This is the third in my Nature's Nanotech series also featured on www.popularscience.co.uk If you’ve ever seen gecko walking up a wall, it’s an uncanny experience. Okay, it’s not a 40 kilo golden retriever, but we are still talking about an animal weighing around 70 grams that can suspend itself from a smooth wall as if it were a fly. For a gecko, even a surface like glass presents no problems. This is nature’s Spiderman. It might be reasonable to assume that the gecko’s gravity defying feats were down to sucker cups on its feet, a bit like a lizard version of a squid, but the reality is much more interesting. Take a look at a gecko’s toes and you’ll see a series of horizontal pads called setae. Seen close up they look like collections of hairs, but in fact they are the confusingly named ‘processes’ – very thin extensions of the tissue of toe which branch out into vast numbers of nanometer scale bristles. These tiny projections add up to a huge surface area that is in ...

I quite often get asked if I'd like a book for review. If it's not self published and it's a science book, it's usually an easy yes. With fiction, it's very much a matter of whether or not it tickles my fancy - hence the review a while ago of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children . So when I received the offer of Carla McKay's The Folly of French Kissing , not an obvious choice of reading for me, I at least weighed up the pros and cons. On the plus side it was set it France, which I love, and the puff comments ('The Gallic equivalent of something out of Midsomer Murders...') caught my eye. I like a touch of murder if it's British in feel, and this was an ex-pat novel. On the downside it really wasn't the kind of book I usually read (and the cover, according to the chick-lit convention, seems to suggest it's aimed at women). Now the publisher did themselves no favours sending me a bound proof to review. I hate reading from bound ...

It's   Royal Society of Chemistry podcast   time again, and hard though I may try, I can't totally ignore the Olympics . What does 'The Olympics' say to the compound-loving chemist? The achievement? The national pride? No! The Lycra. We may mock the weekend cyclists puffing along in their shiny Lycra shorts, but the fact is it's an essential these days for many sports. And Lycra turns up in some surprising places. So maybe it's time to slip into something stretchy and find out more.  Take a listen .

Does this get you pregnant? Sorry if that title sounds a bit like an obscure scientific paper, but there's an important point to make. I was listening last night to a radio documentary about domestic violence among military personnel and it made the most fundamental scientific blunder. It missed a phrase that should be tattooed on the hand of every broadcaster: ' Do not confuse correlation and causation .' Let me take a step back with an example that was used on my Operational Research masters course. For a good few years after the war, the pregnancy rate in the UK had a strong correlation with the import of bananas. When more bananas were imported there were more pregnancies. Fewer bananas, fewer pregnancies. The amusing response is that the bananas were causing the pregnancies. But to accept that at face value is to miss two other possibilities. One is simple reversal. The pregnancies could be causing the bananas. By this I mean that there could be a causal connec...

This is one of a series of articles co-hosted with www.popularscience.co.uk Living things are built on hidden nanotechnology components, but sometimes that technology achieves remarkable things in a very visible way. A great example is the ‘lotus leaf effect.’ This is named after the sacred lotus, the  Nelumbo nucifera , an Asian plant that looks a little like a water lily. The plant’s leaves often emerge into the air covered in sticky mud, but when water runs over them they are self cleaning – the mud runs off, leaving a bare leaf exposed to the sunlight. Water on a lotus leaf Other plants have since been discovered to have a similar lotus leaf effect, including the nasturtium, the taro and the prickly pear cactus. Seen close up, the leaves of the sacred lotus are covered in a series of tiny protrusions, like a bad case of goose bumps. A combination of the shape of these projections and a covering of wax makes the surface hydrophobic. This literally means that it fears...

A skeuomorph sounds like a baddy on the set of Alien vs Predator , but in reality a skeuomorph is an object or feature that copies the design of, or is made to look like something else. And it's a topic of much soul searching among Apple fans at the moment. Apple's skeuomorphic podcast app There are some aspects of skeuomorphism few would question. Functional skeuomorphism is why spreadsheets look like sheets of lined paper accountants used to use, why a word processor is a bit like typing on a piece of paper, or why a button in a computer interface looks like - well - a button. However the aspect that is causing some concern is a tendency to go beyond function to appearance for appearance sake. This can be a good thing - some kinds of decorative skeuomorphism work well with a computer. So, for instance, brushed aluminium goes well with an iMac. But the problem is with decorative appearance based on non-tech stuff like leather bindings on the address book and calend...

Sorry, not really a post, more a shriek of excitement, but I had to mention that the Universe Inside You is on the same 24 hour Kindle offer that took Inflight Science up with the likes of 50 Shades of Grey . Today (Saturday 21 June) it's 99p from the UK Kindle store and $1.54 from the US Kindle store . When I last looked was #63 on the paid Kindle list: hope to get it all the way! Please spread the word... Here's a bit about it: Built from the debris of exploding stars that floated through space for billions of years, home to a zoo of tiny aliens, and controlled by a brain with more possible connections than there are atoms in the universe, the human body is the most incredible thing in existence. In the sequel to his bestselling Inflight Science , Brian explores mitochondria, in-cell powerhouses which are thought to have once been separate creatures; how your eyes are quantum traps, consuming photons of light from the night sky that have travelled for millions...

