Science in Action is at the UK's Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition, hunting for dark matter, melting ancient ice, cleaning up disused mines and looking for the batteries of the future. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth (Image: Pile of used batteries ready for recycling. Credit: Mindful Media via Getty Images)
I'm Rory Stewart and I want to talk about ignorance.
I will die without having read everything that was written in classical Latin, because ignorance isn't simply the opposite of knowledge, it's part of what it means to be human.
Just about every game I can think of involves ignorance.
There's no adventure without ignorance.
There's no narrative.
The long history of ignorance from Confucius to QAnon.
With me, Rory Stewart.
Listen on BBC sounds this leafy side street in central London is actually home to the Royal Society, Britain's oldest scientific academy.
Isaac Newton was a fellow here, so was Charles Darwin.
And every July they host a festival of some of the best things that are going on in science in the UK.
I'm Marilyn Peace.
I'm here for science in action from the BBC World Service.
Let's head in.
There's 14 exhibit stands here, from the tiny worlds of nanotechnology up to the vastness of the cosmos as revealed by the James Webb telescope.
And I can't get them all in the show, but this stall brings together uk researchers and scientists from the Philippines on green mining.
I think this wants to look.
We are from Natural History Museum and we are presenting here one of our projects which is focusing on green mining.
So we are trying to make mining as nature friendly as possible, or at least return the post mining areas to usable state condition.
And we are applying multiple technologies and approaches for this.
So for example, we have here drones we are presenting here which are used to monitor the area and estimate the damage that has been done to the nature and what needs to be done.