The www.popularscience.co.uk website has been sent for review a book called Shapes by Philip Ball . It's an interesting book about shapes in nature - everything from why shells have a particular form to why a zebra's pattern looks like it does. Something the reviewer drew to my attention, was a fascinating observation about a creature for whom the idea of prime numbers isn't just a bit of abstract maths, but a matter of life and death. Apparently there are some cicacada species whose life cycle tends to operate on prime numbers - say a 13 year or 17 year period. Most of their life they are tucked away safe underground, but once every 13 or 17 years they pop up to breed and are vulnerable. It has been suggested this is a self preservation thing. Typically the number of predators around go through regular peaks. Imagine your life cycle was 12 years rather than 13. Then you'd be particularly susceptible to predators with a 2, 3, 4 or 6 year peak, if that peak synchroni...

A little while ago I mentioned how impressed I was with the Mail Chimp service handling email newsletters. Those nice people at Mail Chimp were kind enough to send me a T-shirt for the mention - I had intended to include a picture of me modelling it, but #2 daughter snaffled it from desk and I don't know what she's done with it, so I've had to make do with a generic picture of it. What I've been particularly fascinated with is the reporting that goes along with a mailing. Rather stupidly, given the number of newsletter type emails I don't bother to read, I had assumed that most would be opened - but no. As it stands, nearly a week after sending out a newsletter to the recipients from the Hymn CDs site , I find that just 34.7% have been opened. In case you think this makes my newsletter unpopular, I ought to point out that, according to Mail Chimp, the industry average is 19.2% opens, so I'm doing pretty well. What isn't clear is just what 'opened' ...

I've got a cold, okay? By now, just nine words in, half the female readers of this blog will be sniggering behind their virtual hands, muttering 'man flu.' (I know who you are. Thanks to Google Snickertrak™ technology, I have your IP addresses. This won't be forgotten.) Well, those of you thus sniggering are wrong. I don't think I've got flu. I've had that, and I know it's much more debilitating. With nothing more than a couple of paracetamols I've been able to do the school run - if it had been flu, I would still be in bed, groaning. (Be careful. Snickertrak™ is still operating.) However, I think this idea that men can't cope with the most trivial of illnesses overlooks the fact that a cold is not very nice . My head feels like it's stuffed with cotton wool, I've a sore throat and my nose is dripping so much that had I been give a hose attachment during the night, I could have substituted for a fire engine. So, yes, it's not...

Yesterday was the IVCA Clarion Awards at the BFI in London. It spans a wide range of communication media - film, video, TV, radio, posters and... yes, books, all covering areas of social responsibility/ethics/environment. I went along because my book Ecologic had been shortlisted in the book category. It was an interesting experience. Not too different from your standard awards ceremony as you see on TV, but winners were strongly discouraged from making a speech - they mostly just took the award, posed for a photo and got off, which meant it all went very briskly. Books were towards the end of the list - while waiting with increasing tension, some of the clips shown of the visual entries were fascinating, particularly a series of short films in the style of The Sims for Holocaust Awareness - brilliantly done - and a viral campaign about child pregnancy. When it came to the books there were three other strong contenders, so I was genuinely shocked when Ecologic won and I had to go up a...

In the UK, there is an increasing culture that implies that all adults are dangerous to children, unless proved otherwise. We are terrified of a strange adult coming near a school (despite the fact that by far the majority of really nasty crimes against children are committed by family and friends, rather than strangers). One result of this climate of fear is that we routinely expect people who go into schools on a professional basis to have a Criminal Records Bureau check - and there is going to be an even wider reaching scheme in place from next year, which has caused many protests from high profile authors, which seems to incorporate CRB checks, though I'm not quite sure how. I've relied in the past on a CRB check done by a charity, but now I've joined an organization called National Association of Writers in Education , which will do the CRB check for me - because one of the ludicrous things about the way CRB checks are run is you can't apply for certification ...