The recent furore (well, furore in teacup) over Free Schools teaching creationism has made me quite angry. We have seen the creationist/intelligent design lobby in the US over the years use all sorts of dirty tricks to try to sneak creationist pseudo-science onto the agenda. But now those opposing religion, specifically the British Humanist Association, but also plenty of others who should know better, are resorting to their own dirty tricks, and it's not good enough. If you want to make your point by using good reasoned argument, you mustn't cheat or you will be ignored when the truth comes out. The problem I have is this. There is every good reason to oppose creationism, which in its most extreme ('young Earth') form says God made the Earth, essentially as it is now, 6,000 years ago, and in its watered down ('old Earth') form says God made the Earth as it says in Genesis in the Bible, but over a longer timescale. Creationism is biblical literalism. Howe...

I've been reading a lot on psychology recently for a book I'm writing and was fascinated to discover just how much doubt there is about the whole business of suppressed memories. The idea that we can find memories so horrible that somehow the brain will edit them out has no scientific basis in origin, coming from the work of Freud and his ilk, who simply made things up as they went along. Freud's work has largely been removed from the the scientific viewpoint, but the idea of repressed memories got left behind. It's time we forgot it. To make matters worse, we now know that processes like hypnosis are quite good at implanting fake memories. So when a 'therapist' tries to regress someone to get to memories that have been suppressed - of child abuse, say, or alien abduction - instead of getting to hidden memories what they are doing is constructing new ones. There are fascinating experiments where by simply being told a convincing story repeatedly even individ...

I've mentioned before the powerful aspects of networking as identified very clearly in the interesting book  Wikinomics (see details at Amazon.co.uk or at Amazon.com ) - unfortunately it's something many companies haven't got a clue about. I was just rapidly emptying my inbox of commercial newsletters, which I have a habit of accumulating in the hope of winning a year's supply of electric bananas or some such essential, when it struck me how many of them came from that strangely named person 'donotreply' AKA 'noreply' AKA 'dontreply'. Even the rather witty weekly roundup from the IT intelligence site Silicon.com comes from a non-human sounding address silicon@newsletters.silicon.cneteu.net that it seems highly likely won't get you anywhere if you send an email to it. These companies who employ 'noreply' are, frankly, dumb. Organizations spend a vast amount of money on building a relationship with customers - yet the very mo...

This is the first of a series of features on www.popularscience.co.uk that I will also be featuring on my blog: When we think of nanotechnology, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that we are dealing with the ultimate in artificial manufacturing, the diametric opposite of something that’s natural. Yet in practice, nature is built on nanotechnology. From the day-to-day workings of the components of every single biological cell to the subtle optics of a peacock feather, what we see is nanotechnology at work. Not only are the very building blocks of nature nanoscale, but natural nanotechnology is a magnificent inspiration for ways to make use of the microscopic to change our lives and environment for the better. By studying how very small things work in the natural world we can invent remarkable new products – and this feature is the first in a series that will explore just how much we can learn and gain from nature’s nano tech. As I described in The Nanotechnology Myth the t...

A while ago I eulogised on the subject of barbecue sauce . I admit I am practically an addict - yet I ought also to recognise an older allegiance that is still there. Because I am also very fond of brown sauce. This is something that could only be invented (or at least named) in the UK. In France it would be (and is) sauce picante. In the US it would be super-tangy fruitified meat sauce or something. But here it's brown sauce. Brown. Plodding. Tells you nothing but the colour, nothing of the delights that lie within. For me there is nothing better (sorry barbecue, but you don't cut the mustard) to go with, say, a sausage or a pie. I confess (though this is a personal oddity) I have it with fish and chips. But the ultimate has to be as an accompaniment to a cooked breakfast or a bacon sandwich. Those who go for ketchup in these circumstances totally miss the plot. So essential is it to have this accompaniment that even those bastions of US imperialism McDonalds and Starbuc...

It's   Royal Society of Chemistry podcast   time again, and this time round we're having a laugh. In fact it's a gas. Nitrous oxide to be precise. Why not spare five minutes for a giggle - and you'll learn a bit as well about a substance that had them rolling in the aisles over a hundred years ago and has become popular at parties again. Take a listen .

This is the sort of thing you can do with cheap power When I was researching my book  Ecologic  I came across one of those irritating quotes that seem to belong to more than one person. (The classic example of this phenomenon is the aphorism 'Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal' or its variant 'Good artists copy, great artists steal', which are attributed to T. S. Eliot, Stravinsky and Picasso.) A popular quote that the media use to show how misguided early fans of atomic energy were is that they thought it would be 'too cheap to meter.' A fair number of UK sources attribute this to one of the British pioneers, Walter Marshall. But I am yet to find a single reference as to the context in which this was said or written, if it ever was, by Marshall. What seems to have a stronger attribution is that these words were said by the chairman of the US atomic energy commission, Lewis L. Strauss. However the context in which he said this is absolutely...

