Every now and then I think it's a good idea to dip into a basic aspect of physics that may not have been in the school curriculum. Take, for instance, the quark. I don't refer to the low fat cheese sometimes given this name but the particle at the heart of every atom in your body (and everywhere else for that matter). Proton structure Once upon a time we talked about the basic particles in the nucleus in the middle of the atom being protons and neutrons. They haven't gone away, but they are no longer considered fundamental particles. Each is made up of three smaller particles – quarks. There’s a whole mess of quarks distinguished by characteristics known as flavors (no, really). The different flavors are charm, strangeness, top/bottom and up/down. (Even the more prosaic names can sound a bit odd with antimatter versions. One is the ‘anti-bottom quark.’) The proton is two ups and one down; the neutron two downs and one up. Up quarks have a 2/3 charge and down quark...

The cover of my rather ancient Penguin copy I occasionally like to revisit books I've read before, and recently picked up a title from my shelf by an author that seems to have almost disappeared from the collective memory of science fiction - John Brunner . When I was in my teens and early twenties, Brunner was everywhere in the SF bookshops. He was a prolific author, and frankly some of his books were poor rushed jobs. But his best were excellent, and deserve to be remembered. His most famous title is probably Stand on Zanzibar - not one of my favourites, but interesting in its use of news clippings etc to give the book a different feel. It's an over-population book and I was never thrilled by disaster novels. For me, one of his best was The Shockwave Rider . This used Alvin Toffler's extremely popular (and very inaccurate) stab at futurology Future Shock as a model. That part in itself wasn't very interesting, but Brunner gave us images like the computer vir...

It's   Royal Society of Chemistry podcast   time again, and in this podcast I'm dealing with a slippery customer. PTFE - or teflon if you prefer was not invented. It was discovered by accident. And, in case you've heard otherwise, it wasn't a spin-off of NASA's space effort - they used PTFE, but it had been produced for years before NASA was even formed. And as for the involvement of a French housewife...  Take a listen .

We drive over to France at least once a year. It's a lovely place to visit and the roads are much nicer to drive on than ours. But I am getting a little tired of the game played by the French authorities where each time you go, they think of a new thing you have to carry in the car. Recently it was a reflective jacket. Next a reflective jacket for everyone in the car. And this year it's breathalysers. Yes, unless you have a breathalyser in the car you can get an on-the-spot fine. I'm really not sure what they are for. After all, if you use your breathalyser, even if it comes up clear you can't drive, because you won't have a breathalyser in the car (OK it's a twin pack, but you know what I mean). It's hard not to see this as a way to rake in easy fines. So I've been thinking about what next year's imposition might be. And I reckon it will be a corkscrew. You will be fined if you don't have a corkscrew in the car. This is partly because it is ...

There is no doubt that the best detailed source of information on the real science that is being done is in the published papers that scientists are required to turn out to prove that they are still alive and working. But the problem for everyday human beings is a) They are often expensive to get access to (hence the open access business that gets the likes of the excellent Stephen Curry so worked up)  b) The are often almost unreadable unless you are already an expert in the field. A new initiative called The 21st Floor Wiki Project aims to change that be asking scientists to contribute a page to a Wiki for each paper they publish that explains what the paper says to the general reader. It sounds a great idea, though I suspect many scientists couldn't be bothered to do it, and if they did do it would struggle to make it readable. However, let's not damn it before it's tried. Here's more details from the handy press release. Why not take a look at the real thing...

There's a nice game used by economists and psychologists to help understand human decision making that I investigated for The Universe Inside You called the ultimatum game. In it you and a second person are asked to make a decision about some money. The two of you mustn’t discuss your decision in any way. You are given £1 (say) to share. There are no strings attached, it is a genuine gift, you simply have a decision to make before the money is given to you. The other person decides how the money is split between you. They can split it however they like. The money can be split 50:50, they can keep all the money to themselves, or they can give you a penny and keep the rest… or split it any other way they like between the two of you. You then say either ‘Yes’ and the two of you will get the money, split between you the way the other person decided, or ‘No’ in which case neither of you gets any money. There can be no discussion between the two of you. This game has been under...

After they'd packed up the crew's kit was quite compact (bottle for scale) - but this was still no iPhone job Last week I had the fascinating experience of a film crew coming round to my house. I've done TV interviews in the past, but never had this level of direct exposure to the visual media at work. I've had suggestions that I was engaged in an episode of Wife Swap or something similar. In fact it's both much less and much more at the same time. It's less because what I did will probably result in 10 seconds on screen, and it's more because this wasn't Channel 4 but a role with a Hollywood connection. I'll reveal more when we get closer to the date, but the interview was for one of those bonus features you get on a movie DVD. It was about time travel and will accompany a science fiction movie that will be in the cinemas in September. What made it rather exciting was that I was sent a preview DVD of the film (with dire warnings about what...

