It's Royal Society of Chemistry podcast time again. We tend to think of chemists as, how can I put it, rather dull scientists. Not the oddballs of the science world. But take a listen to this famous chemist: I was sitting writing at my textbook but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gambolling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold confirmation: long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together, all twining and twisting in snake like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. This was the discoverer of today's compound, the magnificently named Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz speaking of his inspiration on a Clapham omnibus (no, really) that ...

Recently I had a little rant about antioxidants and how much they were misused as a selling tool by making it sound as if a product was better for you than it really was. I thought the way antioxidants were being pushed in food and drink was the limit of such dishonesty. Silly old me. I often find the rest of the family has borrowed my shampoo, so I sometimes get my revenge by borrowing theirs. Imagine my surprise when I discovered this morning I was washing my hair with a product that boasts antioxidants as its main selling point. Yes, it's Alberto Balasam antioxidant shampoo. How do they justify this? Here's the bumf: Pomegranate, the "superfruit" packed full of anti-oxidants, is now great for your hair too. This Pomegranate shampoo deeply cleanses and strengthens your hair and leaves it smelling "superfruity"! Oh, wow. Now, to be fair they don't make any claims for benefits from the antioxidant (or should I say anti-oxidant), and they even qualify...

I just heard Brian Cox getting himself in a real twist, arguing with Billy Bragg whether science was a belief system on Radio 4's Infinite Monkey Cage , coming from Glastonbury festival. I think our Brian's mistake was that he was arguing on a false premise. He could never win the argument because science is a belief system. But it is one that operates on totally different rules to a religious belief. When evidence comes up that counters a scientific belief (or theory as we call them), that belief is changed to match the evidence. Scientific beliefs are kept in line with our best information about the universe. By contrast, many religious beliefs are unchanging in the face of contrary evidence. So, for example, many fundamentalist Christians and Muslims believe that the Earth was created within the last 10,000 years. There are vast swathes of evidence to the contrary, but they just ignore the evidence and continue with their beliefs unchanged. I think Brian Cox would have...

If you look really closely you can see my name... Before I became a popular science author I spent a few years writing business books. Never one to miss up an opportunity, I wondered whether there was a chance to do a business equivalent of Ecologic - after all, businesses have plenty to win and lose when it comes to getting it right with the environment. I contacted one of my old publishers and the answer (as usual with a publisher) was no. And yes. While they didn't really want what I was offering, how about writing something on sustainable business (close enough to the Ecologic theme) for their new series, Financial Times Briefings ? The idea of the series is an interesting one that I've pondered in the past. If you address a book to a particular niche - senior executives and CEOs - what you need is not a fat doorstop, but rather a slim summary of the essentials. And even more interesting is the pricing model. Typically, slim summaries sell for less than an ordinary ...

I know it doesn't appeal to everyone, but one part of the book writing process I really enjoy is research. For example, when writing my book about pioneer moving picture photographer Eadward Muybridge ( The Man Who Stopped Time ) I spent many a happy day in the local history room at Kingston-upon-Thames going through box after box of their Muybridge archive, handling original letters and photographs by the man himself as well as many photocopies and duplicates. Anyone interested in really getting into the head of Charles Darwin might like to know that those nice people at the University of Cambridge have put scans of Dawin's personal library online . So far 330 of his books have been scanned with around another 400 to go. (He had 1480 books, but he didn't write in all of them.) Now these aren't Darwin's notebooks or anything so personal, they are books by other people, so you might think 'So what?' But Darwin was a top notch defacer, a librarian's ni...

This is the book that reminded me about Judge Dee These days historical murder mysteries are common fare. We might not hear much about Brother Cadfael any more, though the legacy remains, but I challenge anyone who likes their mysteries with a touch of history not to like the Shardlake series. However recently, while looking for a bit of fiction on my shelves to recover from a bit too much review reading, I re-discovered Robert van Gulik. In my teens I loved his murder mysteries set in seventh century China, featuring the remarkable Judge Dee Jen-djieh. Dee, based on a real historical character was a magistrate - a role that combined local admininstrative official, judge and CID inspector. van Gulik has an interesting style. While creative writing classes would probably reject him (he's fairly liberal with adverbs, for instance) he manages to set the scene using quite sparse description - he never gets bogged down in floweryness, yet you really do get a feel for the time a...

