When you step into the quiet, temperature-controlled room at the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) in Harwell, Oxfordshire, the first thing you notice are the three great black boxes, each containing a prototype quantum computer.
They are clad with shutters, partly to protect your eyes from powerful laser light but also to prevent heat or vibrations – even pressure waves from someone walking in – from interfering with this new and sensitive kind of computer, one that uses individual atoms to explore realms beyond the reach of conventional, ‘classical’ computers in your phone, home or office.
NQCC Laboratories and at the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) at the Harwell Campus, Didcot, Oxfordshire. Image source: NQCC
Under development there for the past year, the trapped-atom quantum computer remains only a promise: a machine that computes not just with logic, but with the shimmering probabilities of quantum reality. It is one of a dozen different kinds of quantum computer being studied at the NQCC.
Officially opened in October 2024, with an investment approaching £100 million, the NQCC’s 4,000-square-metre facility is Britain’s answer to a global challenge: to gather competing quantum technologies under one roof and see which are most likely to prosper.
Walk its corridors and you find a variety of approaches—superconducting circuits cooled to millikelvin temperatures with the help of theatrical chandeliers and chirping pumps made nearby at Oxford Instruments; trapped ions suspended in electromagnetic fields; photonic processors that compute with light; others that rely on silicon chips; and, glowing softly within black shutters, the neutral-atom arrays.
Indeed, the many different approaches reflect how quantum computing is in its infancy, explains Luke Fernley, a researcher at the National Quantum Computing Centre.
At their heart, quantum computers exploit the strange properties of quantum mechanics, which was developed at the start of the 20th century to describe nature at the smallest scales. “Neutral-atom-based quantum computers control the positions and properties of individual atoms,” he said. “This exquisite control allows their strange quantum mechanical properties to be exploited to perform computation.”
The theory, which is deeply counterintuitive, also says that the fate of two particles can be linked so quantum computers can do simultaneous calculations, rather than one at a time. “Think of each atom as a switch that can be on, off, or a mixture of both on and off,” he said. “These atoms can interact with each other, causing an inextricable link known as “entanglement”. This link couples the states of many atoms at once, facilitating simultaneous calculations.”
NQCC Laboratories and at the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) at the Harwell Campus, Didcot, Oxfordshire. Image source: NQCC
Though he started out at Durham University studying molecular quantum computers, which offer richer (but currently slower) possibilities, he believes atoms remain a fundamental gateway technology to quantum machines which all at their heart manipulate qubits, the quantum version of the 0s and 1s in an ordinary computer, which can represent both a 1 and a 0 at the same time.
Entanglement means that qubits in a superposition can be correlated with each other, enabling quantum computers to tackle difficult problems that are intractable to classical machines. Unlike the bits in a classical computer, which are rigidly on or off, qubits can occupy many states simultaneously to explore a vast landscape of possibilities at the same time.
A quantum algorithm, or program, begins life much like a classical one—as a set of logical steps—but must be reimagined in the language of quantum mechanics. Each operation is translated into an atomic recipe that dictates which qubits to entangle and how to measure the outcome. On a neutral-atom quantum computer, the computation unfolds as a carefully timed dance of photons and atoms as the quantum algorithm is translated from mathematics into matter.
By using finely tuned lasers to trap and control individual atoms, Luke Fernley and his colleagues aim to make them work together as a testbed for simulating quantum phenomena—for example, modelling molecular interactions to aid drug design. Next spring, they plan to use entangled pairs of atoms to implement quantum logic gates built from light and matter.
A central challenge lies in readout: although quantum computers can explore vast numbers of possibilities simultaneously, this parallelism cannot be directly observed. When the algorithm concludes, the delicate quantum superposition ‘collapses’ to give one answer. Useful results emerge only by running the algorithms many times to build up reliable statistics.
Atom wrangling
To control atoms takes light. Throw open the black shutters and inside there is a banquet-sized optical table: thick metal drilled with a lattice of holes for mounting all kinds of bits and pieces to manipulate laser light—from collimators to lenses and prisms that fold and shape beams, to acousto-optic and electro-optic modulators that flick beams on and off or change their frequency in nanoseconds—and an orchestra of mirrors mounted on fine-threaded actuators.
