There has been a media storm in a teacup lately over Apple's iPhone (I suppose it makes a change from that wedding). It probably reflects the fact that none of the news media's technology correspondents are old enough to remember back to 1984 that they didn't point out the irony of Apple's famous '1984' advertising campaign. Because now, it seems, friendly ole Apple is really Big Brother. The brouhaha (love that word) arose because it was discovered that iPhones appeared to keep a list of places you had been. Oh no. Your privacy is breached. The world has ended. Everyone who is jealous of us iPhone users can now laugh at us for being smug. However, it seems that this was a mistake - this is just a file the phone uses to keep track of locations of the WiFi and phone masts it uses to help locate its position in all those useful position based apps before the GPS can kick in. To be honest, I think we make too much of privacy (as witness all the fuss about supe...

I'm neither a mad monarchist nor a rabid republican. I have no interest in royalty, but I think the associated pomp and circumstance does bring us good tourist income - and I'm not particularly worried about getting rid of our royals entirely. Apart from anything else, having a hands-off head of state strikes me as a good thing . It's just confusing when a country has a prime minister and a president, both highly active in politics. However, the upcoming wedding has got me thinking about the viability of the current setup. It really needs to change. A small point is primogeniture. The idea that any male should inherit ahead of his older sisters is just ludicrous and needs to be done away with immediately. But there are two other, bigger elephants in the room. The first elephant (think ears) is Prince Charles. I'm sorry, this ageing homeopathic organic biscuit seller and woo supporter is not someone I would like to see on the throne - and going on the polls, I'm ...

Part of a visual proof of Fermat's Last Theorem I was sent One side effect of writing science books is that people send you their ideas and scientific theories. Some science writers, I'm afraid are very dismissive of this, but I consider it a compliment. Most of the times I can't understand their theories, and if they run to any length I haven't got time to read them in detail, but it at least shows an interest in thinking about how the world works. It's also true that just occasionally someone has a real, significant idea that they send to a scientist or writer. The physicist Satyendra Nath Bose famously sent Einstein a few pages of scribbled thoughts on the way some particles behave like gasses. Einstein must have received vast quantities of rubbish in the mail, so the fact that he spotted Bose's work was interesting and responded implied that he must have at least glanced at this stuff. As I'm a writer not a working scientist (and certainly no Ein...

Our Easter special Royal Society of Chemistry podcast is a celebrity of the compound world. It's such an A-lister that we can refer to it by its initials and know exactly what we're talking about. And boy, is it  a big celeb. In fact it's includes the biggest molecule known in its family. What's more it's very much the life of the party. Literally. We're talking DNA. Take a listen! Apologies to regular readers - it may be a few days before the next post.

I am always amazed by the power of the word 'natural'. It can transform the most rubbish product into something desirable. And conscious though I am of this manipulation, I still feel the pull of its siren call. The same goes for terms that imply natural. I'm a sucker for crisps that say they have 'sea salt' rather than boring old 'salt.' And yet, when we rush out and buy sea salt at inflated prices, what are we actually getting for our money? First of all, very little difference in taste. I've never seen it done but I can predict that the best of chefs, faced with the same stew (or crisps) flavoured with sea salt and mined salt in a double blind trial couldn't taste the difference. The trouble is if they ever make the comparison they will taste a bit of fine grained mined salt and some chunky crystallized sea salt and say 'yes there's a difference' - which there is, but it's all down to texture. Second there's the matter of...

Game theory is a fascinating subject. The idea that you can, in some sense, simulate serious and important issues through games where rewards and punishments parallel our interface with reality is remarkable - and there is no doubt that games like the Prisoner's Dilemma offer real stimulation for the mind. However, you have to be careful how you use game theory - and I came across a prime example of getting it wrong today. I've just read the book Here on Earth by Tim Flannery for review. In it, he describes an exercise where a United Nations style response to climate change was simulated. In the game, each participant (one per nation) was given 40 Euros. The game had several stages, and at each stage the participants (in smaller teams) had the choice to contribute a small amount, a larger amount, or nothing. At the end of each round, the players kept any cash that was left over as long as their group hit a certain target. The aim was to raise enough money to conquer climat...

