Creatures can converse and share their stories by voice or text through visitors’ mobile phones at Museum of Zoology If the pickled bodies, partial skeletons and stuffed carcasses that fill museums seem a little, well, quiet, fear not. In the latest coup for artificial intelligence, dead animals are to receive a new lease of life to share their stories – and even their experiences of the afterlife. More than a dozen exhibits, ranging from an American cockroach and the remnants of a dodo, to a stuffed red panda and a fin whale skeleton, will be granted the gift of conversation on Tuesday for a month-long project at Cambridge University’s Museum of Zoology. Continue reading...

National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh From Donkey Kong to Halo 3, the entirety of video game evolution is here – and you can play almost every console and cabinet Walking through the doors of this exhibition, you are immediately greeted by the PDP-10 - the gigantic mainframe computer that was used to program SpaceWar, considered by everyone except extreme computing history pedants to be the first recognisable video game. Next to it, on the left, a bright yellow working Pong arcade cabinet from 1972. Puck Man (later Pac-Man) and Space Invaders cabinets stand side by side just beyond. These are very familiar sights to anyone with a knowledge of gaming history, and they set the tone. If you’re a keen (or, let’s be honest, old) player then it’s highly unlikely that you’ll learn anything new at Game On, but you will nonetheless have fun. Beginning in 2002 at the Barbican in London, the Game On exhibition of video game history has been touring the world for all this time, only ever packed away entirely during the Covid-19 pandemic. It first came to Edinburgh later that year. Twenty-two years ago I dragged my dad along to this exhibition; this time I will be dragging my kids and encouraging them to have a go on the now-ancient games I loved when I was their age. Crucially, you can play almost everything at this exhibition, from Donkey Kong to Guitar Hero, Farming Simulator to Soulcalibur. One section pairs each console in gaming history with a defining game, another groups games together by genre, and a third is devoted to multiplayer, with four-player Halo 3 set up around a pillar. There are more than 100 games to sample and they form a well-curated nostalgia trip, focused primarily but not entirely on the 80s, 90s and 00s. Continue reading...