The business end, where laser light does its work, is an 8cm by 2cm glass-fronted vacuum cell. Inside, the NQCC team anticipate trapping hundreds of caesium and rubidium atoms at a time in a neat array by using lasers, which can herd atoms by bombarding them with photons, light particles.
At first the team uses lasers and magnetic fields to herd millions of atoms, even tens of millions of atoms into a ball a few millimetres in diameter, called a magneto-optical-trap. Because molecular and atomic motions are tantamount to heat, the same confining lasers that create this blob also serve to cool the atoms, reaching a few hundred millionths of a degree above absolute zero – colder than outer space.
At this temperature, atoms move at a fraction of the speed they do at room temperature. With the help of extra cooling steps, involving precise tweaking of magnetic fields, laser power and polarisation, the atoms can reach a few millionths of degrees above absolute zero where they can use another set of tightly focused lasers like microscopic tweezers to position them. These tweezing lasers form patterns- lines, grids, even honeycombs- “where an array of several single atoms is held by these optical tweezers as gently as eggs in an egg box,” he explained.
When they want to entangle a pair of atoms, they use a trick called a Rydberg blockade: nearby atoms are briefly brought together and tickled with yet more lasers to form high-energy “Rydberg” states, where atoms can “feel” each other, a little like atomic magnets, so that changing one automatically influences the other. “One atom’s excitation prevents the other’s, so the qubits states become entangled together,” he said. “This entanglement opens the pathway to quantum parallelism, the mechanism to help solve puzzles that normal computers can’t.”
These fleeting interactions – performed over thousandths to millionths of a second – form the logic gates to perform calculations using a fragile but powerful web of atomic correlations, sustained only if the machine is exquisitely isolated from the noisy outside world. The entire apparatus—from the vibration-damped optical table to the thicket of mirrors and modulators—is there to preserve this delicate quantum choreography.
NQCC Laboratories and at the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) at the Harwell Campus, Didcot, Oxfordshire. Image source: NQCC
Cameras and single-photon detectors peer at the atoms through viewports, recording the faint fluorescence emitted when an atom changes state, when an electron shifts within it to a lower state. This glow reveals whether the atom represents a 0, a 1. At the end, a sensitive camera takes a picture: glowing dots reveal 1s, dark ones 0s. The pattern is the answer.
The lasers must remain extraordinarily stable for days; photon detection—the only way to read out results— has little tolerance for error when you have to pick up single particles of light from individual atoms; vibration or electromagnetic interference can ruin hours of careful alignment; and it takes time, of the order of a thousandths of a second, to make atoms have close encounters.
While a dozen quantum computers are being tested at the NQCC, nearby on the Harwell campus two commercial companies are also investigating atomic quantum computers: SQALE is the Scalable Quantum Atomic Lattice computing tEstbed, a neutral-atom quantum computing testbed of 16 by 16 arrays of atoms developed by the company Infleqtion, and another is being developed by QuEra Computing. Other teams worldwide are taking a similar approach, with one in Boston, USA, recently describing a 3000 qubit computer, and another in Pasadena unveiling an array of 6,100 atomic qubits.
Simulation and chemistry
Quantum processors—including neutral-atom and molecular arrays- can simulate chemistry in unprecedented detail. These quantum simulations can mimic molecules more faithfully than classical machines. For drug discovery or materials design, this could mean testing how a compound binds, folds or reacts before any synthesis in the lab. The same tools could help uncover new superconductors, catalysts or battery materials tuned for efficiency and sustainability.
For a single atomic species experiment, such as an atom of rubidium or caesium, around five to seven different lasers are required. These can produce pairs of entangled atoms and the resulting quantum processors could tackle problems that stump classical methods: optimising supply chains, traffic systems, or even the training of AI.
Reading out and analysing the results of the quantum processor is done with classical computers. In effect it is a hybrid computer, where quantum co-processors handle the toughest calculations while classical hardware manages the rest. These could become as commonplace as a GPU today is in exascale computers and AI.
