Research into humanoid robots is a rapidly advancing field, with companies around the world striving to produce robots that look and act more like us. But what is it about recreating ourselves in robot form that we find so captivating? Why do humanoid robots both enthral and terrify us? And is our obsession with robotic humans just vanity, or could they play valuable roles in our future society? In this special live recording at Imperial College London as part of the Great Exhibition Road Festival, Claire chatted to Ben Russell (Science Museum), Maryam Banitalebi Dehkordi (University of Hertfordshire) and Petar Kormushev (Imperial College London) about humanoid robotics.

Feedback is New Scientist's popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com Science is one of the most fruitful sources of new terminology. There's nothing like a surfeit of terms like "mitochondrial synthesis" and "quantum fluctuations" to make your writing sound authoritative Recently there has been a spate of scientific papers containing the phrase "vegetative electron microscopy/microscope". The term suggests a device for scanning broccoli, but it is utter nonsense. There are scanning electron microscopes and tunnelling electron microscopes, but not vegetative electron microscopes.

Now Nasa engineers say they are developing their own ChatGPT-style interface that could ultimately allow astronauts to talk to their spacecraft and mission controllers to converse with artificial intelligence-powered robots exploring distant planets and moons. An early incarnation of the AI is slated to be deployed on Lunar Gateway, a planned extraterrestrial space station that is part of the Artemis programme, according to the engineer developing the technology. "The idea is to get to a point where we have conversational interactions with space vehicles and they [are] also talking back to us on alerts, interesting findings they see in the solar system and beyond," Dr Larissa Suzuki, a visiting researcher at Nasa said. Speaking at a meeting on next-generation space communication at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in London on Tuesday, Suzuki outlined an interplanetary communications network with inbuilt AI to detect, and possibly fix, glitches and inefficiencies as they occur. "It then alerts mission operators that there is a likelihood that package transmissions from space vehicle X will be lost or will fail delivery," she said.

In this special live recording of the Robot Talk podcast at the Great Exhibition Road Festival, Claire chatted to Glyn Morgan (Science Museum), Bani Anvari (University College London) and Thrishantha Nanayakara (Imperial College London) to explore how our intelligent friends from the world of science fiction match up with state-of-the art robotics and artificial intelligence reality. Glyn Morgan is a curator of exhibitions at the Science Museum, most recently: "Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination" (open until August 20th). He also teaches a course on Science Fiction at Imperial College, and has published widely on many aspects of the genre writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Royal Society, and the Science Fiction Research Association, amongst others. His research is interested in the interface between science fiction and other disciplines from history to psychology and beyond, and the ways science fiction can be used as a cognitive tool to help us understand ourselves and our society. Bani Anvari is a Full Professor of Intelligent Mobility at the Centre for Transport Studies in the Faculty of Engineering at University College London (UCL).

Select items from the office of the late and eminent theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking will go on display at the Science Museum in London next year. The announcement comes following an acceptance in lieu agreement, which allows families to offset tax, between the Cambridge University Library, the Science Museum Group and the UK Government. Thanks to this, Professor Hawking's considerable collection of scientific and personal papers will remain in Cambridge in the collections of the university library. This archive includes correspondence dating from 1944–2008, a first draft of a'Brief History of Time' and a highlighted script from his first cameo on'The Simpsons'. The contents of his office at Cambridge's Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, meanwhile, will join the collections of the Science Museum. Among the items being preserved are Professor Hawking's personal wheelchairs -- which he needed due to motor neuron disease -- and communication equipment.

London's world-renowned Science Museum reopens as a Covid-19 vaccination centre on Thursday (March 11). The museum on Exhibition Road in South Kensington, which was founded in 1857, will serve north-west London as part of the NHS's vaccination programme. Vaccinations will take place in Special Exhibition Gallery 1, a vast temporary exhibition space where thousands of artefacts have been displayed. These include a nuclear fusion reactor, historic robots and the spacecraft flown by the first woman in space, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova. Preparations are now also underway for a coronavirus-focused exhibit to go on display once the museum reopens.

Oct. 6, 2020--Partners for Automated Vehicle Education (PAVE) held a Sept. 23 webinar on promoting autonomous vehicle technology. The guest speakers, Lucinda Yuen with Ford Motor Company, and Rebecca Posner with the Center for Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) in the United Kingdom, spoke about AV museum exhibits that they'd helped create. Both exhibits aim to get people comfortable with the idea of AV technology and to inform the public about the power, versatility, and potential of the tech. The exhibits are at the Michigan Science Center in Detroit, and the Science Museum in London. Both are interactive exhibits that allow people to engage with and learn from the technology in a personal way.

We all need to talk about AI. We need a big conversation, one that involves everyone, not just because this technology is changing our future but also because we need to inspire more people from diverse backgrounds to guide its development. We need a national conversation because the most important conversations of all take place between experts and the public, not between experts, whether ethicists, academics or coders. But, as companies such as Samsung do more to engage with audiences, and new industry initiatives emerge, the trigger for the biggest public conversations is often when a new science or technology makes the headlines, often when things go wrong. Few people were interested in infectious proteins called prions until BSE, or'mad cow disease' (a phrase coined by a colleague of mine at The Daily Telegraph) became a threat to a national herd and then, through vCJD, to people.

London, and particularly the Science Museum, has a long, solid history of mounting exhibitions on information technology topics, from its 1991 reconstruction of Babbage's Difference Engine to the industrial robots it featured in the late 1990s (which health and safety insisted should be behind glass), their humanoid fellows in 2017, and the 2014 exploration of the information age. This summer, the city has three such exhibitions running simultaneously, two of them at the Science Museum. You could summarize them as: 1) What have you done for us lately?; 2) What are you going to do for us?; and 3) Why is it taking so long? The first is GCHQ's romp through the history of keeping secrets, Top Secret: From ciphers to cyber security. This moves from the earliest times through Mary Queen of Scots' coded letters to World War II (GCHQ's formation, Bletchley Park and Alan Turing) and the Cold War.

The idea of Kickstarter first formed in the mind of Perry Chen in 2001. A native New Yorker, Chen was 25, living in New Orleans and working as a musician. He wanted to bring a pair of DJs he loved down to perform during Jazz Fest. He sorted out a venue, organised things with their management, but in the end the event didn't happen – Chen didn't have the funds to pay for the show if not enough people turned up. In his frustration, a thought occurred to him: "What if people could go to a website and pledge to buy tickets for a show? And if enough money was pledged, they would be charged and the show would happen. Over the years that followed, Chen held on to that simple idea. He moved back to New York in 2005, still more intent on making music than starting an internet company – he had no background in technology – but the thought wouldn't go away. He became friends with a music journalist, Yancey Strickler, who got sold on the idea, too. They talked about it with, Charles Adler, a designer and DJ, and the three of them formulated ideas and spoke to mates of mates who knew code or to people who might help fund such a thing. Eventually, in April 2009, eight years after the idea had first come to Chen, the three of them launched their website and waited at their laptops to see if other people thought it was a good idea too. In the first few days, a few emails trickled in, from people pitching ideas, wondering how the thing might work. And then, after a couple of weeks, a young singer-songwriter from Athens, Georgia, launched a project to fund her album, Allison Weiss Was Right All Along. "My name is Allison Weiss and I'm recording a new EP this summer.