Former chancellor George Osborne is joining artificial intelligence (AI) giant OpenAI. He will lead its OpenAI for Countries programme, which is aimed at helping governments increase their AI capacity. Announcing his new London-based role, Osborne said it was a privilege to be joining the company. I recently asked myself the question: what's the most exciting and promising company in the world right now? The answer I believe is OpenAI, he said on X.

Neutron imaging has helped reveal historical discrepancies hidden within a collection of illegally trafficked Iron Age swords. But the nine ancient Iranian weapons aren't wholesale forgeries--according to an October 8 announcement from researchers at the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, they were assembled by fusing metal fragments from multiple different artifacts together to form "Frankenstein's monster" pastiches in order to boost their potential black market value. To determine each roughly 3,000-year-old sword's alterations, researchers relied on a tool not often seen in archeology. As explained in a study published on Tuesday in the Journal of Archaeological Science, a team from Cranfield University, the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, and the British Museum used neutron tomography to analyze the weapons after they were recently seized by authorities at the UK border. Instead of more common X-ray techniques, the equipment's neutron beams allow it to generate renderings of a subject's internal features even if surrounded by dense material like bronze and iron.

'Digital archaeologists' have secretly scanned the 2,500-year-old Parthenon Marbles inside the British Museum -- with the hope of creating'perfect' replicas that could one day lead to the repatriation of the originals to Greece. The researchers took the detailed 3D images by stealth after the museum refused a formal request. They used technology embedded in the latest camera phones and iPads to scan half a dozen of the sculptures, also known as the Elgin Marbles, so the files can be used to programme a'robot sculptor' to carve replicas. Experts from the Oxford-based Institute for Digital Archaeology (IDA) hope marble blocks can be created with metal chisels, in much the same way the sculptures were created by the ancient Greek architect Phidias around 447–438 BC. The marbles once formed part of the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens but were stripped and shipped to Britain when Lord Elgin turned up in Greece in early 1800.

A mysterious hand that was created around 3,500 years ago and is believed to be Europe's oldest prosthetic limb will go on display in the UK for the first time this week. The artefact, which experts think may also have doubled as a knife, was discovered in western Switzerland in 2017. It is made from bronze with a gold cuff and dates to between 1,500 and 1,400 BC. The hand has been on display only once before, making a brief appearance in Germany, but will now be part of the'World of Stonehenge' exhibition at the British Museum. Detectorists found the hand buried in a human grave near Lake Biel, along with a hair ornament, bronze dagger and cloak pin.

Unprecedented access to thousands of artefacts gathered by the 18th century physician, naturalist and prolific collector Sir Hans Sloane, will be available online to everyone for free, thanks to a multi-million pound digital project led by UCL. Following his death, Sir Hans Sloane's collections formed the basis of the British Museum, Natural History Museum and British Library. The Sloan Lab: Looking back to build future shared collections will bring Sloane's immense collections, ranging from coins to manuscripts and stuffed animals, which are currently held in a variety of locations, together online for the first time. Researchers will work with experts and communities to link up Sloane's collections, put them in context for the 21st century, and give new opportunities to search, explore and engage critically with the UK's cultural heritage online. The Sloane Lab is one of five'Discovery Projects' sharing £14.5m of Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funding to democratise and decolonise the UK's culture and heritage collections.

Broken and scorched black by fire, the dense, wedge-shaped marks etched into the ancient clay tablets are only just visible under the soft light at the British Museum. These tiny signs are the remains of the world's oldest writing system: cuneiform. Developed more than 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where modern-day Iraq now lies, cuneiform captured life in a complex and fascinating civilisation for some three millennia. From furious letters between warring royal siblings to rituals for soothing a fractious baby, the tablets offer a unique insight into a society at the dawn of history. An estimated half a million of them have been excavated, and more are still buried in the ground.

Firstly, I'd like to thank Lina and Stephen from LoopMe, the world's largest mobile video advertising platform, for inviting me to be this year's keynote to present the "Future of Artificial Intelligence" at the British Museum in London the other week. All in all it was an eclectic day, after an interview which you can see below, I discussed, and showed, just how far Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come in just the past four years, lifting the kimono as they say on the latest generation of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN's) and so called "Creative Machines" that are being used to innovate new products, including aircraft, clothes, other AI's, robots, software and shoes, as well as compose and compile best selling pop songs, and create scarily realistic high definition fake news clips, after which I moved onto the impact that the forthcoming so called "Quantum AI" revolution, and self-learning brain inspired Neuromorphic computers, that will pack the power of today's biggest supercomputers into a fingernail, will have on the future pace and direction of AI development. As for the remainder of the day, and the line up, it was as interesting as it was diverse. There were luminaries such as Saqib Shaikh from Microsoft who despite being legally blind has risen to fame for using his immense drive and determination to develop AI powered solutions that help disabled people everywhere better understand and navigate the world around them, as well as Alan Kelly, Ireland's "most awarded creative," and the Creative Director of Rothco, whose recent work with the Times newspaper saw him and his team use AI and speech synthesis to help them "unsilence" JFK, and allow him to finally speak the state of the union address he was going to deliver on the day of his fatal shooting in his own voice. There were also speakers and panellists like Roger Highfield, the director of the UK Science Museum who was discussing some of the latest breakthroughs he's seen in robotics and AI, such as Nvidia's recent "fake" celebrity stunt, and Chris Russell from the Alan Turning Institute who discussed his work in using AI to create better "healthcare outcomes," as well as other executives from a range of organisations, from eConsultancy to News UK, who regailed the audience with insightful facts about the state of AI in the global advertising industry.

If you are a brand or an institution, people talk about you. If you happen to be a museum which welcomes around 17,000 visitors per day, 365 days a year, then lots of people talk about you. They talk about you all the time, in all languages, in ways you can't control. They'll talk about your new exhibition, your audio guides, your security procedures and the coffee you serve in your restaurants. Some of these people will talk to you directly -- they'll send emails and write letters and leave comment cards, which you can neatly log.

The 9,500-year-old Jericho Skull contains a human cranium packed with soil and covered with plaster to replicate individual facial features. Sea shells are used to represent the deceased's eyes. Researchers have reverse-engineered the ancient ritual practice that created one of The British Museum's most important artifacts--the Jericho Skull--revealing the face of a man whose remains were decorated and venerated some 9,500 years ago. The Jericho Skull is also considered the oldest portrait in the museum's collection, and, until recently, its most enigmatic: a truncated human skull covered in worn plaster, with eye sockets set with simple sea shells that stare out blindly from its display case. A facial reconstruction based on the human remains found inside the Jericho Skull.

A full-body virtual autopsy of an ancient Egyptian mummy showed visitors he was likely murdered. By combining visualization techniques with interactive multi-touch tables and intuitive user interfaces, visitors to museums and science centers can conduct self-guided tours of large volumetric image data. In an interactive learning experience, visitors become the explorers of otherwise invisible interiors of unique artifacts and subjects. Here, we take as our starting point the state of the art in scanning technologies, then discuss the latest research on high-quality interactive volume rendering and how it can be tailored to meet the specific demands of public venues. We then describe our approach to the creation of interactive stories and the design principles on which they are based and interaction with domain experts. The article is based on experience from several application domains but uses a 2012 public installation of an ancient mummy at the British Museum as its primary example. We also present the results of an evaluation of the installation showing the utility of the developed solutions. Visitors walk into Gallery 64, the Early Egypt Gallery at the British Museum, eager to see and learn about one of the most famous and oldest mummies in the collection. Known as the Gebelein Man, he was buried in a crouched position in a shallow grave during the late pre-dynastic period at the site of Gebelein in Upper Egypt.