Beautiful experimental results from around the world have demonstrated major milestones in making tweezer-based quantum computers real contenders in the zoo of quantum computing possibilities. As with all the rivals, however, scaling the number of qubits while maintaining their fragile quantum states remains a challenge.
“At the NQCC, we are exploring using dual-species architectures, using both rubidium and caesium in a single glass cell to work towards overcoming these challenges. This requires around twice as many lasers, making dual-species experiments naturally more complex,” he said.
For now, though, modest victories matter: by next spring Luke Fernley hopes to have a few hundred atom pairs suspended in a vacuum, each a flickering logic element in a machine that computes with uncertainty itself: he and his fellow quantum computing scientists are learning to compute by choreographing the most delicate dance in physics—one where a single misstep can spoil the whole calculation.
Ask a Conservator Day is an annual event where conservators around the world answer questions about their work, including behind the scenes of working in a museum and how we protect our collections. Read on to hear from our conservation team.
What’s inside your toolkit?
Vanessa: I always have scalpels with different blades, bone folder, soft brushes, hand-held magnifying lens, hand-held microscope, spatulas, erasers, torch and a dust air blower.
What’s your favourite tool?
Rebecca: My favourite tools are a set of specialist spatulas that were engraved with my initials, which I was gifted from my family the day i graduated.
Vanessa: My favourite tool is a very soft brush.
Vanessa Torres – Conservator, specilaist in paper and photographs.
What’s the best part of your day as a conservator?
Vanessa: When I get to work with the photographs in our collections, cleaning, stabilising, repairing and caring for them.
Vanessa: The simplest way to describe myself as a conservator is I am the photographs doctor!
What is the main trait you need to be a good conservator? Rebecca: I think my three main traits would be attention to detail, patience and problem solving.
Vanessa: Curious mind, attention to deal and enjoy looking closely at objects.
What do you enjoy the most about your job?
Rebecca: Knowing that I am aiding the preservation and mantaining the museums collection, that allows the future generation to learn and discover about History, Science and Art is something I cherish.
Vanessa: The privilege of handling and exploring the collection, identifing and improving the objects’ care. I love organsing photographs in new folders and boxes!
Rebecca: Following on the summer when the new permanent Sound and Vision Galleries opened to the public, I am now moving onto the next exhibition coming soon to NSMM.
What’s your favourite non-conservation-specific tool?
Rebecca: I have quite a few tools which are multi purpose and i often use in conservation. My favourite however has got to be the the backpack hoover. I always feel like i’m in ghostbusters when wearing one.
Vanessa: Sharp and pointy dentistry tools, small glass suckers that are typically used to dismantle mobile phones, backpack hoover and a nutmeg grater.
For more information about Conservation. The Institute of Conservation (ICON) has a helpful website which covers lots of topics you might be interested in.
Many people think of space as a distant place — a realm of rockets, astronauts and moon dust, but it’s actually as close as your phone. Every GPS route, financial transaction and weather forecast depends on the satellites that soar through space, orbiting high above us. So much of modern life relies on them, yet the importance of space to our everyday lives is not always realised by people.
That’s why, at the Science Museum, we see space not just as exploration but as explanation: a way to show how science underpins everyday life. Which is why the new House of Lords report published this week, The Space Economy: Act Now or Lose Out, matters so much. It warns that the UK could miss out on the economic and strategic rewards of the new space age — not through lack of talent or innovation, but through lack of coordination.
This report is the culmination of nearly a year of work, hearings, reviewing written evidence and then discussion by the UK Engagement with Space Committee.
I had the pleasure of meeting with Baroness Catherine Ashton, who chaired the committee, to discuss the findings ahead of publication. One of the things she said that struck me most was that, before this inquiry, she and many of the committee members hadn’t realised just how much space is part of our everyday lives. I know this is not an uncommon view — and it’s exactly why the work we do at the Science Museum to share the excitement and relevance of space is so important.
The report makes it clear: space is not a luxury or a distant frontier. It’s critical national infrastructure. The UK space sector contributes over £18 billion to our economy, supports nearly 50,000 high-productivity jobs, and plays a vital role in tackling global challenges — from climate monitoring to secure communications. It’s a sector built on science, engineering, and ambition — and it’s growing fast.
