Mrs Heseltine is currently a trustee of the Imperial War Museum, but Downing Street said she would stand down when her present work there was completed. The new appointment, with a general election so close, may raise a few eyebrows, but Mrs Heseltine has a long-term interest in the V & A, which houses collections of fine art, craft and design. She has been a visitor of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford since 1989 and is also a member of the Tate Gallery British art consultative committee. Professor Christopher Frayling, rector of the Royal College of Art, becomes an ex-officio member of the V and A board of trustees and like Mrs Heseltine, Professor Christopher White, director of the Ashmolean, also joins.. A top-secret United States spyplane which flies on the edge of space at five times the speed of sound crashed at the British experimental airbase at Boscombe Down, Hampshire, in September 1994, according to a report in a leading military aviation journal. The SAS, the report said, was scrambled to throw a cordon round the wreckage, which was flown back to the US two days later, The hypersonic reconnaissance aircraft, called Astra or Aurora, is believed to have been developed in the 1980s as a secret US government "black programme". Officially, the US denies the aircraft exists, although there have been many reports of mysterious sonic booms and sightings. This is the first report of such an aircraft crashing.The British Ministry of Defence and the US Defense Department both denied the story yesterday but David Oliver, the editor of Air Forces Monthly, said that Royal Air Force officers had been among the sources in a two- year investigation of the incident, and that he was sure the report was true."We have no doubt that an incident did happen on the day in question and it has never been satisfactorily explained by the authorities", Mr Oliver said yesterday.Air Forces Monthly is widely read in the MoD and in the defence industry, both in Britain and in the US. The report says the Astra (Advanced Stealth Reconnaissance Aircraft), or AV-6, or Aurora, crashed during take off on runway 23 at Boscombe Down on the evening of 26 September 1994.

London Air Traffic Control Centre was alerted that a serious incident had occurred. Later that night a witness reported seeing a tarpaulin screen around the front of the aircraft surrounded by a number of emergency vehicles. The witness said the rear section of the aircraft appeared to be raised, suggesting the nose-wheel had collapsed.Witnesses also saw and photographed men in plain clothes arriving during the night, who were later identified as SAS. The following day an Agusta 109 helicopter - one of four captured Argentine helicopters used exclusively by the special forces - arrived. "The SAS arrived twice", Mr Oliver said.The wreckage was kept under a tarpaulin in the corner of a hangar but was seen by witnesses when the doors were opened to bring out a Buccaneer aircraft. The next unusual event was the arrival of a giant C-5 Galaxy transport aircraft which is believed to have flown the wreckage back to the US on 28 September.Reports of the new aircraft have been around for five years.

In April 1992 a US radio ham intercepted a transmission from an aircraft descending from 65,000 feet, a height only reached by the Space Shuttle and the Cold War spyplane the U2 (later renamed TR1). Concorde, the highest-flying and fastest civil aircraft, cruises at 59,000 feet.In August 1992 unexplained sonic booms were measured over the Netherlands, prompting questions in the Dutch parliament. The path of the aircraft suggested it had flown from RAF Machrihanish on the north-west coast of Scotland. In December that year The Independent reported claims by the crew of a boat in the North Sea that they had seen an Aurora and produced an artist's impression similar to the latest impression in Air Forces Monthly.On other occasions radio hams intercepted transmissions from unidentified high-flying jets requesting permission to land at Machrihanish, though that airfield has now closed.. Robots were always meant to lend a helping hand: and this one does, literally.

It is a robot prosthetic hand strong enough to hold a weight equivalent to four kilogram bags of sugar, which is self-contained apart from batteries and two printed circuit boards. Built by a team at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre and the engineering science department at Oxford University, the hand is intended to replace a human one and is operated by sensing the movement of the muscles in the user's forearm. "The most important thing about a prosthetic is that it should be more like a pair of glasses than a hip replacement," said Peter Kyberd, who helped develop the hand over the past three years."It should be something you put on in the morning and just wear, that you don't need training to use."He is shown here operating the hand at the Robotix show in Glasgow's McLellan Galleries, where a huge variety of robots are on show for the next three days.A number of amputees in the Oxfordshire area have already tried prototype versions of the hand, developed at a cost of pounds 127,000. Dr Kyberd thinks that, for the moment, it is more effective to operate it via the muscles than by techniques requiring surgery, such as a direct attachment to the nerves that were linked to the hand."Nerve attachment would be a huge invasion," he said. "This is better in that it just uses surface attachment: you tense muscles to close and open it, and to touch and to squeeze. If it feels that what it is touching is slipping, it will squeeze tighter."The maximum that the hand can squeeze is roughly 4.5 kilograms.

A normal hand can manage more than 10 times that amount - a range which Dr Kyberd says would be feasible for a robot hand, "though it would run the batteries down faster".. When Treasury questions started yesterday, there was a strange form occupying three or four inches of green leather on the third Tory bench, something that really shouldn't have been there. Who was this hunched figure - the clothes hanging loosely off the bone: a jacket draped from the scapulae, a pair of trousers covering femurs and humeri, a lank lock of hair flopping over the bare skull? Give the spectre a scythe, and the picture would be completed. That old thespian Michael Fabricant - usually drawn to any celebrity or curiosity like a gaudy moth to a flame - suddenly learned the value of geographical discretion, and banished himself to a bench a long way away, from where he stared at Death with the round-eyed horror of a child. It was ousted Tory rebel Sir George Gardiner, now the only representative on earth of Sir James Goldsmith and the Referendum party; a John the Baptist sent amongst us to tell of that which is yet to come And this Baptist is well-cast. If he hasn't been dining only on locusts and ditch-water for twenty years, he sure looks as though he has. Except often he doesn't finish the locusts.Two rows in front of him, taking up enough space for five Gardiners, was his polar opposite, Ken Clarke. Ken has enough colour in his cheeks for two men; George would fail to lend hue to a paramecium Ken likes going to jazz clubs; George enjoys funerals.