Just occasionally everyone raves about a piece of software and I really don't get it. I never got Pinterest or Instagram, for instance. In those cases it's just that they aren't really useful to me - but the service I'm struggling with here really feels like it's something that should be valuable. And time after time I go to it, think hmm... and get nowhere. It's called IFTTT , short for If This Then That, and its role is to automate those trivial repetitive tasks we find ourselves doing. The concept is simple but powerful. You have a trigger, which is something happening on anyone of 82 services (or 'channels' as IFTTT confusingly calls them), such as email or Facebook or Evernote, etc. etc. When that something happens, IFTTT automatically carries out an instruction. It could be to send you a text, or perform a task in another service. Examples work better than the abstract with this kind of thing. You can write your own 'recipes', but IFT...

There is a long standing campaign in the US to stop fluoridation of drinking water, due to concerns about the dangers of sodium fluoride. (Most of the UK doesn't do this, though around 10 per cent of us get fluoridated water, and most of our toothpastes contain sodium fluoride.) I have no particular axe to grind on this, though I would be rather surprised if there is a significant health risk with this particular salt - NHS England says 'Reviews of the risks have found no evidence to support these concerns and the general consensus is that water containing the correct amount of fluoride and fluoride toothpaste have a significant benefit in reducing tooth decay.' What I do object to, though, is when people use scaremongering tactics - specifically making statements that are irrelevant or unsubstantiated. The other day, as you do, I got one of those graphics sent to me on Facebook, which I have attached here. And it's hard to imagine a better example of naughtines...

The inevitable vampire bunny from Dracula, the Pantomime* I know it's trendy to pooh-pooh the social networking giant, and speak of the way Facebook is so yesterday. And, of course, one doesn't need virtual friends, one has real ones. And all that guff. But, in fact, in a world where many of us don't stay in one place, and may have contacts around the world, I think Facebook does have a lot going for it.  Let me give you two quick examples. I used to be a member of a writers' online group called Litopia. Over the years some of the people I liked best left, and then the whole thing folded. But I had made real friends - people who I would happily go out for a drink with if we were in the same city - and I was in danger of losing touch. One of our number (partly as a result of my moaning) set up an invitation-only group on Facebook, which is now 120 strong, and it has kept those virtual friendships going - and brought a good number back into the fold. Facebook made...

Bringing me in doesn't make it teaching creationism Thanks to Ian Campbell for pointing out a report to me, publicised last week, on the best way to 'tackle creationism in the classroom. The blaring headlines suggested 'Children should be taught about creationism in science lessons to avoid alienating those of strong faith,' but before the radical atheists start foaming at the mouth, I'm not sure that's what the study actually concluded. (Actually it's too late to prevent the backlash. Apparently 'Richy Thompson, campaigns officer at the British Humanist Association, said: “Young Earth creationism and intelligent design should not be given credence and taught as scientifically valid for the simple reason that they are not.”' But did the study suggest this? Admittedly there was the inflammatory statement 'If [evolution] is presented insensitively, students may feel compelled to choose between science and deep-rooted religious beliefs. Rathe...

I enjoy the TV show QI with its combination of fascinating facts and entertaining banter, but occasionally the programme's smugness gets too irritating, especially when it gets things wrong - and I have in the past ( here ,  here and here ) moaned a bit about this. It's doubly irritating when QI spends part of its time attacking the fact checking on another show, as the first of the K series (repeated last week on the BBC) did. It was rather ironic that the show itself happened to contain two errors itself. One was on the matter of the red kite. Stephen Fry asked what colour a red kite was, and inevitably the siren sounded as someone said 'red'. He pointed out the quite interesting fact, featured in my book Light Years , that orange wasn't given a name as a colour until around the sixteenth century, and until then 'red' was used for both red and orange (the word 'orange' existed, but just for the, erm, red fruit). But the boo-boo was that he sa...

This is a bit of a late arrival for one of my Royal Society of Chemistry podcasts , as I didn't get round to blogging about it when it was published - which is a bit of a shame, as we are talking potassium bromide, that compound of legend, that was allegedly put in the tea of the troops in an attempt to reduce their sexual drive. That does seem to have been a myth, but it doesn't stop this simple compound having a rather juicy history. So pin back your ears, suppress your libido and take a listen by clicking play on the bar at the top of the page - or if that doesn't work for you, pop over to the full page .