Sometimes the computing world comes up with a term that truly gets on my nerves, especially when it used portentously - few have succeeded as fully as 'the cloud' and 'cloud computing'. Part of the problem I have with this is why 'the cloud' is necessary at all? We've already got the terms 'network' and 'server' that seem to work quite well. By comparison, 'the cloud' is more than a little nebulous. (Smug smile.) However, it seems we're stuck with it. But there have been interesting signs lately of a split in the cloud. We now have (my terms) clean cloud and dirty cloud. Clean cloud is Google's vision. This puts pretty well everything on the net. (Sorry, in the cloud.) Your device will have a bit of storage for temporary work, but all your data and all your programs are online. When you want to do something you call up a cloud-based application and access your cloud-based data. It is, in many ways, a consummation devoutl...

I recently mentioned a few of the games that I had found made the iPad fun as well as a practical business and information tool - and I have been sent for review another game that has recently been added to the iPad store. Ivor is moving just as you remember If you are a certain age (or your children are a certain age) you probably have fond memories of the TV series Ivor the Engine . With its hypnotic voiceover, gentle imagery and rubbish animation it was somehow rather appealing (especially for those of us brought up on Noggin the Nog). The Ivor the Engine game brings all that Ivor used to be to an iPad app. The sounds and look are perfect. The music, the voiceover, those proto-beatbox vocal chuffs from the engine, they are all there. There are even the joins in the paper of the backdrop. There's authenticity, isn't it? The game play is straightforward with little hints popping up to start with to show you what to do. As you meander around Ivor's world, you will...

An antioxidant, yesterday. (Ascorbic acid) We are regularly bombarded with advertising about products containing antioxidants. 'Whoa! Healthy stuff!' we are supposed to cry. Because we all know that antioxidants are good to consume. Don't we? Even aircraft manufacturers have got in on the act. Apparently Airbus' concept cabin for 2050 include 'vitamin and antioxidant enriched air.' Now antioxidants are really good things. The antioxidants produced in your body do essential work in mopping up free radicals that can cause damage to cells. And tests where antioxidants are used directly on cells show a benefit. But here's the thing. There isn't any good evidence that consuming antioxidants gives you any benefit at all. In fact there may even be a small cancer risk as a result of the eating and drinking them. (This in itself should not be too worrying. Lots of good things have a small cancer risk attached to eating them. Celery, for instance.) Why, t...

At the moment you can hardly turn on Radio 4 without hearing a mention of James Joyce. We keep hearing about what a great writer he was. I'm sorry, but I just can't agree. Probably 99 percent of the population has never read any Joyce. And the majority of those who have attempted to read Ulysses (say) have given up because it is practically unreadable. Yes, I admit, Joyce has a small but very vocal cadre of fans, but I'd suggest the majority who nod to the genius of Joyce do so because of his repute rather than out of personal enjoyment of his work. I would like to be a trifle iconoclastic here and suggest Joyce is not a great writer at all. Being a great writer is about being a great communicator. Joyce is a rubbish communicator. I'd also like to suggest that you can't be a truly great writer unless your works appeal to the public at large. This doesn't mean you have to be writing populist tripe. You can be covering deep and troubling issues - but if you ar...

It's time again for the Royal Society of Chemistry podcast on compounds you just have to love. This time round, starring role goes to hydrogen peroxide, beloved of dangerous blondes and rocket scientists. You need to listen . You know you want to.

Quite recently I was getting all het up about electric cars , and how I'd quite like one if only they were priced more reasonably. I have to put my hand up right now and admit I was wrong. One of the huge differences between the approach taken by politics and science is that science has to be eager to admit mistakes and move on - and I got this one wrong on good scientific reasons. The trouble is, as was the central theme of my book Ecologic , and will crop up repeatedly in my soon to be released business book Sustainable Business , with green issues it is all too easy to let go of logic and go for emotion. And susceptible as I am to iAnything, I let logic go out of the window in my interest in an electric car. Rule number one with being properly green is to think holistic. I don't mean by this that you should go all fruit-loopy and do a quick meditational chant over your fuel tank, or try acupuncture on your tyres. I mean when thinking of the costs and benefits to the envi...

