Approaching the town hall This is a time of year that is associated with good news, so it is great to be able to bring some good educational news when we are always hearing bad things about schools, universities and Michael Gove. Just over a week ago, though it seems a lot longer thanks to Christmas, I was at Rochdale Sixth Form College 's awards ceremony. Located in the imposing Victorian gothic grand hall of the Town Hall, the event was a celebration of the year's leavers' achievements, the majority now at university, and it turned out to be one of my favourite events of the year. My role was to give a motivational speech and to hand out around 200 certificates, accompanied with the obligatory smile and photo - which sounds like a very repetitious task, but saying hello to all the different students made it surprisingly enjoyable. With RSFC student of the year Rhiann Canavan The reason I say it was good educational news was down to the remarkable achievements...

The graphic that made me grumpy When I made the remark online 'I sometimes feel that the period between Christmas and New Year is what being retired would be like, but with more tinsel', someone kindly pointed me to the Twixtmas website . The website itself is excellent, promoting the idea of doing something worthwhile with those days - but there was graphic on it that made me slightly grumpy (rare though I know this is). I've said it before and I will say it again, because it needs repeating. We do not need to do anything to preserve the earth. It is utterly pointless trying to 'save the earth.' I don't say this because I am full of doom and gloom, but because given a few million years (a teeny snippet of time in the Earth's lifetime) our planet can shrug off any environmental messing up we can manage. The earth does not need saving, we do. Unlike the earth, we need very narrowly fixed environmental conditions to survive comfortably - conditions, i...

Wishing you a happy Christmas and an exciting and inspiring New Year.

 Earlier this year I was surprised and delighted to be the answer to a question on University Challenge , the venerable and much-loved quiz show, so I was even more filled with jollity to be asked to appear on the Lancaster team for the Christmas edition of the show, which features graduates with a little more experience of life, the universe and everything, rather than the usual youths. The format otherwise, though, is the same, down to the sizzling quizmastership of Jeremy 'Take No Prisoners' Paxman. The result of the invitation was a trip to the ITV studios in the glossy new MediaCity development that has transformed the old Salford Docks into something rather glamorous. Across the water, Coronation Street actors smoulder on their new set, while in the main development BBC and ITV come together in a friendly merge that is somehow well reflected in the way ITV makes University Challenge for its old rivals. MediaCity is worth an exploration in its own right - and we we...

Most simple inorganic compounds - think sodium chloride, for instance - are amongst the more  familiar substances. But boron nitride, just boron and nitrogen is something most of us have never heard of. Which is amazing when you consider how remarkable it is. Because its electronic structure is similar to carbon it can take all the forms that carbon does, from an equivalent of the wonder material graphene to a diamond substitute - and often it does the job better than the original. So prepare to get all abrasive as you  hurry over to the RSC compounds site  to see more on this useful inorganic compound. If you'd like to listen straight away,  just click here .

But don't say I didn't warn you.

Ho, ho, ho! It's that time of year when we're dashing around madly, but at the same time work sometimes slows down a bit. When better moment to take a break from thrashing around for a little light entertainment. And so we proudly present the Now Appearing Christmas Mostly Musical Quiz . There is no prize (though do feel free to add a comment saying how you did) - just the satisfaction of knowing stuff. Or not. No Wikipedia or Google cheating please - just try from the top of your head. The answers are down below. 1. Why do Rangifer tarandus abound this time of year? 2. How would you distinguish Father Christmas from Santa Claus in an identity parade? 3. A certain rhyme in depth: a) Which poem introduced Santa's reindeer (a bonus if you can give both titles)? b) Who wrote it? c) Five years either way, when was it written? d) Which two reindeer have variant spellings of their name (a bonus for the variants and why)? e) Who wrote the poem that introduced ...

What's happening here? Whatever it is, it's not worth examining I had the pleasure last week of speaking at event for heads of science from secondary schools in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Before my own session I sat in on their get-together where they were primarily discussing the many and byzantine changes to the exam system that the government and Mr Gove's latest whims have brought about. Two things struck me as an outsider. One was that, rather than simplifying the exam system, every change seemed to make it more complicated. Rather like the way the tax system has got more and more complex over the years, the exam system, particularly once you take in GCSEs, iGCSE equivalents, GCE, BTEC, requirements for the eBac, the three buckets* etc etc has become a tangled mess. Frankly both could do with a 'start again from the beginning', though I accept that the last thing teachers need is yet another upheaval. However one specific thing stuck out like the ver...