Making science more approachable? (Photo of The Big Bang Theory cast courtesy CBS) I think science is wonderful, fascinating, life-enriching, and generally the best thing since the big bang. So it may seem odd to head up a post 'Why is science boring?' - but the fact is, like it or not, the majority of people consider it to be so. So those of us whose job is communicating science need to be aware of this and its implications. Despite occasionally enjoying pointing out its failings , I am quite fond of QI, and have observed something quite interesting about the general attitude to science there. If there is a guest with a science background like Dara O'Briain or Ben Miller, then whenever that person answers a science question with a little bit of detail the other team members glaze over and generally act bored. So why does this happen, and how can we get around the issues? Here's a few thoughts, which I can guarantee aren't comprehensive, but are a starting p...

See this and weep, Mr Mayo Last night I heard some of  Simon Mayo on Radio 2 . (It was an accident, okay?) They asked quite an interesting question: 'How far can you see?' - but then accepted as if it were fact a totally silly answer. Someone had rung in to say that a British Airways pilot told him you could see up to 250 miles, or words to that effect. There are two problems with this. First, I worked at BA for 17 years and met quite a lot of pilots, and many of them were jolly nice people. But almost all were great spinners of yarns. I wouldn't believe a word they said. More to the point, though, as presented, the question bears a considerable resemblance to that hoary old favourite 'How long is a piece of string?', because the proper answer is 'It depends what you are looking at.'* The furthest anyone can see dwarves the 250 miles answer to a ridiculous extent, but let's work up to it. The human eye is actually very good at detecting photons -...

Image showing the 'Centaury' word Courtesy University of Bedfordshire According to a press release from the University of Bedfordshire, Stephen Bax, the Professor of Applied Linguistics there has finally managed to begin the process of interpreting the Voynich manuscript, a medieval book on plants and science that is written in a language that is so mysterious that many believed it to be made up, without meaning. To continue with the release: Up until now the 15th century cryptic work has baffled scholars, cryptographers and code-breakers who have failed to read a single letter of the script or any word of the text.   Over time it has attained an infamous reputation, even featuring in the latest hit computer game Assassin’s Creed, as well as in the Indiana Jones novels, when Indiana decoded the Voynich and used it to find the ‘Philosopher's Stone’.   However in reality no one has come close to revealing the Voynich’s true messages. Many grand theories have been p...

Have you ever thought about how strange a concept 'shiny black' is? Read on, in a post inspired by a Twitter interchange with Steve Mould of Festival of the Spoken Nerd . (If you haven't seen their show, book now - it's great!) What colour is the car in the picture? It's black. Are you sure? Of course I'm sure. What's your point? It's black? YES! Okay? Bear with me. How do you know it's black? Because that's the colour it is. And how do you know what colour anything is? This is basic Newtonian stuff, isn't it? White light hits an object. White light is made up of all the colours of the visible spectrum. Some colours are absorbed, the rest re-emitted. And the colours that are re-emitted are the colours we see. Trivial. So a postbox, for instance?... Exactly. White light hits a postbox, which absorbs everything except the red photons, which re-emit. And amazingly we see a red postbox. I still don't get your point. You will....

It's not surprising when the beam lines have to go through two of these that a bit of energy is lost. (Photo courtesy of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) I'm a bit embarrassed that the day after moaning about the Today programme's handling of a climate change story , I'm getting at the way the press dealt with a science story today. Some may rightly say something about pots and kettles. After all, I am a science writer, and I get things wrong too (most recently calling the Harwell facility the National Physical Laboratory rather than it's true name of the Rutherford Appleton - though, to be fair, I think the Harwell lab probably deserves the title more). But the problem I'm describing is more about mainstream media misunderstanding the science, rather than a simple factual error. The last couple of days, most of the papers have carried excited reporting of a breakthrough at the National Ignition Facility, the vast nuclear fusion site at the Lawr...

Would you buy a used weather system from this man? I was listening to Lord Lawson on the radio this morning, doing his usual climate change denial thing (though he was being very careful to always refer to it as 'global warming', as the kind of weather we have at the moment is not one many would associate with warming). And in his voice was all the fervour of an old-time religionist. He knows that global warming doesn't exist, and he wants us all to share in his beliefs. It made me wonder, why he believes something so fervently in the face of the evidence. By evidence, by the way, I don't mean the current flooding in the UK, though of course it may be indeed influenced by climate change. We can't deduce anything from a single data point. I mean the big picture. And when you think about it, his response is very similar to the way that creationists cling onto their beliefs that, say dinosaurs co-existed with humans and were on the ark in a great flood where th...