Warning - this post contains asterisks I gather from the news that a footballist by the name of John Terry is in court because of saying something to another footballist called Anton Ferdinand. For me the court case highlights a perversity in the law that I've mentioned before, but this brings it out stronger than ever. According to what I remember from last night's news (so wording may not be exact), Ferdinand taunted  Terry about his extra-marital affair and used an obscene gesture. In response, Terry said to Ferdinand 'F*** off! F*** off! You black c***!' and it is this phrase that has landed him in court. As someone with once red hair, who got the usual taunting when younger, I think it is totally unfair that this is treated totally differently to what would have happened had Terry responded to a red-haired player by saying 'F*** off! F*** off! You ginger c***!' In those circumstances I presume there would have been no case. Surely the law itself is ...

I'm currently reading the new edition of Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things which is an excellent book debunking pseudoscience and superstition, from the man who is probably our best known media sceptic. However, at one point, Shermer does trip over his own assertions. (I point this out in the same spirit as that of Bill Bryson, using examples of bad English that he found in guides to English usage in his own guide.) Shermer is careful to first explain the difference between the scientific method and the way most pseudoscience is reported. (He doesn't mention it, but I love Robert Park's encapsulation of this in Voodoo Science as 'data is not the plural of anecdote'.) Shermer tells us that in science we should be scrupulous about presenting data that goes against our theories, rather than being selective with the observations. But then, only pages later, he indulges in a little selectivity himself. To illustrate the recent growth of scien...

Okay, there are some causes that not everyone buys into. If you are dog lover, for instance, you might not want to contribute to the cat's protection league. But there is one cause I feel everyone can get behind. Who doesn't love a good zombie? Even better, who doesn't love a zombie crawl? If you happen to live in sunny Herne Bay you can go along and see one on November 3rd 2012 - but even if you don't, you can give those zombies money to stop them scooping out your brains electronically by clicking through to JustGiving . Best of all, rather than trying to eat your money, said zombies are giving the donations to Kent Air Ambulance. Awww. Sweet.

We're going on Higgs hunt, Going to catch a big one! I'm not scared - been here before. And haven't we just. With rumours flying wildly that the discovery of the existence of the Higgs boson (or that nautical favourite, the Higgs bosun as some members of the press will unerringly refer to it) would be announced from CERN yesterday morning (and in the end it was, sort of), it was fascinating to see the US Tevatron team rushing in with a non-announcement earlier in the week that they might have seen something that might be significant. This is ironic in a way, because the US should have been here first with the heavy guns. The Superconducting Super Collider was going to be the machine that finally laid the is-it-isn't-it saga to rest on the Higgs boson, a.k.a. the God particle. After spending around 2 billion dollars on it, funding was pulled when the option was to either continue this or the US contribution to the International Space Station (which, incidentally...

Someone whose gig I would go to Musically speaking, I was a strange child. The first album I ever bought, age 11, was Elgar's Dream of Gerontius (Barbirolli, I think). To be fair, we were doing it in the school choir, I didn't just didn't randomly feel the urge to buy it. I was 15 when I first bought a contemporary record - the Beatles' Abbey Road . Similarly, while all my friends were going to gigs by Tyrannosaurus (sic) Rex and Van der Graaf Generator, I...wasn't. I just wasn't interested. Since then the closest I have come to a rock concert has been Cliff Richard (don't laugh - I didn't go voluntarily), the Flying Pickets and Al Stewart. (Now that was a brilliant gig. Next time Mr Stewart is touring in the UK I will be along there like the proverbial gig ferret.) Now I've always said, if there's one band I really would like to see live it's Pink Floyd. I love their music and they allegedly gave great shows. Realistically it is ne...

Leaving aside the fact that the title of this blog post would make quite a good mild expletive - something definitely due a comeback after all the explicit four letter words on reality TV - it reflects a frustration I've finally decided to finish. Taking the dog for an afternoon walk in pale autumn sunlight [ok, this is a repost of an old one, but to be honest, pale autumn sunlight seems about the best we can hope for this July], our path was crossed by a creature resembling a stretched limo version of a mouse. But was it a stoat or a weasel? Which is the mouse-sized version? My frustrated lack of ability to remember is stoked to greater heights of fury by a friend and ex-King's Singer (but that's another story) I occasionally go for a walk with, who has the habit of gnomically uttering 'a weasel is w-easily recognised as a stoat is s-totally different' or some such remark, which doesn't help a great deal. If I read Wikipedia right, the weasel, as we know...

A journal which I'm sure is very readable A while ago, straying through the depths of Nature Network , I saw an item on writing more readable papers. There may well be several out there - it's a hoary old topic. I don't dispute the suggestion that many scientific papers could be better written, but in the end, however approachable, they are unlikely to get a reprint in Heat magazine, so it is still a matter of writing to the audience. Without doubt, though, it's a relief when the writer of a paper adopts a lighter tone and writes like a human being, rather than a robot. I suppose the best known instance of putting a human face to a paper, which some have held up as a shining example of what's possible, is Einstein's paper on subjective time. The abstract reads: When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute - and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity. In the paper he allegedl...