I've already waxed lyrical about the iPad for work purposes, but it is also supposed to be a fun device, so I felt obliged to check out whether you can play games on it in a satisfactory fashion. I have to confess I'm not much of a games player these days, but I was once. When X-wing and its sequels came out I spent days playing them, and for a few years one of my main sources of income was reviewing computer games for a magazine. The good news is, yes, the iPad does work pretty well as a game playing device. Ok, we're not going to get X-box/PS3 level of graphics, but it's pretty nifty. Once you've got over doing a labyrinth type game using the motion sensors to tilt the board, it's easy to find some rather nice backgammon games like the one illustrated above (just called Backgammon). You can play against a fair computer opponent, 2 player or online. Making a bit more use of the graphics, I've downloaded rather a nice pinball game in Pinball HD. Only 3 t...

Listening to the radio the other day I heard that parts of the UK are in a state of drought . This a trifle ironic after a weekend of heavy rain, but that wasn't enough to make the problems go away. We have had less water for this time of year than has been seen in the last 100 years. Looking at an aerial picture of the UK there seems to be something wrong with this idea that we could ever be short of water - we are surrounded by the stuff. The statistics are stunning. As I point out in Inflight Science , In round figures there are 1.4 billion cubic kilometres of water on the Earth. This is such a huge amount, it’s difficult to get your head around. A single cubic kilometre is 1,000,000,000,000 litres of water. Divide the amount of water in the world by the number of people and we end up with 0.2 cubic kilometres of water each . More precisely, 212,100,000,000 litres for every person. If you stack one person's share up in litre containers, the pile would be around 10 million ...

I don't really have favourites among my books. While there are some like First Scientist , my book on Roger Bacon, that are always going to be a bit specialist, and others like my most recent, Inflight Science , that have particularly wide appeal, I hope they are all going to sell well. But just occasionally, for some reason, a book doesn't get that sales drive. This happened to Upgrade Me . If I did have favourites, this would probably be one of them. What I usually try to do is explain science in a way that makes approachable. With Upgrade Me I admit (and perhaps this was the problem) I also did some theorizing. Yes it was based on good science/history, but I was setting out to show why I feel that biologists have got it wrong when they say that we haven't evolved in 100,000 years - because our technology has transformed us in a kind of artificial evolution. Take a simple example. A while ago I was walking the Ridgeway with a friend. It was a really hot day. Accordin...

I've been reading about Windows 8 recently, the totally redesigned Windows interface for the next version of the operating system, which owes as much to smartphones and iPads as it does to a traditional WIMP environment. My first reaction was scepticism. Don't get me wrong - I love the touchy-feely interface on the iPhone and the iPad. When did manipulating things with a mouse last seem enjoyable - which the gesture-based interface does. But surely things are different on the desktop? The enjoyably reactionary IT minds at The Register certainly feel this way. Although they give a lot of coverage to the iPad, they sarcastically refer to it as a 'fondle slab', and so, by extension call Windows 8 'FondleWindows .' The key phrase from their introduction to Windows 8 is: 'As even the iPad's biggest fans might admit, while it's a terrific viewing device, for office work it's actually a sub-optimal UI, for now. Nothing beats a mouse and a rich UI d...

I've have just emerged from around a week of email hell. Something had gone wrong with the mechanism by which emails were retrieved from my POP mailboxes to arrive in Outlook, meaning even a little iddy biddy text email could take a minute to arrive. Anything with an attachment was simply too big ever to make it. I naturally reported this to my hosting company, who faffed around a bit with no obvious outcome. But a day or so later they started displaying a notice saying that customers who used BT to get to their servers were experiencing slow-downs. Ah-hah! Time to get the well-oiled BT support machine whirring into action. Their first suggestion was an interesting one. I was to try pathping. I was vaguely aware that ping is a program for checking that a device on the internet is 'there' - pathping is apparently a cunning extended version of this that pings every hop along the way between your router and the final destination, and also does a test detecting packet loss ...