There is a long tradition of humorous fantasy that has followed two broadly diverging paths - a more sophisticated route in the UK (typified by Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, whose writing, though apparently science fiction could probably be more accurately classed as fantasy) and a rather less subtle approach in the US. This American genre varies from the hugely entertaining Amber stories of Roger Zelazny (which are primarily adventures, but maintain the wry humour of a noir detective story) to downright silly but fun romps like Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming (also by Zelazny). But I had not realized quite how far these books could go in intensity of groan production until coming across Board Stiff . The book was written by Piers Anthony, a long standing member of the SF and fantasy community who may never have been quite in the first rank, but has turned out many readable tales over the years. It was, I admit, with some trepidation that I approached the book when it...

I am delighted to welcome J. S. Watts as my latest guest blogger.  J.S.Watts is a UK writer. She has written three books: two of poetry, “Cats and Other Myths” and the multi-award nominated “Songs of Steelyard Sue” ( published by Lapwing Publications) and a novel, “A Darker Moon” (published by Vagabondage Press). She has had a long term interest in mental health issues because of family issues and her work in education. She has served on various Mental Health Act panels and been a Mental Health Trust governor. See her website  for further details. GUEST POST I’m actually a little hesitant about writing this guest post. I mean, what’s a poet and fiction writer doing writing for a science based blog? Do I have the scientific chops for this? Also, by choosing to share some thoughts on the tricky subject of religious delusion in the seriously mentally ill, I know I could be treading on thin ice and who knows what lies beneath? Let me be upfront about a few thi...

Image reproduced with the permission of the Whitaker Museum and Gallery I have recently had this painting brought to my attention and I couldn't help be fascinated. It's called 'girl at a Preston loom' and it was painted by one William Clegg in 1869. I've no idea if William was a relation - Clegg is a fairly common name in Lancashire - but I can't help be drawn to the image. Apart from anything else, it was unusual for painters then to represent such lowly figures, so it's a rare example of a painting of what was then a common sight. But apart from the coincidence of name, it also grabs my attention because my grandmother started work in a cotton mill at an early age and my suspicion is that, though the machines were probably rather larger in Annie Pickersgill's day, the technology was likely to be very similar. To my shame I can't remember exactly when Annie started work - I know that she began to attend the mill for half days before she l...

It seems particularly appropriate with Christmas on the way, when a lot of us have a bit more time to dip into fiction, to be reviewing a young adult fantasy novel in ebook form that would appeal to adult readers as well. Val Tyler 's Shadows Beyond  takes us into a world where the teenage Emtani must travel from the only life she has known in a small village to the unknown of the city, where her young sister has been taken as a slave. With grotesque crime lords, a glossy upper city with a horrible secret and a dark underbelly where the Luciphorous Factory leaves slave workers horribly disfigured, it has the feel of a dystopia, but without the total absence of hope that tends to make dystopias ultimately too depressing to be an enjoyable read. Despite all the trials and horrors Emtani and her friends go through, there is a positive side to their experience too. In some ways this isn't a book I would naturally be attracted to. The fantasy element involving headlets and sha...

What colour is a beam of blue light? Not long ago I facetiously commented on Facebook that electrons were pink. The next day, an X-ray crystallographer asked me 'As someone with a physics background, what colour would you say an electron is?' I almost fell off my chair. But once I started to think about it, it's a really interesting question - and one that might be worth first approaching by asking another apparently silly question. What colour is a beam of blue light? The answer certainly doesn't have to be blue. Before I explain why, let's put relativity out of bounds. Once you start moving, colours are moveable feasts - think blue/red shift. But I'm envisaging a much simpler situation. I show you a beam of blue light and ask you what colour it is. I can guarantee you would not answer 'blue'. To avoid distraction, what I will do is shine the blue light down a cylinder with a black interior, turn the lights off in the room and open a door on t...

Here's another guest post from Richard Sutton, who introduces himself: From San Rafael, California on a windy January in 1952, it's been a wild ride. My folks never settled down until long after I'd moved to a cabin I built on a commune in Oregon, but I couldn't sit still -- the wanderlust was in my blood. After college,  I hitchhiked to New York City in 1973. There I met my wife on Canal Street and finally found a home. I learned my first craft post-college, spending 20-plus years in the trenches of NYC advertising and publicity as a graphic designer, marker-pen-jockey, art director and copy writer. I served the needs of a wide range of clients from corporate multinationals to non-profits and small retail businesses. I now limit my design and marketing work to book covers and collateral marketing for authors. Somewhere in there I began writing fiction and short stories and began trading in authentic American Indian arts. My first novel, The Red Gate , was released in...

