'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...

I'm virus proof on my Mac! Oops... Even though I am now a Mac user, I have to admit that, as a species, they have their problems. Specifically, they have always had a tendency to be smug. Infuriatingly so. Perhaps the biggest example of this, bigger still than their certainty that their machines had more style and flair, or were better at arty things, was the assurance that computer viruses were not a problem for them. They sneered at the poor PC user, scrambling to update their anti-virus every year. They sniggered behind their hands as friends computers succumbed to worms and trojans. Because, on the whole, Macs were virus proof. Not because they were so technically sophisticated, but because they were simply too small a market to make it worth virus writers targeting them. However, though Macs still have a relatively small market share, it has steadily grown. And guess what? Viruses are out there. What's more, since hardly any Macs are protected against them, they ar...

I very much enjoyed Mark Forsyth's fluffy but inspiring earlier books on words, notably The Etymologicon , and his new title The Elements of Eloquence is equally enjoyable (and anything but a hard read). But it is also a book that makes you stop in your tracks. Because this stuff really matters. Forsyth has revealed a startling truth that should have been obvious - in all those hours spent in English lessons we aren't taught how to write well. Yet there is a way to do this that has been around since the time of the ancient Greeks and that was, until it went out of fashion, a major part of the school curriculum - rhetoric. Now, if you told me a couple of weeks ago that I would wax lyrical about a book on rhetoric, I would not have believed you. 'Rhetoric' just sounds really dull. As a subject, it sounds as if it would make politics look engaging. Yet, as Forsyth so ably demonstrates, rhetoric is simply the key tools and techniques of getting something across in word...

O yippee-do-dah, Sony has brought out another smartwatch . And further surprises, Samsung's smart watch sales are pitiful . Still my beating heart, and pass the smelling salts. (Whatever happened to smelling salts?) In case you haven't come across them, a smartwatch is the wrist-worn equivalent of a smartphone, though the screen is, of course, much smaller. I can see why people get excited about smartwatches. They are truly reminiscent of all that 1950s scifi. Once you've got a videophone on your wrist, all you need is a flying car and a laser gun and you are truly equipped for the twenty-first century. But the reality is rather different. Firstly, all the evidence is that wearing watches is going out of fashion. Remaking them as a smartwatch seems a bit like the way the gas companies responded to the introduction of the electric light by bringing out a better gas jet. They were already dead, but they didn't realize it. I'm not saying watches will disappear. T...

 It's relatively rare that physicists indulge in a spot of whimsy. They are, on the whole, rather literal people - which is not to say unimaginative. Most modern physics is so imaginative it is hard to believe it is connected to the real world. But it is rarely whimsical. However, one rare step into the field, far eclipsing Schrödinger's unfortunate mangy moggy, is the strange case of Maxwell's demon, and this imaginary character's threat to the second law of thermodynamics. This is the third and final post on the subject, inspired by my book Dice World . Let's start with the split box we met in the previous post . The door in the middle has been open for  a while and entropy has risen as the gasses on either side go from being hot and cold respectively to a mix of the two. But now enter the demon. He is an extremely small creature, so small that he can see the individual molecules of gas passing back and forth in the box. And he has such a high metabolism that ...

I'd like to introduce another of my guest bloggers: Ute (who pronounces her name Oooh-tah) Carbone is a multipublished author of women’s fiction, comedy, and romance. She lives with her husband in New Hampshire, where she spends her days walking, eating chocolate and dreaming up stories. Find out more about Ute and her work at her website . GUEST POST Last summer, the great whites came to Cape Cod. There were multiple sightings of these sharks in the waters off the Cape Cod National Seashore. In July, a great white shark attacked a man kayaking near Nauset Beach in Orleans. A few weeks later, a swimmer was bitten near Balston Beach in Truro. These were the first recorded incidents of shark attack on the Cape in seventy five years.  Towns began to post warnings about getting into the water. On busy Labor Day Weekend, the bank holiday that marks the unofficial end of the summer season, beaches in Chatham and Orleans, a stretch that the Cape Cod Times  dubbed “shark alley”, w...

