Every now and then I feel the urge to do an online experiment - today we are dealing with one of the biggest social issues to face humanity. Which way do you put the toilet roll on the holder? I am personally convinced there is only one way for a sane person to do this, but not everyone agrees. So what do you think? Which way up should we put the toilet roll? I'd be grateful for as many replies (here or on Facebook /Twitter @brianclegg ) as possible. Please don't just vote, though - I would like a logical explanation, with workings where relevant. Thank you in anticipation. Littlendians and Bigendians have nothing on this one.

One of the saddest things about the way chemistry teaching has progressed is the way experiments have been made safer and safer. In our after school chemistry club I once did an experiment using hydrogen cyanide as an ingredient - somehow I can't see it being employed today. And the modern idea of a chemical volcano is the impressively bubbly but totally un-volcano like result of combining sodium bicarbonate and vinegar. But back in the day we could produce much more impressive volcanoes that threw out sparks and sent ash flowing, as you will discover in my latest Royal Society of Chemistry podcast. To find out more about ammonium dichromate, 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 its page on the RSC site . And in case you'd like to see it action (though the real thing is better):  

...ish It might seem obvious that streaming a video is more environmentally friendly than going to get a DVD and watching it, but one of the rules of ecologic is that in the environment, common sense doesn't always deliver the right results. Think, for instance, of tomatoes, where British tomatoes raised in greenhouses have a worse carbon dioxide footprint than Spanish tomatoes, despite all those extra food miles. It would have been entirely possible that the heavy energy use at the data centre, plus the transmission costs balanced out the production, shipping and driving back and forth that is the life of a rental DVD - but no. Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime really do have an environmental benefit (for the reasons above, and also because DVD players take a lot more energy than a streaming box like an Apple TV or a Smart TV with built-in streaming services) - and there's a study to prove it.  Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and Northweste...

Could I apologise to people who like this blog for the science/entertaining bits that this is yet another piece on politics - but the good news is that I promise to shut up on the matter now until the general election next year. I pride myself that my friends on Facebook and the people I follow on Twitter are nice, intelligent people, with a far better understanding of science than the average member of the public. Which is why I have been very disappointed by the social media storm coming from them during the recent UK election. I don't normally discuss my political affiliations, but I think I ought to say up front that I am one of the few remaining Liberal Democrats in captivity, in case anyone makes assumptions from what I am about to say. What I think has been very silly is the swathes of abusive posts and tweets about UKIP, calling them fascists and racists. (Or just launching ad hominem attacks.) Now, bearing in mind I am a Lib Dem (come on, I'm called Clegg),...

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am passionate about football - specifically I am passionate about avoiding it at all costs, which is why the current relentless advertising on ITV for World Cup coverage is filling me with dread. But I did read something the other day that was a really interesting point on the subject of the dreary game. It was in Think Like a Freak , the latest tome from the guys who brought us Freakonomics (review follows soon) and they were applying their usual sideways thinking to the matter of the England team's favourite occupation, the penalty shootout. It is a tiny bit of psychological warfare between the player taking the kick and the goalie, as the goalie has to dive before it is clear which direction the ball is going in. What Levitt and Dubner point out is that the best way to win is actually to kick straight at where the goalie is standing, as that way it is likely to get through whichever way he dives. Of course you couldn't do it ev...

So, polling day in the European elections is upon us. As I've mentioned previously , I really don't want to vote for any of the options available, but I do intend to vote, so what to do? Let's have another go. Logic says something like this. Of itself, this vote won't make anything happen, because it doesn't really matter what party our Euro MPs belong to, as it won't make any difference to what the European parliament does (which is pretty limited anyway). So the only point of the vote is to send a message to the political parties about Europe ahead of the election that really does matter, next year's general election. Some people think that they will also send a message about other policies, like the NHS or the environment, but I think this misses the point. The message that will be received will simply reflect the relevant party's attitude to Europe. So here are my options (in order of the latest poll I've seen): Labour: Let's be va...