I've just finished reading Marcus Chown 's new book We Need to Talk about Kelvin (in the shops in a couple of weeks time), which starts from everyday observations to probe different aspects of basic physics and cosmology. The final chapter is a little different, in that the concept being probed doesn't have a good scientific theory to cover it - it's 'why aren't the aliens here?' The point is that it's a huge universe that should contain many planets capable of supporting life. So you'd expect there to be lots of intelligent life out there. And dismissing most UFO sightings etc. as the errors and wishful thinking that they indubitably are, we are shockingly short of alien observations. Why aren't they on the street corners? Why don't we see their probes and receive their messages? In practice, the 'street corners' question is easy to answer. Aliens are just as limited by the speed of light as we are - and it is a very big universe. S...

At risk of sounding a grumpy old man (okay, okay, I am ) - small print sometimes really gets up my nose. I hate those adverts that say 'We guarantee to beat your insurance quote'... and then in the verbal small print at the end they say 'minimum premium applies, terms and conditions apply' - i.e. they are lying when they say they guarantee to beat your quote, they will only beat your quote if it's more than a certain amount, and if you meet their terms and conditions. But the specific thing that got me going was the bottom of my receipt f rom the Post Office. An innocent enough slip of paper, but it announces firmly 'This is not a VAT receipt.' The first response is that there are billions of things it's not - why did they bother to tell me about this one? It's not a fire engine. It's not a supernova. But they didn't tell me that, did they? But being more reasonable, why isn't a VAT receipt? Why can't all receipts be VAT receipts? Aft...

The white goods company Electrolux has been running a lab design competition to come up with designs for domestic appliances for 2099 (as, apparently, Electrolux is 90 years old). There are eight finalists who have come up with various unlikely possibilities, of which the most fruit-cakey are the two I have included here. I'm all in favour of designers being given a bit of free rein with creativity, but there seems to be a problem with the criteria used to select these designs. Two essentials are missing. Scientific practicality - will this be feasible in 90 years time? - and practical relevance. Who would want a domestic appliance that does this? Each of these 'novel' ideas falls down at one of these hurdles. The first is a teleporting fridge. According to designer Dulyawat Wongnawa: Technologies seem to be progressing at an increasingly faster rate nowadays. In the next 90 years, we will see a lot of technologies that today we think are completely impossible. Even though ...

In my book Ecologic , I look at the way that what's apparently good for the planet isn't always the best thing to do, while the ideal solutions are sometimes anything but obvious. When we try to sort out our priorities for tackling global warming, the natural inclination is to either invest in ways of reducing emissions - better household insulation or making it easier to avoid flying, for instance - or look for opportunities to actively oppose climate change - for example with big sunshades or seeding the ocean with iron. But there is something else we ought to be investing in, as is brought out in this interesting article in New Scientist . It argues, successfully to my mind, that we ought to give more consideration to the psychology of climate change. Almost all the lack of action is down to psychology and its interplay with politics. If we can change the way individuals and governments see the risk involved and what it means for us all, there's a hope that climate cha...

I often tweet about a new blog entry, but this is a rare example of a blog entry from something I've already put on Twitter. I rather enjoy bad signs. But there's a certain hierarchy. It's not good enough that a bad sign should be in chalk, or run off on a laser printer. It should be expensively set or painted... like a sign on the side of van. And then it has to be more than just a casual apostrophe. While I'm irritated by the greengrocer's apostrophe (the one used unnecessarily in plurals, such as carrot's or CD's), that's not enough to make a truly bad sign. But this one, I feel, is a cracker. I was driving past and had to stop the car and jump out to take a photo, it was just so wonderful. I'll purvey yours, if you purvey mine!

When Radio 4 gets boring (which sadly is quite often), I tend to flit over to that airwaves resort of the middle-aged, Classic FM . They even occasionally play a piece I haven't heard and like, which is nice. And worryingly, I quite often find myself agreeing with David Mellor 's taste. But I have to agree wholeheartedly with a whingeing person on the Now Show a few weeks ago (probably Marcus Brigstocke ), in saying that I get really depressed with Classic FM's obsession with classical music being relaxing . Yes, of course it sometimes is relaxing - but equally it can be exciting, thrilling, energizing, heart-pumping, inspiring and more. Though my terminology has mellowed with age, I still agree with the sentiment in the way I considered my favourite classical music as a student to be 'orgasmic.' By all means, Classic FM, have your relaxing moments - but give us some fire, some passion too. Listen to something like Barber's Agnus De i, and hear pure angst for ...