And yet, as the report notes, space and the huge range of benefits it brings to us here on Earth, can still be something of a mystery to many. That’s precisely what gives astronauts and rockets such an important role. Baroness Ashton told me, “There’s no substitute for an astronaut to get kids excited about space.” She’s absolutely right. Throughout my career, notably when I worked for the UK Space Agency, I’ve seen how astronauts use their spotlight to shine a light on the entire space ecosystem — from engineers and scientists to mission planners and manufacturers. They’re the gateway to deeper understanding. Rockets and astronauts may be the most visible symbols of space, but they’re also the most powerful tools we have to connect people to the broader story.
That’s why we’re so proud of our new Space gallery at the Science Museum. It celebrates the human stories of space, but also showcases the breadth of UK innovation. From Space Forge’s Pridwen heat shield, designed to return materials manufactured in space, to Magdrive’s prototype thrusters that will revolutionise spacecraft manoeuvrability, and Astroscale’s docking plate tackling space debris, all of these objects tell stories of the areas that the report highlights as UK areas of expertise.
We also feature the Black Arrow nose cone and Prospero satellite — reminders that the UK is one of the few nations to have launched its own satellite on its own rocket. With new UK spaceports preparing to launch again, these stories are not just historical — they’re timely, relevant, and vital to tell.
Now that the report is published, the Government has two months to respond, and that response will be debated in the House of Lords. It’s a fascinating example of how policy is shaped — and how we can all engage with it.
At the Science Museum, we’re passionate about inspiring young people to take up careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Space has extraordinary potential to do just that. But as the report points out, it’s still misunderstood. That’s why we’re committed to using our platform to break down barriers, spark curiosity, and help people see how space touches their lives — and how it can shape the UK’s future.
If you’re interested in space, policy, or simply how the world works, I’d encourage you to read the report and follow the journey. It’s a story of opportunity, challenge, and ambition — and it’s one we’re proud to be part of.
In April 2025, ahead of the biggest Bradford Science Festival to date, I went to St Paul’s youth club in Manningham to meet with ten intelligent, creative and lively young people to talk about fashion and climate change. The topic was new to most of us, but through browsing a few library books, brainstorming ideas and asking each other big questions, we started to find the connection between these two topics. And the Young People’s Panel was born!
We were shocked by some of the things we learnt. Did you know that nonbiodegradable fabric can sit in landfills for up to 200 years? This includes fabrics like polyester and nylon. We discovered that making one cotton t-shirt can use up to 2,000 litres of water (that’s about 5,400 normal bottles). It made all of us think twice about what we were buying and how often.
With the help of fantastic youth workers Kim, Karen, Anum, Margaret and Danielle from Bradford Youth Service, we organised lots of engaging sessions in which the panel researched the science, learnt new skills and eventually designed and made some sustainable outfits using upcycled, second-hand textiles. These pieces are being exhibited at Bradford Science Festival 2025 on 25 and 26 October in the Broadway.
Coming up with creative ideas.
Over six months, we travelled the Bradford District in search of knowledge and inspiration. In May, we went to Ilkley to visit the well-loved collection of charity shops, learning to look at labels to see what materials things are made of and consider how they might have been made—was this hand-knitted or made by a machine?
Thinking about how fabrics are made.
To inspire the panel to think about the importance of youth voice in event planning and decision-making, we attended Public Interest, a Common/Wealth Theatre production at Loading Bay as part of Bradford 2025. Although the show was on a completely different subject matter, it was inspirational and helped us think about what an engaging event might look like at Bradford Science Festival to showcase our work.
In August, after finalising our ideas, we travelled to Keighley to visit Charlotte and Gillian at Stitch Society. In their amazing studio they design and make high quality, sustainable clothing by hand. Here the panel learnt new skills including sketching designs, using paper patterns, sewing on a machine and how to transform fabric using natural dyes (such as beetroot, turmeric and nettles).
Learning to use the sewing machines at Stitch Society.
The final pieces are a triumph, and we are really proud of the Young People’s Panel’s work. They have made many outfits, including two upcycled hoodies with sewn-on patches and a skirt and kimono from colourful second-hand scarves.