If there was ever a company it is possible to have a love/hate relationship with, it's Amazon. The hate side is pretty straightforward, and the one that probably many of my readers could put forward. In fact the very mention of them will have some of you frothing at the mouth. They are a behemoth, flattening all opposition in their path. They fiddle their taxes. They drive bookshops out of business. They don't pay publishers (and hence authors) as much as they should because of their virtual monopoly. They set the rules and everyone else has to follow or get out. And they treat their low level employees like automata. I really did write the book But actually, they are also pretty damned good at what they do. As someone who wrote the book on customer service, I have to grudgingly admit that most of the time they get it right in a big way. Like the way that I can buy music from them and in many cases I can not only get the CD, but instantly download the tracks at the ...

There are some evil people out there who prey on computer users by pretending to be their banks etc. Luckily for us, the people who run these phishing scams are often not very bright. The other morning I received this email: Oh, dear, I thought, what a shame I can't receive that £265.93 as I don't have a NatWest account. Silly old bank. And fancy them not spotting they should take the fee off, rather than add it on. Doubly silly old bank. But then, the very next email in my inbox was this: Now, call me suspicious, but finding out that exactly the same amount, with exactly the same transaction ID (and exactly the same negative fee) was also being applied to 'my' Barclaycard account was teensiest bit worrying. Especially as the format of the email was identical. Then I looked at the next email. Oh, come on now. This is taking idiocy to a new and rather dizzy height. It's surely not phishing at all, but a form of performance art, designed to bring a...

On the whole I find pretty well every compound I cover in the Royal Society of Chemistry podcasts quite interesting, but today's is a bit of a beast. Prepare to meet acetaldehyde , which some blame for your hangover. So grab yourself a glass of Irn Bru and  hurry over to the RSC compounds site  to see more on this painfully fascinating substance (posted 22 Jan). If you'd like to listen straight away,  just click here .

The typical movie jump to hyperspace If there's one thing science fiction movies can agree about, it's that heading towards the speed of light, and or engaging warp drive should make for some interesting special effects. Often stars elongate, sometimes they change colour, sometimes they disappear with a bang. The reality is not quite so visually exciting, but it is still impressive and decidedly confusing until you  think through what is happening. As a ship accelerates towards the speed of light, two things should happen. One is that there will shifting of colours. The colours of the stars behind the ship will be red-shifted, moving down the spectrum and those in front will be blue-shifted, moving up. This means that some stars will disappear as their colour goes out of the visible range, while others will pop into visibility for the first time. The second thing is that the stars will move towards the front of the ship, bunching up in the direction of flight (though ...

My corner shop I was listening to a piece on the radio the other day on the way home from the STFC (not a football club - but that's a different story). The piece was bemoaning the rate of closure of local newsagents. 'We are losing a vital local resource,' they said. Are we? Are we really? Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of local enterprise and such, but are the typical local newsagents all that wonderful? As I've mentioned before, my local corner shop, 5 minutes walk from my front door, is a massive 24 hour Asda superstore, alongside the likes of Marks and Spencer, Next and Starbucks, so I'm not exactly typical in local provision. But I've had plenty of experience of local newsagents in the past, and I really can't see what all the fuss is about. Those on the programme, bemoaning their loss, had two principle arguments - that the local newsagent gave better customer service than a supermarket, and that mostly they are being replaced...

Picture from Mike Jupp I was interested to see this graphic on Facebook the other day. I was impressed by the statistic - and it makes a lot of sense. Tear out a load of trees, replace them with housing and tarmac and you are going to get an awful lot less water taken out of the system, inevitably increasing the flood risk. As always when I see such numbers, though, I feel the urge to check the source, as I am afraid as many as 91% of statistics found on the internet are either wrong or simply made up.* I have struggled to find anything other than people repeating the 50 gallon figure without sources (though I'll come back to how realistic it is), but I was fascinated to discover this piece of research by the Forestry Commission. Although it doesn't directly confirm the 50 gallon figure, it does (not surprisingly) confirm that trees are about the best thing you can have to reduce water run-off. But the reason I found it fascinating was the detail, looking at different ...