A few days ago I heard the author Michael Rosen talking on the radio about his new book Alphabetical . He told how the capital letter A turned upside down looked like a stylised ox's head with two horns - and low and behold, this letter used to be called aleph, the word in ancient Semitic languages for an ox. I was hooked and was soon plunging into this exploration of the English alphabet. Along the way Rosen brings in so many stories. A lot of this is done by a cunning wheeze in the structure. The book is arranged alphabetically (how else?) and each letter starts with a short section on the letter itself, its origins and its uses in English, then follows with a longer section that has a theme. So, for instance, D is for disappeared letters and V is for Vikings. We then get a meandering exploration of that theme - sometimes with many deviations along the way, but always tying back to the alphabet and writing. It ought to work brilliantly, and in many ways it does, but I was s...

I am rather fond of the US TV show Fringe, and am currently working my way through Season 4 (when are we getting Season 5, Netflix?). An episode I watched recently featured an invisible man, which made me think of the difficulties that invisible man syndrome has traditionally revealed in the Science Fiction Hokum Test (SFHT). The SFHT is a recognition that to make science fiction work it is perfectly acceptable to make up new science or to bend the laws of physics, but once you have set up a premise, it needs to work consistently and logically, or it fails the SFHT. The original H. G. Wells invisible man (and many in the movies) have had a big problem because their alleged mechanism was a treatment that made our hero transparent. The SFHT says it's fine to invent a mechanism for making someone transparent - but then you have to live with the consequences. And for Wells' invisible man this should have meant going blind. If he had literally become transparent, light would pas...

Anyone who has gone through that 'I want to fix up my car' phase in the UK will be familiar with Haynes workshop manuals. These large format hardback books take the reader through all the basic maintenance and fiddly bits for practically every model of car you can think of. Now, they've added a fairly unique bit of maintenance work to their portfolio - fixing up the Imperial Death Star from Star Wars . This is one of a range of entertainment-based titles added to the range. I recently reviewed the UFO Investigations Manual , but the Death Star version is closer to originals in the sense of being about a specific piece of technology. Like the UFO book, though, it's a bit of misnomer, in the sense that it isn't actually a workshop manual - it doesn't guide you through maintenance work on a Death Star, but rather it is a book about the Death Star, treating it as if it really existed. It reminds me in some ways of the sort of thing you used to see in comics li...

  A new guest post by Kate Kelly. Kate is a marine scientist by day but by night she writes SF thrillers for kids. Her debut novel Red Rock , a Cli-Fi* thriller for teens, is published by Curious Fox. She lives in Dorset with her husband, two daughters and assorted pets and blogs at scribblingseaserpent.blogspot.co.uk * No, I didn't know either. It stands for Climate Fiction, often dystopian fiction where climate change has had a significant impact on the environment. GUEST POST Most of the time you will find me somewhere on the internet talking about writing with my fellow authors, but Brian’s invitation to appear as a guest on his blog has given me the opportunity to talk about my other great passion – geology! During the day when I’m not writing fiction I work as a marine scientist. I studied first geology and then oceanography at university and both these subjects have remained very close to my heart – especially the geology. And I’m lucky because I am able to...

Last week I started a quick look at the most mind-boggling bit of 'classical' physics, the second law of thermodynamics, one of the stars of my book Dice World .  This week I'm exploring how the second law can both be true and not true at the same time. Thinking of the traditional approach of 'heat flows from hot to cooler', this seemed solid and unbeatable in the Victorian world of brass and iron. And once scientists began to take the idea of atoms and molecules as real entities seriously (something that happened surprisingly late), it also made a lot of sense at the level of individual particles - but there was a twist in the tail. In the beginning was order A favourite thought experiment for thermodynamicists is a box that is split in two. (They don't get out much, and consider the Large Hadron Collider to be showy and unnecessary.) On one side of the box is a hot gas. On the other side is a cool gas. Life doesn't get much more exciting than th...

There's a certain kind of novel that is technically aimed at 'young adults' (bookseller speak for teenagers), but that is also enjoyed by adults. It is, of course, a publisher's dream if it comes off, as you end up with a much bigger potential audience than usual. The best known example is, of course, the Harry Potter series, though I think my favourite crossover YA books are The Owl Service ,   The Night Circus and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children , - in fact, demonstrating the power of this approach, they remain among my favourite books ever. I was, therefore, rather interested when I came across a new such book called The Young Dictator by Rhys Hughes. The premise is intriguing. Jenny Kahn, a twelve-year-old girl, by strange means, wins a by-election and becomes a member of parliament. With some magical assistance, she ends up as dictator of the UK, which is just the starting point on a career of dictatorship that will involve aliens, giant spide...