This is a strange tale of the a secret underground civilization with an incredible power source... and how they are linked to a primary school trip to the swimming baths. When I attended Littleborough County Junior School we didn't have a local swimming pool, and had to be bussed over to the big baths in Rochdale. I remember well those elegant Ellen Smiths coaches, emblazoned with a ferocious big cat on the side, that used to take us, but of the baths themselves I can only remember two things. One was the awesome high diving board. None of us ever went anywhere near it, yet it hung over the baths with a sense of real menace at the thought of plunging from the top of it. The other memory was afterwards, waiting for the coach to pick us up in the entrance hall on cold but sunny winter days (it always seemed to be winter), getting a hot Bovril drink from the vending machine. It's the only place I ever had anything to do with Bovril. We didn't have this rather s trange beef ext...

I was over at the BBC earlier this week, recording a couple more elements for the the Royal Society of Chemistry 's series of podcasts Chemistry in its Element - but it was an earlier recording that has just been added to the oeuvre - and it's an element that I have to confess to knowing little about before making a start on this podcast - lanthanum. This is a successful bit part player of an element with fingers in a lot of chemical pies... and it gives its name to one of the floating rows of the periodic table. But its best claim to fame is probably dating things so old that nothing else would consider even a blind date. Take a listen , and find out more. Powered by Podbean.com

I came back today. It's hard to imagine that three years ago this was a busy little road, thronging with cars in the rush hour. Of course, it was inevitable that when the UK had to be evacuated things would gradually fall apart. In some ways it's surprising that there hasn't been more deterioration. I keep expecting to come around a corner and find houses occupied, children playing. On the whole, the tarmac has survived well. There was just the tiniest sign that nature was beginning the gradual process of destruction. A small clump of grass that had broken through (just above the leaf at the bottom). But it is the way things will go from now on. I don't know why, but I found the Give Way sign, soon to be hidden by the plants, particularly poignant. Give way to what? Emptiness. I don't think I will come back to these islands again. It's too sad. Too sad. If ( like me with Derren Brown ) you aren't happy with the explanation of these photos, here's an alte...

I was determined not to jump into the explosion of blog comments on Derren Brown 's lottery prediction trick - but something I heard yesterday has persuaded me to make the leap. For non-UK readers, Derren Brown is an illusionist, who last week 'predicted' the lottery results on national TV - then a couple of days later, explained that he had got these results by having a group of people guess them, averaging the results, and reiterating the process. Allegedly, as the group got to know each other, the results got better. I'm not bothered about the trick itself. Let's be clear - he didn't predict the lottery results, he showed them after they had already been broadcast, using a totally spurious legal argument as to why he couldn't show them before. So all the trick came down to was 'how did he transfer a set of numbers onto some balls quite quickly without us seeing?' - basic stage magic, nothing to do with seeing into the future. What really irritat...

I'm sure it's one of those management guru words of wisdom, doing and listening are different things , but I'm thinking more of music. Every now and then, someone asks me to buy a ticket to a concert. 'You're a singer,' they'll say. 'Wouldn't you like to come and hear the Tregrundy Male Voice Choir in concert?' Well, no, I wouldn't. I do like listening to some music, notably Tudorbethan church music (there was an excellent programme on Tallis and Byrd on over the weekend - you can still catch it as I write on iPlayer ). But my general attitude is typified by the way I feel about barbershop singing. I first sang barbershop while at university, from the excellent Songs of Yale book (accept no substitutes). Singing barbershop is great fun - about half way between performing and getting drunk, really, which I guess I why it appeals to students. I've done it on and off with ad hoc groups ever since. But I can think of nothing worse than...