Putting stuff into space is an expensive (and dangerous) business. Let's face it, if you really had the choice, which would you prefer, taking off plane-style down a runway, or balanced on top of a tall, thin, pencil-balanced-on-its-end style structure? For that matter, the technology used to get stuff into orbit is very poor on the environmental side. Okay, hydrogen/oxygen engines are green, but the way various stages of the rocket are discarded is a tad wasteful. When the space shuttle was introduced, the idea was that this was a reusable and hence cheaper and less wasteful vehicle - but it still relies on those huge discarded boosters and fuel tanks. So if you really could do a plane-style rocket that could take you properly into orbit, rather than a Virgin Galactic sub-orbital flights, it would be quite something. Pie in the sky? Well, yes, it is right now. But a British company called Reaction Engines believes they have the technological concept to make it possible. Yo...

For a while now, some users of the Popular Science book review website have asked if it's possible to have a forum to discuss the books. The fact this hasn't existed to date has nothing to do with an aversion on my part - I think it's a great idea - and everything to do with my technical incompetence. Aware that this isn't really a very good excuse, I've set up as an experiment a Popular Science forum . It's linked from the main www.popularscience.co.uk site, but you can also get to it direct. I'm hoping that popular science fans will find this useful to discuss the books we review, any other popular science books and whatever they fancy in the arena of popular science writing. At the moment it's pretty rattling and empty because it was just set up - please do pop over and say hello. You'd be very welcome.

I've been sitting on this one for a while, but I can sit on it no longer. A few weeks ago there was a news story essentially asking whether children with no friends should be classed as special needs. I'm not entirely sure this was a serious story, it was probably just a reaction to something on a web forum. However, if someone was taking this seriously, it's worrying. There seem to be two problems here. The first is confusing cause and effect. It's entirely possible that children who do have very genuine special needs will not have any friends. For example, a child on the autistic spectrum may find it difficult to make friends. In this case, you certainly will have a child without friends who is special needs. But the lack of friends is not causal in this requirement, it's just a symptom. The second is the dilution of the special needs label. In a sense, all children are special needs. They are all individuals, and all have particular requirements for support...

I was delighted to discover that if you put 'wind up a scientist' into Google, the very first item that comes up is my post last year on this topic . Surely definitive proof that if you want to wind up a scientist, this is the place to do it (see the old post if you want to know why this date is the second annual wind-up-a-scientist day. Actually it will tell you why it's wind-up-a-scientist day - the reason it's the second one is because last year's was the first). The point is that scientists can take themselves a bit too seriously, something that is probably worth both celebrating and deflating. Last year I suggested many options, but this year I'd like to focus on a theme. What's your favourite item spoofing a real scientist (not fictional ones, that's cheating)? To lead off, I'd like to provide this rather excellent Brian Cox spoof:

Apologies if posts are a little off and on until after Easter - it's school holiday time again! There's a rather interesting piece about scientific beliefs on Derren Brown's blog . Apparently over a fifth of the population believe that light sabres exist, more than 40% believe in Back to the Future style hover boards and most mind-boggling of all, 18% of adults believe they can see gravity. (I think this must surely have been them misreading the questionnaire and thinking it was asking them if they could see gravy. I can see gravy.) But what I found most interesting of all was how much Derren Brown's post got wrong - so it's not just the British population that has misconceptions about science. For example, Brown's post crows that 30% of Britains believe that time travel is possible. Ho, ho, silly people! They've been watching too much Dr Who! Unfortunately, Derren, time travel is possible. Thanks to relativity, for example, every time we move or experi...

For a long time I have been teetering on the edge of mildly exploding (is that both an oxymoron and a mixed metaphor in one sentence? Ace!) about the popular use of the words 'icon' and 'iconic' as in 'Albert Einstein was an icon of the scientific age,' or 'this is an iconic song.' According to my dictionary this usage of a word that previously applied to a religious painting seems to have emerged around the 1950s. But the usage should concern an exemplar, something that is representative of the height of a particular culture or movement. So Albert Einstein can indeed be considered an icon, but the same doesn't go for many other uses. The way 'icon' is employed pretty well daily in the media, particularly on TV and radio, is much weaker. As long as someone or something is faintly well-known, they become an icon. So, for instance, according to The X-Factor , whichever hideous old song is being recycled on the show is an 'iconic song...