Anyone who is an aficionado of The X-Factor (or even hears the start of it as they rush out of the room screaming) will be aware of its producers' tendency to use a striking bit of classical music as a background, typically at the beginning and as the judges come on stage. The older members of the audience may recognise it as 'that music they used to have on the Old Spice ad' - not to mention in numerous movies. What it really is, of course, is 'O Fortuna', the opening and closing chorus of Carl Orff's choral masterpiece, Carmina Burana . What I wonder, though, is whether those involved in the X-Factor know just how appropriate this particular number is, for two reasons, to their peculiar form of entertainment/torture. I suspect not. The first appropriate aspect is that the chorus is about the wheel of fortune in the sense of the random hand of fate meaning that at one moment we might be on top and the next on the way down. Spookily accurate. But even more...

Like many, I watched online the interview between the UK's leading political interviewer, Jeremy Paxman and comedian Russell Brand with interest. It brought out, as has quite frequently been the case over the last few years, the way that Brand is not just an idiot who can offend people on radio programmes and/or a sex addict - he is very verbally able, and has thought about things in what is, admittedly, a rather shallow, but nonetheless interesting fashion. I can certainly see why Brand could get many rallying to his cry that politicians don't do anything for us and that democracy is flawed. But there is a real problem with Brand's approach to politics - and it is reflected all too often in the over-the-top, knee jerk political comments I frequently see on Twitter and Facebook. It's a problem that is often reflected in protest movements - they're against something, or everything (think capitalism, conservatives, politicians, America, big business, corporations ...

My book Dice World about randomness and probability and their impact on our lives inevitably includes quantum theory, but some have expressed surprise that it also covers the second law of thermodynamics. After all, popular science books are supposed to be about modern, trendy, weird science, aren't they? And that sounds so old and Victorian. I mean, 'thermodynamics'. It just reeks of steam engines. And that's certainly why it was first of interest - but the second law is just as fascinating as anything that the twentieth or twenty-first centuries have thrown at us, and this is the first of a short series of posts pondering it. The second law is a classic of physics, so much so that it inspired the physicist Arthur Eddington's famous lines: If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - we...

I'm delighted that my latest guest post is from the inestimable Henry Gee: Henry is a Senior Editor of Nature. His latest book ‘ The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution ’, is now available from the proverbial All Good Bookshops. His blog The End Of The Pier Show   continues to delight its three regular readers. DISCLAIMER: for readers for whom rhetorical devices are as giraffes to unicycles, no kittens were harmed in the making of this post. GUEST POST Brian, for it is he, has invited me to write a guest post for his blog, so here I am, not too late I hope, with a bottle of wine and a smile, though I decided against buying the flowers on the garage forecourt as they looked rather tired. Goldie looks up from her cosy spot in the corner, raises an eyebrow and sensibly goes back to sleep. I’ve known Brian for six years or so, ever since we both had blogs on Nature Network (now SciLogs). We’ve even met two or three times in real life. Just to show you ...

Call that a moon? THIS is a moon! (Apologies to Crocodile Dundee) I am very fond of QI, but as I have mentioned previously , there are times when the QI elves' attempts to be perverse just to be able to catch the contestants out result in a warping of reality as we know it. One of the most dramatic examples of this over the years has been their varying answers to the question 'how many moons does the Earth have?' While the show has been running the accepted QI answer has been various numbers between 2 and 20,000, but never one , the obvious and actual answer. But I have to say, if I were ever on the programme I would protest loud and long if hit by this question, because that answer of 'one' is correct. They excuse their latest, 20,000 (that's from memory - it was some large number) value by saying there are lots of little lumps of rock that get captured by Earth's gravitational field for a few days and while captured they are natural satellites, wh...

We really don't appreciate enough the wonders that information and communication technology enables. The smartphone in our pockets gives us abilities that only James Bond had when I was young. And earlier this week I had a brilliant example of the way ICT can transform the way we work when I spent the day in a school in Amman, Jordan without leaving my office. I've done quick Q and A on occasions via Skype with a school before, but nothing on this scale. Overall it was remarkably effective. Now I can hear the technophobes in the background (what are you doing reading a blog, you old fogies?) saying 'Ah, but it's not like really being there!' And for once they are right. That is perfectly true. But there are plenty of occasions when being there is just not practical, and this is certainly the next best thing. What's more, it even saves the school money (something most schools are not averse to),  because they don't have to pay for my travel. And I can ...