In October, a few weeks before the show, we met back at St Paul’s and invited Rozina and Lorett from Creative Flare Yorkshire to join the fun. They were inspirational and showed us some upcycled outfits they’d made during a similar project. We decided on who would model the outfits, which music would play and some spoken word.
We hope many of you will consider the history and lifespan of the clothes you wear, and think about the impact our fashion choices have on the planet.
When Matt Clifford opened his Financial Times app one recent morning, three of the top five stories were about artificial intelligence. “Twenty years ago, modern AI did not exist,” the former advisor on AI to the Prime Minister told an event he chaired for the Bradford Science Festival. Now he believes it could reignite the ability of UK industry to compete globally. “Every time there’s a general-purpose technology,” he said, “you can either watch it happen somewhere else—or decide to shape it yourself.”
Artificial intelligence could rival the broad sweep of human intelligence in the next year or two, according to the most feverish estimates, unsurprisingly from the bosses of AI companies. Others believe that, though superhuman in respects, from playing Go to working out the structure of proteins in the body, there are fundamental limits to what current AI can do, not least due to its huge appetite for power and data. Meanwhile, warnings have sounded that the AI market may be experiencing a bubble similar to the dot com era, driven by overexcitement and inflated valuations.
Clifford, who grew up in Clayton on the outskirts of Bradford, hosted an AI discussion at the National Science and Media Museum last Saturday with Charlotte Deane, Executive Chair of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, EPSRC, which funds AI research, Tom Forth, Head of Data at Open Innovations, and Zandra Moore, tech entrepreneur and angel investor.
In opening the event, Clifford told the audience how he has watched this transformation in the fortunes of AI from both the policy front line and the perspective of technology entrepreneurship. “In the 1980s and 1990s we didn’t have enough computational power,” he recalled.
Then around 2012, everything began to change in the wake of new chips from the then small company NVIDIA and work by a Canadian team led by Briton Geoff Hinton. They showed that deep neural networks—loosely modelled on the brain, they can recognise patterns like complex pictures, text and sounds to produce insights and predictions—were better than humans, for instance when it comes to the “deceptively hard” task of distinguishing chihuahuas from muffins.
Clifford’s curve now has a geopolitical dimension. Britain’s computing power is levelling up fast, with new supercomputers like Isambard-AI in Bristol, Mary Coombs in Daresbury, Cheshire and Dawn in Cambridge. The giant high-performance machines, so called exascale computers, still belong to the US and China, though, with Europe recently joining this elite club with Jupiter.
The US and China are locked in an arms race of data, chips and capital. Britain, by contrast, must find a subtler way to survive. “We’re not like the US or China,” he said. “What we can do is build out infrastructure to serve AI models, adopt AI in the public sector, and think about AI sovereignty—what bits of the value chain the UK can play and win in, where we can be world-leading.”
Given the amount of high-quality health data gathered about the UK population, for example, through projects such as Born in Bradford (brought to life in the museum by the Living Dots exhibit) and UK Biobank, the panel pondered if we need to find ways to tax how AI puts these data to use.
Billionfold Leap and British Lag
“It’s easy to say AI is all hype,” Clifford said, “but if you look at what’s happened since 2012, the amount of computational power used to train frontier models has gone up a billion-fold. No other technology in history has seen that level of increase in investment in such a short period.”
This year alone, he added, the world will spend $500 billion on AI infrastructure. “That increase in input is seeing a massive impact in real-world outputs—language processing, image recognition, drug discovery, video processing—all seeing rapid increases in performance, though not perfect.”
One metric he tracks is “how big a task you can delegate to AI and have a decent chance it will do it respectably.” In software engineering, the California-based organisation METR tests how long a human task takes before an AI delegated to the task achieves a 50 per cent success rate. Once, it was seconds. “Today that number is two hours—half the time AI will do that successfully,” he said. “And it doubles in performance every seven months. There are six more doublings before the next election which takes you from two hours to a working month.”
The exponential curve, Clifford warned, “is like Covid—before you know it, you suddenly find yourself in a different world.”
