There are an estimated 91 million “orphan works”, according to the UK government. These are artworks, photographs, diaries and letters and other historically important documents, of which the copyright owners cannot be located. And now, under a new licensing scheme in the UK, some of these works will be made accessible to the public for the first time. The change in rules means that filmmakers, publishers a ...

For the first time, the books that make up Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree series will be adapted for cinema. Enid Blyton died in 1968, but that hasn’t stopped her stories from remaining a favourite for generations of children around the world. She remains one of the world’s best-selling authors of children's books, selling more than 600 million copies worldwide. There are four books in The Faraway Tree seri ...

Today marks the launch of the Doctor sharing some of his vast knowledge with six to 12-year-olds through the medium of gaming. He’ll be doing this through a new game from the BBC, called The Doctor and the Dalek. As part of the BBC’s drive to develop the UK’s coding ability over the next year, Make it Digital, the game aims to introduce children to coding and programming and improve their computer skills. T ...

Sometimes it can feel as if we are paying a lot for performance tickets, especially if it turns out we didn't enjoy the show as much as we were expecting to. But a comedy club in Spain has come up with a novel way for customers to only pay for what they “use”, thanks to facial recognition software. The Spanish government sharply raised the tax on theatre tickets from 8% to 21%, which caused ticket sales to ...

You may have heard of the holodeck from Star Trek - an enclosed room in which people and objects are simulated and holographic images are projected. Inside the holodeck, you can be anywhere you want to be and it has been the pipe dream of technology companies for decades to be able to create one. But it could become a reality! Or, at least, something very similar to a holodeck has finally been created! Micr ...

The Lady with an Ermine... How about just The Lady? A recent discovery from French scientist Pascal Cotte has shown that even some of history’s most famous artists don’t get it right the first time, and can change their minds about their work. Mr Cotte, co-founder of Paris’ Lumiere Technology, spent three years using his Layer Amplification Method (LAM) to analyse the well-known painting from Leonardo da Vi ...

The creative sector is worth around £71 billion per year in the UK, but companies have said that they find it hard to recruit employees who are proficient and up to speed with the latest technologies. To tackle this issue, the Minister for Culture and Digital Economy Ed Vaizey has announced that the government and several creative industries have pledged cash to help fill the skills gap. This will be done t ...

Mojang is the ingenious company behind the hugely popular open-world video game Minecraft, and it has just been bought by tech giant Microsoft for a staggering $2.5 billion (£1.5 billion). The game, described as virtual Lego with extras, allows players to build an entire world using retro Lego-like blocks, while also enabling them to battle other players and explore the huge map of this blocky world. Minecr ...

Back in March, we told you about the new pound coin to be introduced by the Royal Mint in 2017, which will include some of the same counterfeit-proof tech found in Britain’s banknotes. When George Osborne made the announcement in this year’s Budget, he explained that one pound coin in every 30 is a fake, which costs both businesses and taxpayers millions every year. So, for the first time in 30-odd years, a ...

There is no denying it: Sir Patrick Stewart is a legend. In fact, he is one of the greatest and well-loved legends of our time. And he appears to age at a much slower rate than the rest of us - he looks just as he did when he first graced our screens as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation almost 30 years ago. It isn’t just on the big screen or theatre that he shows us just what a brill ...