I don't care what all the jokes say, or those Daily Mail stories about lorries going 300 miles out of their way through tiny villages, I find my sat nav intensely useful. Particularly when navigating in unknown territory on my own, it's fantastic. There's not a lot of point, though, if the maps are out of date, so I subscribe to an update service and the other day, I received an email from Tom Tom, informing me that a new set of maps were ready for download. Well and good. But there was something about the email that stopped me in my electronic tracks. It began as follows: Dear English Bas Now, bearing in mind that Tom Tom is a European company, it was hard not to fill in the implied '...' and complete the third word in that greeting with 'tard'. Oh, ho, I thought (as no doubt did many others), here's a Tom Tom employee with a grudge, sending out a naughty (if truncated) email. A few hours later I received another email from Tom Tom, which I have copied ...

Occasionally you use something online that's so good you want to spread the word. I run three newsletters, one for the Popular Science website , one for my creativity website and one for the hymn CDs website . These have, frankly, been a pain to maintain because I've done it manually, compiling a list and sending out emails to multiple blind copies. I always knew that there were services for doing this, but I was too tight to contemplate the expense, and when I've investigated mailing services, they have seemed byzantine in complexity, clearly aimed at professional email marketers, rather than humble list managers like me. The service that has transformed by view is Mail Chimp . It really is straightforward. You can cut and paste an existing list in (or import a file), it does all the list management, and it's easy to produce newsletters with all the gloss of a good professional mailing. The only slightly scary bit is that you have to set up a list and a first mailing ...

It's not often I find myself strongly aligned with the Prince of Wales. In fact, it's such a rare occurence that I found it decidely difficult to type that previous sentence. Yet there are some aspects of his views on architecture that I can't help but applaud. I'm not saying 'down with all modern stuff' - I like much modern architecture. Nor do I share his enthusiasm for neo-classical - I've always found classical architecture sterile and cold. But I do agree that those who are responsible for designing our domestic architecture should make more reference to architectural tradition. We now live on a modern development that is anything but a collection of oversized shoeboxes. With reckless abandon, whoever designed it has plundered architectural styles to produce something that works wonderfully well. Whether it's the rather French-looking house we now live in, or something that would fit well in a London street, they have used scale and style to make it...

I can't claim to have a great memory, so it always amazes me when I witness a feat of memory from someone else. Not those trick abilities to memorize phone books or trivia, but rather when someone dredges up a clear memory from a time when everything is a hazy blur for me. A few weeks ago I had a great example of this in an email I received out of the blue. It was from someone a similar age to me, whose family bought our old house when I was 11. We're talking 1966 here. I really don't need to say that was a long time ago. Here's part of the email: I seem to remember you had a real shock of red hair!! Your dad had a train set in the front little bedroom. Didnt he run the model trains in Springfield Park? ... and, of course, he remembered my name. By contrast, I can remember nothing of him and his family. Or the people we bought our new house off at the time. It's not just hazy - there is no memory at all. Nothing. (For that matter, I don't even recall my ...

In all the excitement of moving house I haven't mentioned my new book, Before the Big Bang , which is now available. It explores the latest theories on the origins of the universe and what came before it, including: Why there is more doubt about the Big Bang theory than is often stated How our current best ideas on the origins of the universe came into being How the universe could have been started by a collision of membranes in multidimensional space Why the Matrix isn’t necessarily all fantasy How the universe could be in a black hole or a hologram How ‘before’ is meaningless in the standard Big Bang theory … and much more. Here's an extract of a review on Kirkus Reviews: Excellent popular history of how humans understand the universe... British science writer Clegg (Upgrade Me: Our Amazing Journey to Human 2.0, 2008, etc.) excels in recounting the struggle over our universe’s origin, which most—but not all—agree lies in a vast primeval expansion known as the Big Bang. Read...

