Higgs Boson breakthrough was UK triumph, but British physics faces'catastrophic' cuts When the Nobel Prize in Physics was announced in Stockholm in October 2013, the world was watching. Among the names read out was Prof Peter Higgs, the British theorist who, nearly half a century earlier, had predicted the existence of a particle believed to hold the cosmos together - the Higgs boson. The announcement, broadcast live from Sweden, was what many scientists had hoped for since a year earlier, when experiments at CERN had finally confirmed Higgs's theory by discovering the Higgs boson - hailed as one of the biggest discoveries in a generation. At the time Higgs, who has since passed away, said in a statement: I hope this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research. Blue-sky research asks questions to understand the universe, rather than design new products.

From our attitude towards work to our grasp of what two metres look like, the coronavirus pandemic has made us rethink how we see the world. But while we've found it hard to adjust to the new reality, it's been even harder for the narrowly-designed artificial intelligence models that have been created to help organisation make decisions. Based on data that described the world before the crisis, these won't be making correct predictions anymore, pointing to a fundamental problem in they way AI is being designed. David Cox, IBM director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, explains that faulty AI is particularly problematic in the case of so-called black box predictive models: those algorithms which work in ways that are not visible, or understandable, to the user. "It's very dangerous," Cox says, "if you don't understand what's going on internally within a model in which you shovel data on one end to get a result on the other end. The model is supposed to embody the structure of the world, but there is no guarantee that it will keep working if the world changes."