffen, the Museum’s Curator of Communications, who guided me during a research visit of the collections in 2008. It was all that remained of a mighty horn loudspeaker that was demonstrated in the Museum during the 1930s, John explained. A demolition accident had almost totally destroyed it in […]