Anyone listening to Classic FM recently, amongst the interminable adverts voiced by Joanna Lumley (no, Ms Lumley, I do not want personal injury lawyer), will have come across ads for the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). These proclaim proudly that no dubious advertiser, even on the internet is safe. I think it's time someone reported these adverts to the Advertising Standards Authority, because in my limited experience, pretty well any bad advertising is safe - this agency doesn't seem to work. Admittedly I'm basing this on a very small sample. I have had interaction with them in two cases. The first involved a mail-based advertising campaign . In this case, the ASA had ruled against the campaign. They said it had to stop. Yet months after this, people were still adding comments to my blog day after day (until the events mentioned in the previous post occurred) saying that they had received the mailing that day. The adjudication did nothing to stop the mailings. It...

One of the joys of becoming a grumpy old man is that you can be honest about things you couldn't possibly say when you were young. For instance, while at university and for a good number of years after, if offered sherry (yes, children, we drank sherry back then) I would go for the dry stuff. I couldn't stand it, but this was the sophisticated thing to do, so I did. Similarly, back then, I used to go to a lot of concerts. Actually I listened to a lot of music, just sat and listened to records, which I wouldn't think of doing now. But the main point here is the concerts. Some concerts I have been to have been brilliant. I pick randomly an Al Stewart concert that was superb, and an orchestral concert at the late lamented Free Trade Hall back in the 70s, when the brass in some Shostakovitch symphony or other was so powerful it made your chest cavity resonate - that's what live music is about and it stays with me to this day. However, I have also sat through many (many)...

Regular readers can hardly have failed to notice the appearance of my new book Inflight Science , but today is the official publication date, which seemed worth marking. If you are toying with buying a copy, today would be a great day to do it! To say I'm pleased with this book would be an understatement - sometimes everything just seems to come together right with a book, and this is a prime example. It was genuinely great fun to write, which I think is half the battle. It is so much harder to make a book interesting if you are struggling to be interested in the topic yourself. One or two people have pointed out the irony that I hate flying, but funnily it really isn't an issue. I prefer to use other means of transport on environmental grounds, and if I have to fly, it scares me witless. But then most people either experience fear or boredom in flight - and I think that's why a book like this can be helpful, because it's a distraction and hopefully brings back some...

Every now and then the people in charge of the information on motorways get bored. If they have no warnings to give on those big signs, they put up a slogan or two. Now, I think they're missing a real opportunity here. Rather than saying 'Tiredness kills/Take a break' they ought to say something truly outrageous, like 'Slow/UFO ahead'. That way drivers would really wake up and take attention. Or they could copy the old US Burma-Shave signs that Bill Bryson is so fond of. The ones with the little rhyming slogans on a series of signs, for example: On curves ahead/Remember sonny/That rabbit's foot/Didn't save/The bunny/Burma-Shave - something like that would really make drivers sit up and pay attention. But no, they have to go for rather dull and worthy reminders. One that was in evidence on the M4 yesterday is illustrated above, and I think it's a disaster of a slogan. As a motorist when I 'think bike' I think of really dangerous hazards that ...

Joyce's incoherent rambling that gave a particle's name its spelling When the Finnish Academy of Sciences named a hypothetical quark this week, they kicked off an unsightly row that has shaken the physics world. Quarks are the fundamental particles at the heart of some of the more familiar inhabitants of the nucleus. Protons and neutrons are each made up of three quarks. The odd name 'quark' was dreamed up by physicist Murray Gell-Mann. It's often said he took the name from Irish author James Joyce, but Gell-Mann always denied this. He came up with a verbal name that sounded like 'kwork' (some purists still pronounce 'quark' this way). Gell Mann then spotted the quote from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake , and because the word looked a bit like his particle name, plus it came in threes, he adopted it as the spelling. Quarks come in six varieties, quirkly known as 'flavours' - up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. Now a group at ...