Yet Britain, home computing pioneers such as Alan Turing, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, is once again in danger of falling behind. “UK firms are pretty bad at adopting technology,” Clifford admitted.
One barrier to adoption is conservative AI policies in companies. If we’re to reignite economic growth, and reduce our dependence on the US, “AI feels like something we should do.”
Muscular adoption
Clifford’s alternative to techno-nationalism is what he calls “muscular adoption.” The idea is partly inspired by the historian of technology Jeffrey Ding, whose book Technology and the Rise of Great Powers he often cites. “Every time there’s a general-purpose technology—like steam, or electrification—governments get fixated on research and building the tech. But what we need is ‘muscular adoption’: By adopting general-purpose technology in an ambitious way, you can shape how it develops more than if you just do the frontier R&D.”
His vision of sovereignty is not about closing borders or building rival supercomputers. It is about making AI work in Britain’s favour—in hospitals, classrooms, laboratories and civil service offices. “GPT-5 can’t run a hospital today,” he said, “but in a few years you could do that if you have deep collaboration, not just importing AI technology from California but deep collaboration with people producing the AI and shaping it to our needs. That’s a kind of AI sovereignty: working out how to use AI in high-stakes, high importance environments so we’re not fully dependent on other countries.”
Clifford chairs the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA)—“sort of the UK take on DARPA,” he said—based in London, which focuses on strategic research investments and has a long record of influencing policy: “I helped set up the AI Security Institute under Rishi Sunak and wrote the UK’s National AI strategy for this Government,” he said, which outlined the need to invest in AI infrastructure, adoption of AI by the public sector, and identifying the parts of the AI value chain where “the UK can play and win.”
“Government has made a lot of progress—though maybe not quite as fast as I’d like to go,” he said, adding that as an antidote to the concentration of AI firepower in a few companies, he backs open-source AI that anyone can use.
Apex Predator Fears
For Clifford, the problem lies less in Britain’s research base than in its reflexive caution. “In government I found challenges about whether we have data in the right place and format, about training and compliance, and understandable paranoia about what might go wrong.”
He recalled a focus group held a few years ago where “a guy from Bradford” asked, “Humans are the apex predator on Earth. Why would we build a new apex predator?” The remark captured the national mood: proud of its intellectual heritage, nervous about losing control.
That nervousness extends to Westminster. In 2023 Clifford co-organised the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, a global gathering aimed at discussing the safety and regulation of AI. Famously, the summit featured an encounter between the then Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, and the entrepreneur Elon Musk, which included a discussion of killer robots.
When it comes to stopping the robot apocalypse, however, Deane said the response was simple: “Pull the plug.” However, Clifford did flag concerns that advanced AI—especially when granted autonomy and access to sensitive information—can act against their operator’s interests.
Pragmatist’s Case for AI
Charlotte Deane, who also uses AI in drug discovery as Professor of Structural Bioinformatics at Oxford, gave a roundup of what AI can already do. “AI is way better than human doctors at interpreting some scans in hospitals—though I do want a human doctor to look at the data as well,” she said. “In drug discovery, it’s completely changed our ability to predict the shapes of molecules inside you. It’s better at designing efficient ways to generate power or move it across the grid.”
“The important thing is to know it’s not perfect, but AI can speed us up. In hospitals or drug labs, you want it to be right—but that doesn’t mean you won’t use it. It’s an amazing toy. It won’t be perfect but that’s OK because it makes you go faster.”
Like Clifford, she worries less about UK capability than culture. “There’s always a barrier to doing a new thing, like AI. That’s why it has to be top-down and tied to a problem. Students are using it all the time—even to write up experiments they haven’t done! But university admin, though aware it could make them efficient, are scared because they don’t understand what they have to do. I’ve met with people from 62 universities last year —none of them are using AI very efficiently.”
Sovereignty from below
If Clifford’s vision has been adopted as Whitehall’s, Tom Forth’s is Bradford’s. As CTO of The Data City, Forth offered another view of sovereignty—less grand, more grounded in knowledge. “When I did my PhD, I tried to understand how the malaria parasite kills people and sought a drug to do that without affecting the patient. To get into a PhD you have to read hundreds of papers. Now, you can put the papers in Notebook LM and get summaries.”