The Olympics has quite rightly generated a lot of enthusiasm for sport in the UK after all those shiny medals were won, and that's fine. To be honest, I found the Olympic thing much more interesting than I thought I would. But there is one clamour that I think needs a little balance. We have Boris Johnson, for instance, weighing in saying that schools should institute 2 hours compulsory sport a day like he enjoyed at school, and all the Tories are baying about the importance of forcing competitive team sport on young people. I absolutely understand their aversion to 'everyone is equal and there are no winners and losers' type inclusive sports days. But. In all this enthusiasm to force our youth into as much compulsory competitive sport as possible, spare a thought for the poor people like me who hated sport at school. I didn't mildly dislike it - I truly found it the most unpleasant experience of my life. Think of the poor sods like me who were truly rubbi...

Full marks to any movie buff who can say which classic cult film from the 1980s gave me the ability to include a mysterious gas and robins in the title of this post. Take a guess... ... no, go on, I can wait... ... any idea?... It was, in fact, David Lynch's Blue Velvet , which I have heard much of and have finally had a chance to watch thanks to Netflix. It would be an exaggeration to say I liked the film, but I am certainly glad I've seen it - and unpleasant though it is, it's hard not to admire Lynch's work. The gas in question is the one inhaled at various points by the truly menacing figure of Frank, played by Dennis Hopper. I'd read somewhere before watching the film that this was helium, so I was expecting some scenes with a bizarre silly voice - it might have worked in a menace-by-contrast way, but his voice never changed - so it wasn't helium. (I do find it amazing that a very rare element, so difficult to keep on this planet that it was first d...

I am generally dubious about the whole A La Recherche de Temps Perdu thing, a) because I suspect (I've never read it) the novel is a load of pretentious tosh and b) because it is scientifically incorrect. When Marcel Proust tediously droned on about childhood memories evoked by the taste of a Madeleine cake dipped in tea, he was using the wrong sense as a trigger. Maybe he should have gone for a smell. While it apparently isn't true that the sense of smell is the strongest when evoking memories (vision wins), it does seem from the way the neurons fire in the brain that the first time a smell gets tied to a particular object or activity it kicks of considerably more energetic brain activity than it does on other occasions - so first smell associations appear to be powerful. I had one brought back to me the other day when, for reasons we don't need to go into, I ended up boiling a pan of mushy peas on the stove for 25 minutes. I was instantly transported to my grandma...

The fourth in my series of posts on nature's nanotechnology, also featuring on www.popularscience.co.uk The image that almost always springs to mind when nanotechnology is mention is Drexler’s tiny army of assemblers and the threat of being overwhelmed by grey goo. But what many forget is that there is a fundamental problem in physics facing anyone building invisibly small robots (nanobots) – something that was spotted by the man who first came up with the concept of working on the nanoscale. That man was Richard Feynman. His name may not be as well known outside physics circles as, say, Stephen Hawking, but ask a physicist to add a third to a triumvirate of heroes with Newton and Einstein and most would immediately choose Feynman. It didn’t hurt that Richard Feynman was a bongo-playing charmer whose lectures delighted even those who couldn’t understand the science, helped by an unexpected Bronx accent – imagine Tony Curtis lecturing on quantum theory. Feynman became be...

Unlike the inestimable Henry Gee, I am not a 100 per cent supporter of everything Boris Johnson does and says - though I think a lot of people do underestimate him. There's one thing, though, from my experience of visiting the Olympics last Friday, for which I award Boris a gold medal (or LOCOG or whoever thought of it). Quite unexpectedly, along with our Olympic tickets we found day passes for London Underground, busses etc in our jolly Olympics welcome pack. Leaving aside this saved us around £30 on what was inevitably quite an expensive day out, it was such a good idea. It felt like a positive gesture - we were getting something for nothing we would otherwise pay for - and it encouraged people to use public transport to go to the games. Best of all, it looked like joined up thinking. I was a little worried that the tickets would only take us to and from the venue, but we happily made an excursion to Covent Garden (no, not the opera house ) on the way back with no trouble. ...

Another Fred and George, now sadly no longer with us I've always been interested in the things that inspire writers of fiction. I'm not talking about that painful interview question 'Where do you get your ideas from?'  which makes every writer cringe. That is silly indeed. But there are certainly things that point writers in certain directions over and above the output of their own creative juices. I was inspired to think about this in a big way while re-reading, for a spot of summer light relief, one of the P. G. Wodehouse  Jeeves books - to be precise, The Inimitable Jeeves . It struck me that consciously or unconsciously J. K. Rowling (notice a similarity in the authors' names?) must have been influenced by a pair of characters in this book. Specifically there are twins, named Claude and Eustace, who are at college when we meet them. This pair are always up to mischief, either simply causing havoc or, if possible, running dubious schemes to make themsel...

Are you a humanist? Should you care? Take a look at this short, interesting video featuring some quite well known people talking on the subject, and then I'll share my thoughts with you. Okay, what did you think? My feeling after watching it is that I quite like a lot that goes with being a humanist, apart from one huge assumption that all those taking part seem to make, which is that if you are a humanist you must be an atheist. You see, I think the most scientific religious viewpoint to take is to be an agnostic, and I don't see any conflict with being a humanist. If you are an atheist you say 'I refuse to be open minded. I KNOW what the truth is and no evidence will sway me.' I don't think that's scientific. As an agnostic, I would say I don't think there is clear evidence either way, so it would be silly to take a Dawkinsesque stand on the subject. Just to draw a parallel with a science issue, take the business of string theory. There is no evide...