Infinity, as no end of people keep telling me since I wrote A Brief History of Infinity is a big subject, so I like to revisit it now and again. One of the joys of doing my talk on infinity, a real favourite of mine, is the way people's minds are duly boggled by the idea that there can be something bigger than infinity. And what's more, you can prove it without a single equation. Thanks to the great German mathematician Georg Cantor we can establish this painlessly. The first step is to discover the concept of cardinality in set theory. A set is just a collection of things, and set theory is the maths that describes the workings of such collections, and from which all the basics of arithmetic can be derived. Cardinality is a measure of the size of the set, and the important thing to be aware of is that if we can pair off items in two sets so they are in one-to-one correspondence, those sets have the same cardinality - they are the same size. Take a simple example - legs on...

Like most people with a scientific background it would probably be fair to call me a sceptic, in the sense that I like to see evidence before accepting something. Science and scepticism go hand in hand - think of the Royal Society motto 'nullius in verba' which the Society translates as 'take nobody's word for it.' Or to put it another way, in one of my favourite modern versions, 'data is not the plural of anecdote.' However, all too many sceptics (including some prominent scientists) misunderstand this and turn these into 'without (controlled) evidence this is not true' and 'anecdote has no value' - both of these are incorrect. What we've got here is a logical error. These people are going from 'without evidence we can't say it's true', which is good scepticism to 'without evidence it is false'. And while it's true that anecdotes have no value in deciding whether or not a hypothesis is true, they are valuab...

Another guest post by Mark Lloyd. Mark was born in 1972 in the small town of Naas, Co.Kildare in Ireland. He studied at Trinity College Dublin where he was allowed to  escape with a BA (Mod) in Computer Science, Linguistics and French. His poetry has been published in Revival Literary Journal, Microphone On! And Boyne Berries.  He is a founding member of The Limerick Writers’ Centre, Limerick, Ireland and a member of the Literature Pillar of Limerick City of Culture 2014. He founded Pillar International Publishing in 2012, named after his grandfather’s erstwhile company Pillar Publishing Dublin. Pillar International Publishing, though focusing on edgy and absurd humour, has also published several poetry collections, including Heartscald by Alphie McCourt and I Live in Michael Hartnett (featuring a piece by the late Seamus Heaney).  In humorous fiction and non-fiction, Pillar have published works by Rhys Hughes, Robin Walke r and Thaddeus Lovecraft.  Pillar, in 20...

'Buy organic! It's ever so mainstream.' 'Such has been the trajectory of some of his most cherished causes that decades after lending support to, say, organic farming and alternative medicines, such matters are accepted as mainstream today.' Andrew Roberts on Prince Charles in the Sunday Telegraph via the i's News Matrix I'm sorry? Does Mr Roberts write the above about Prince Charles with a straight face? If so, he should be ashamed of himself. As should Prince Charles if it's true that his influence has made this stuff more mainstream. Luckily, though, I think that Mr Roberts is at least in part wrong, because the forces of reason are, to some extent holding out against Prince Charles' self-proclaimed attack on the logical and analytical approach of the Enlightenment. Is organic farming mainstream? I suppose you could say it is in the sense you will find it in the supermarkets, though interestingly it seems to be getting less and less shelf ...

I have long had this suspicion that somehow you aren't a real writer unless you've written some fiction. Clearly this is ridiculous - and yet it's a beguiling feeling. The first ever book I wrote was a novel (a thankfully now lost turgid science fiction epic, written on the train on the way to school), and I have written at least half a dozen more, which haven't seen the light of day, but I would say are part of my learning to be a writer. Now, though, I am glad to say, I have a real work of fiction that makes me proud and is published. (I should say I'm already proud of some published short fiction, like my short story in Nature .) It's called Xenostorm: Rising and it's aimed at the young adult market, which is theoretically 11 to 14ish, but in practice is popular with adults too - think Harry Potter in this respect. This is science fiction, but not in an intrusive spaceships and ray guns way - it is SF that happens to apparently ordinary teenagers w...