That efficiency, he said, is both blessing and curse. “It lets people who don’t want to get up to speed bluff. You can be very, very lazy. You can kid yourself you’re learning quickly with AI and find yourself left behind,” he said, with Deane adding there is research to support this. “We have to discipline ourselves to ensure the AI tools make us cleverer, not more stupid.”
For Forth, the AI frontier lies not in building models but applying them. “There are two kinds of company: those developing AI itself, like Google DeepMind— Google’s Gemini AI is largely based on this British technology, and we should be very proud—but that’s not the main way Britain is doing AI. There are lots of small ways, like filling out procurement forms to win a contract to supply paper towels to a hospital. AI can handle bureaucracy. That helps small companies compete more fairly with big companies.”
He sees huge potential in manufacturing, which faces various challenges in the UK. “UK companies are better at adopting AI than you think, but I wish were better at adopting robots.”
On geopolitics, his view is refreshingly fatalistic. “In the north of England, we don’t have control over this stuff—it’s going to happen in California and China mainly. If self-driving cars go rogue and start eating people, it’ll happen in San Francisco and Shenzhen.”
His main worry is we’ll be left behind if we worry too much.” What we can do is be indispensable in niche aspects of AI, he said, such as developing AI tools to insure driverless vehicles, a conclusion that aligns with Clifford’s: sovereignty through indispensability. “There are eight billion people in the world, we have to pick small niches we can be good at.”
But when it comes to AI replacing people, he still puts his faith in the human capacity for generating new ideas. “It still seems—at least for a few months, if not many years—we’ll be better than AI at finding truly new ideas and connecting things in different ways.”
Shadow AI
Zandra Moore, who is also an advocate for women in technology, described the business dimension of sovereignty. “AI today is being experienced by most people in jobs without realising,” she said. “In software it’s already there—in chat experiences, in workplace tools. They can be frustrating. But there are processes and repetitive tasks being picked up all the time by AI. That’s great, so people have to do less repetitive work and can focus on what they were trained to do.”
Another aspect of its use in business is “shadow AI”—the quiet adoption of AI tools by workers before the board signs off. “With senior executives I discuss how to move from looking at AI tools to solving problems. Adoption needs to be led from the top down more. There are lots of models moving apace—you can save years of time if you get the right tool for the right problem.”
Bradford, she said, could offer a test bed for Clifford’s national vision. “It’s the youngest city in the UK and very diverse—it offers a real opportunity to tap that emerging talent. Adoption works well when people at the top think of the problem and those young people and curious minds solve it.” Moore also touched on creative-industry anxieties. “AI is supposed to give us more time to be creative—but the creative sector feels under threat. While it can be scary, the earlier we pick it up and incorporate it into our work, the better our chances of surviving that transition.”
What AI do we need to use now?
Clifford challenged the panel to advise the audience on what AI tools the audience should check out. Zandra Moore’s advice for newcomers was hands-on: “Hugging Face Spaces helps you dabble in lots of tools. It’s easier than trying to remember them all. I like to get it to make up ridiculous songs—I’m envious of how my sister can sing—using Mozart AI. “You can even get the song in karaoke format.”
Forth recommends Google’s NotebookLM to make sense of documents for anyone managing complex projects. “It can make a podcast of all your documents so you can listen while doing the washing or gardening or mopping the floor, as I did this afternoon. A couple of startups even do it with a British accent.”
“Personally, I meet a lot of people and have difficulty remembering who they are, what they look like and represent—AI can help with that,” said Charlotte Deane, adding that her students have used AI to write songs about searching for more GPUs, the chips that power AI.
With a grin, Clifford offered a more personal use case: “I like to write immersive murder-mystery party games. ChatGPT is an incredible tool for writing games. My wife’s not so keen on this, so ChatGPT is a great partner.”
The great conversation
For the Science Museum Group, which convened the Bradford session under the banner AI and the Future of Science: How Machines Will Change Everything, such debates are critical – the group has long argued for better engagement with the public on AI, calling for a “big conversation” about technology, trust and the shape of progress.