As a writer, I've been fascinated by the idea of ebook readers for some time - I've had a sneaky go with the Sony Reader sample in Waterstones, but I couldn't imagine what it was like to use a lump of metal and plastic instead of the real thing. This made it doubly interesting to be asked to review ebook readers for a magazine. I can't comment on the results - you'll have to wait until the magazine is out in November - but I can consider on the overall experience. As it happens I was re-reading the Sherlock Holmes stories, which made it easy to flip my bedtime reading between paper and the various electronic offerings. The good news is that they were easy to read, and no problem to substitute for the paper. But I confess, I prefered a conventional book in every case. I'm not one of these 'it's the smell of a book, the tactile experience, etc., etc.' people. It was simply a more pleasant experience (and you don't have to turn the page so often). P...

I've always been one of those fussy people who keeps their books in neat alphabetical order by author. It just seems right somehow. But I've made the accidental discovery that a disordered bookshelf can be a fun bookshelf. When we moved into the new house, the priority was to get rid of boxes, rather than be too careful about what went where, and though I'd got rid of about 1/3 of my books before moving, there were still many more boxes of books than anything else. So to get things moving, I just threw things on the shelf any old how. And somehow, I rather like the sense of danger from never quite knowing which book you are going to lay your hand on next. I've already rediscovered the Sherlock Holmes short stories, something I probably wouldn't have dug out of the alphabetized shelves, but that leapt out at me from the random collection. I don't know if it will last, but for the moment I'm going to keep it this way. I'm embracing the dangerous bookshelf.

One of the joys of moving house is becoming a connoisseur of telephone systems. With a whole host of organizations to contact, particularly while we were without a usable internet connection, the phone became a vehicle for an exploration of the darkest corners of wild and wonderful voice menus, encountering recorded messages from the seductive to the terrifying. Thankfully, the days are long gone when you were likely to be subjected to a tinny electronic rendering of Fur Elise , or some such masterpiece, but the masters of phone automation have come up with many alternative tortures in its stead. I particularly like the artistry of those voice systems where the hold music is interrupted every five seconds by a voice telling you to hold on, because your call is important to them. Every time the music stops you think 'this is it, I'm through' only to get that tedious message once more. Even more evil are the systems that occasionally throw in a ringing tone. That, you think...

Last Thursday I was wandering the streets of Bath with a couple of hours to waste. Foiled in my intention to pop into the abbey and hear evensong (Thursday was the only day it wasn't on, for some reason), I enjoyed some people watching around the Pump Rooms and Roman Baths area - but had then to resort to that inevitable time waster of the modern era, the coffee shop. In the toilet of this establishment I was inspired to snap a photo of a notice on the wall. It had two outstanding qualities. One was the magnificent way it trampled over English grammar. What can we make of the sentence By pulling this cord to activate the disabled alarm ? We are left dangling. The anticipation is electric. Then comes that second statement. Staff will immediately enter the toilet . A terrifying image springs to mind. A black-clad task force of armed barristas, smashing down the door and crashing in... and quite possibly taking a dive into the toilet bowl. All in all, a notice to treasure.

In fact, two very American elements. I've been busy again contributing to the Royal Chemistry Society 's series of podcasts Chemistry in its Element . Celebrating US science, I've covered two elements - Americium (the only element whose discovery was announced on a children's radio quiz) and Californium , an element that failed the naming conventions. Enjoy. Powered by Podbean.com

I'm back - many apologies for the enforced absence. I blithely assumed that modern technology would keep me connected and working through my house move. Ah, sweet innocence. Between houses we spent a week in a holiday cottage, but I wasn't worried, as it was advertised as having WiFi. Despite sterling efforts from the cottage's owner, I could only get a signal while sitting in the car park... and never managed to get past login security. No matter, I also had a Mobile Broadband dongle giving internet access over the mobile phone network. But there wasn't a signal at the cottage. I could get one by driving a few miles, and could (painfully slowly) pick up my email, but replying was a nightmare because the mobile folk didn't provide an outgoing mail server and my ISP wouldn't allow me into their server from the mobile link. Still, it was only for a week. Hah. Once established in the new chateau Clegg, I was still having trouble with the mobile dongle. It d...