The Daily Mail 's ongoing mission to boldly assign everything we eat or drink into the categories 'causes cancer' or 'cures cancer' is a cause of much amusement, but essentially harmless. However, its latest magnificent misunderstanding when it comes to science could actually cause serious harm. A couple of days ago a Mail travel reporter (note they didn't let their science person, if they have one, anywhere near it) gave us the striking headline shown above (spot the typo). You will note there is no suggestion that there is no known scientific reason why this stuff should work - we are told straight 'just a teaspoon will offer three hours' protection' and apparently with a straight face that it causes your skin to vibrate and cancel out ultraviolet light. The article goes on to explain that the liquid sunscreen, retailing at £17 a bottle, works, according to its manufacturer, as follows: 'If 2 mls are ingested an hour before sun exposure,...

I was interested to be pointed to these survey results  in '12 things the British Public Are Completely Wrong About' on Buzzfeed (and finally to the actual survey results here at IPSOS Mori ). This is partly fascinating because two of the results simply don't show what the headline suggests, yet no one seems to have noticed this, and partly because it's interesting to think about why public perception is wrong on these issues - and a large part of the blame has to go to politicians, TV and newspapers. Let's deal with that little quirk where the figures don't reflect what's being said. We are told that 29% of people think that the government spends more on Job Seekers Allowance than pensions and, by coincidence, 29% of people think foreign aid is one of the government's top three expenditures. (In reality we spend 15 times more on pensions than JSA, and foreign aid is not even in the top 10.) The actual figures were 29% and 26%, which surely don'...

I'm always surprised how many otherwise intelligent people respond emotionally rather than logically to news stories about tax. We hear them moaning about celebrities' tax avoidance schemes, and boycotting Amazon and Starbucks because of their immoral attitude to taxation. Fair enough, but let's take a step back. How many people write to HMRC saying 'Actually, it's immoral for me to just pay the 20p in the pound I am legally obliged to pay, could I pay 30p instead? That way we'd have a better NHS etc.'? Not a lot, I suspect. But when companies and individuals employ tax avoidance, all too often people say 'Why aren't they paying more? It's immoral? That's money that should be going to the NHS etc.' However, just like the 20p in the pound PAYE, all they are doing is paying the minimum the tax system requires them to pay. (Gary Barlow's scheme failed to do this legally, hence the problems he is having.) Rather than whinging about th...

UPDATED 18 May 2014 - the book, formerly known as In Apple Blossom Time is now out in paperback and has been renamed Time Bomber. At first glance I am the last person to be part of the target audience of Time Bomber  by Robert Wack, set in 1944. I hate war films (or rather I have never seen one and never particularly want to). I even avoided War Horse because of the setting. As for written material, the last time I read anything set in the Second World War it was a comic back in the 1960s (usually, as I remember it, involving daring raids to blow up a submarine pen) when there was still a considerable appetite for gung-ho WW2 stories. But this is different. I'll admit it appealed to my vanity that the author claimed to be inspired my book How to Build a Time Machine to create a novel around the extraordinary war career and death of Dutch-American mathematician Willem van Stockum, one of the first to take on the implications of Einstein's work on general relativity that ...

Napthalene, for many, will always be the substance of mothballs, with all the association of decay and faded Edwardian splendour that form a part of those outdated items’ baggage. But there's more to this smelly compound, as you will discover in my latest Royal Society of Chemistry podcast. To find out more about bicyclo[4.4.0]deca-1,3,5,7,9-pentene, as chemists like to call it on a bad day, 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 its page on the RSC site .