Bradford, once a powerhouse of the industrial revolution, offered a fitting setting for the latest public conversation. The day before the meeting, Clifford and the panel met in the National Science and Media Museum for a round table discussion with local representatives from the University of Bradford, Microsoft, NHS along with Tracy Brabin, Mayor of West Yorkshire, and museum director Jo Quinton-Tulloch. Their aim: to forge an AI vision for the region.
Around the world, 1 in 4 people will have a stroke at some point in their lives.
A stroke is when blood stops flowing to a part of your brain, caused by a blockage or rupture of a blood vessel. Without fresh oxygenated blood, millions of brain cells begin to die within minutes. Strokes can affect speech and movement, and can have a profound impact on the lives of individuals and their families.
Brain Work, by Anna Dumitriu, is a cross-section slice of a brain inspired by research done at St. Thomas’ Hospital neurology unit. Object: 2000-1113
Strokes can happen to anyone at any age. At 21 years old, I did not expect to have a mini-stroke (a temporary disruption to the blood supply to my brain), nor did my family and friends.
One day, I woke up unable to recognize my right hand. It startled me when I saw it move and couldn’t realize it was mine. But I also didn’t feel concerned at the time. Throughout the morning, I experienced short term memory loss and balance issues. But because I wasn’t in distress and had no well-known stroke symptoms such as face dropping, it took over an hour for my mom to notice my slurred speech and general confusion. Then it took another hour to convince me, a reluctant patient, to go to A&E.
My story ended well. The nurses saw me immediately, my blood was drawn, and I was taken into a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine where my mini-stroke was spotted by a neurologist.
A model showing how the protein fibres called fibrins trap red blood cells and eventually form blood clot. Fibrins normally stop your cuts from bleeding, but too many can be dangerous. Object: 1986-1668
For a long time, all doctors could go on to diagnose a stroke were external symptoms such as sudden paralysis or being ‘violently struck down’. Since our brains are very well protected in our skulls, it wasn’t until the 1970s that two technologies began to be developed that proved to be breakthroughs in how strokes could be diagnosed quickly and reliably. These medical breakthroughs are CT (Computerised Tomography) scanning and MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging). These scanning technologies could be used to identify and monitor clots.
A patient using one of the first CT brain scanners installed at Atkinson Morley’s Hospital, Wimbledon in 1971. A CT scan combines X-rays and computer processing to show detailed images of the body. Object: 1980-811
On display in the Science Museum is the first prototype of the MRI body scanner developed by British scientist and Nobel Prize winner Peter Mansfield.
Using high frequency radio waves, this MRI machine creates an even clearer picture of the soft tissues of the brain without using radiation like a CT scanner or invasive surgery. The scientific technique was originally called Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR), however the word ‘nuclear’ was so off putting to patients that the researchers changed it to Magnetic Resonance Imaging instead.
On gallery in Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries at the Science Museum, if you closely at MRI’s entrance you’ll notice the stickers placed around the ring to distract frightened children. Object: 1988-186
In the early days of MRI technology, the magnets were not sensitive enough for children’s heads, so scientists came up with ‘Jedi helmets’ to help create a clearer picture. During my treatment I had seven MRIs. I once got to wear a helmet, but it was not nearly as cool as the one seen by YouTuber Tom Scott and curator Selina Hurley in this video.
Today, it’s more important than ever to review the signs of a stroke and what to do. Your actions could help save lives.
World Stroke Day Campaign Infographic. Source: World Stroke Organization.
There are three major signs of a stroke:
Facial weakness
Arm weakness
Slurred speech
Then it’s Time to call emergency services and take the individual to A&E.
(#ActFAST)
But as I can attest, there are many other common symptoms like confusion, headaches, dizziness, numbness, balance issues, slurred speech, short term memory loss, seizures, irregular breathing, and paralysis of an area of the body. I’m very glad my mom spotted my signs and took me into A&E immediately.
You can find out more about your own stroke risk (Stroke Riskometer), andtry out whether you recognize the signs of a stroke in this interactive Stroke Spotter Game.
On this World Stroke Day, I hope we all learn to #ActFAST and support equality in funding and attention for stroke prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and care.
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