My Flipboard home page. Images are from posts I try really hard not to get too enthusiastic about the iPad too often, or people will get bored - but I can't resist pointing out the occasional app that really delivers for me. A Twitter page - each story is a tweet, but incorporates data from links (if there are any) One I'm rather pleased with is Flipboard . It's a beautifully laid out app that can tap into your Facebook and Twitter accounts, your RSS reader and also various interesting feeds from Wired to Popular Science magazine. Each appears as a top level box. Tap the box and it opens into the relevent stream of information - but rather than just provide a simple list of contents, it picks up any photos or web pages linked to and incorporates them into a newspaper-like format. The result is very impressive. I like using Tweetdeck for reading Twitter, but Flipboard takes Twitter to a new level because you don't have to click through to find out what a link re...

A couple of weeks ago I had coffee with Doctor Happy Mac . He may sound a bit like a cross between a Bond villain and a Macdonalds character, but Doctor H M (aka Andrew Stephens) is in fact the man to know in the Cirencester/Swindon area if you have problems with Apple products and want them fixed. Or just a bit of Appley advice. As it happens our conversation was not primarily about computers, but I thought Andrew's invitation to have coffee at the particular location we ended up in made an excellent allegory for my deliberations on whether to buy a Mac or a PC as my next desktop computer. 'Come and have a coffee at Made by Bob ,' he said, 'and you'll never fancy a Starbucks again.' Now there is no doubt that the Made by Bob coffee was nicer than the equivalent in Starbucks, and the place certainly had more interesting food (not that I tried any). But the thing is, Starbucks is within walking distance of my office and provides free wi-fi. Made by Bob is a 1...

After a blog post (now removed) claiming to be from a Sony Music executive, the national newspapers now report on behind-the-scenes allegations about Britain's Got Talent . There are several allegations that, if true, are truly unpleasant. We all know when we watch a show like Britain's Got Talent or X-Factor that we are being manipulated. They tug on our heartstrings with sob stories that have nothing to do with talent, and have been shown in the past to be using electronics to 'fix' bad singing. However, what this article suggests goes much deeper than manipulating emotions. There are two allegations I want to cover. One is that all the winners of Britain's Got Talent and X-Factor have been specially invited, rather than waiting in line for auditions. They are people the producers and/or Simon Cowell's company already knew about and were asked along to timed auditions with the panel, rather than having to queue with the rabble and be pre-auditioned by ...

Apologies if it seems this is a heavy music week, though to be fair my earlier post was only using music to get to catchphrases. We've seen heavy defenses of Parry as an English composer recently - I think Ralph Vaughan Williams should get more recognition. But, you say, this is the man who wrote the Classic FM listeners' favourite piece, The Lark Ascending . True. But Vaughan Williams has tended to be sneered at by the serious music mafia. After all, the man was a 20th century composer who liked tunes! Terrible. I think part of the problem with appreciating RVW is that some of his big orchestral pieces verged on the mediocre - his true genius was in small music. Yet this isn't the kind of stuff that sniffy musical bigwigs bother with. I admit I'm biassed. I live all of five miles down the road from Down Ampney where Vaughan Williams was born. But the bias mostly comes from having sung some of his music that is wonderful. The particular piece I love most is calle...

As a break from reading popular science books for review I try at least once a month to dip into some fiction. My latest venture was to revisit two science fiction classics from my youth. At first glance they couldn't be further apart. Fritz Leiber's 1943 Gather Darkness ! tells of a future where high technology is used to create a fake religion to quell the masses, while Brian N. Ball's 1965 Sundog is a rollicking space adventure - yet the similarities between the two books would prove remarkable. I ought to put in a brief proviso in case anyone had the idea of reading one these books - please do, but bear in mind they are of a different age. Even the greatest Dickens fan would admit that to the modern eye he can sometimes be dull and ludicrously wordy. Similarly, these books use much more exposition of the main character's thoughts than would happen now. The technology also, inevitably lets them down. Interestingly the biggest failing in both is IT. They are set hu...