The tabloid newspapers have a strange take on science which isn't always ideal. Take a look at the latest Daily FailExcess exclusive: Our teenagers are facing a new and dangerous threat in the craze for helium hyperventilation. Mother of three Amanda Green (46) from Todmorden in Lancashire worries for her daughter. 'Lucy was an ordinary teenager. She did the sort of things you'd expect a girl of her age to do. Pony Club, that kind of thing. But then she started hanging out with the wrong kind of people. They introduced her to helium.' Helium, the second most common gas in the universe, is usually employed innocently in party balloons, but in a new and sinister twist, teenagers, inhaling the gas to produce silly squeaky voices, have discovered that it can cause them to float. Lucy Green (14), pictured, was only saved from floating away into space when her parents threw a weighted net over her. We would have asked a physicist, but no doubt they would have spout...

I have long been of the opinion that gyms are among the worst businesses there are when it comes to customer service, and I've just witnessed some incredibly bad behaviour from Feelgood Fitness gym (in Briton Street, Southampton), to the extent that I would strongly recommend avoiding them (aka Parkside Health Club) after the way they treated a teenage customer. Said customer decided to leave the gym. She told them and stopped her direct debit. A couple of weeks later she got an email saying her account was in arrears. So the very same day she replied, apologising, saying she thought she'd already cancelled, please cancel immediately and let her know any final payment required. There was no reply. Five days later, she emailed again, saying she hadn't got a reply, and if she didn't hear anything within 7 days she would assume they had closed the account and there was nothing further to pay. There was no reply. Then on 24 April, 17 days after her second email, she g...

Yes, you can even use the environment to write the kind of games we used to knock up in the old days We keep hearing how not enough children get the basics of programming. I did my first programming towards the end of secondary school. We didn't have a computer at the school, so we would punch cards (by hand, a character at a time - we didn't have the card punching 'typewriters' we had at university), pop them in the post so they could travel down from Manchester to London where they were put through either University College or Imperial College's magnificent machine, then we would get a printout back in the post one to two weeks later saying we'd made a punching error. It taught you to be precise. Now, of course, computers are everywhere, but surprisingly few children get a feel for programming them. Here's one possible way around it - http://www.robotbasic.org - what these guys do is to provide an environment where you can use a variant of BASIC to ...

The infamous anti-nuclear power badge, featuring the largest nuclear reactor within 4 light years When I talk to people in the media about their treatment of science, they often admit, rather sheepishly, how bad they are at apologising for misleading the public - even when it's something with the devastating impact of the way the media turned parents against the MMR vaccine with no basis in fact. However, I don't think they're the only ones to shirk their responsibility to apologise. How about Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth ? The fact is that without substantial green campaigning there is a good chance that the major percentage of our electricity - as is the case in France - could now be generated by nuclear power with a huge beneficial impact in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. So much so that we could have probably filled the gap with renewables and had pretty well zero carbon electricity. Instead we are now playing catch up far too late. Long term, t...

There have been a good few attempts to counter Richard Dawkins' best selling The God Delusion (I know I've reviewed this somewhere - I think it was on my old Nature Network blog, but I can't find it, so I'll have to review it again some time soon!), but I think this is one of the more interesting, as it's written by a mathematician and physicist turned science writer, who certainly knows a lot more about physics than Dawkins. What Amir Aczel sets out to do is to look at the claims made by the likes of Dawkins which attempt to use scientific arguments to 'disprove' the existence of God and to counter those, and on the whole he is quite successful. I ought to stress what he doesn't do - and could never do - is in any sense 'prove' the existence of God. As Aczel says towards the end 'In this book I have not proved the existence of God in any shape or form, and this has obviously not been my purpose. What I aimed to do was to argue - convinc...

Note how Netflix lurks under the iTunes Movies and TV Shows on the default Apple TV interface layout Some may wonder why Apple, never famous for supporting anyone else, allow Netflix, a kind of rival to iTunes, onto their Apple TV box. It might not be true, but my suspicion is that Apple is entirely aware of what you might call the Season 1 effect - and how it can positively influence their balance sheets. Here's the thing. Netflix is a great place to consume a TV series voraciously. Once you pay your monthly subscription for Netflix you can watch as much as you like. But the service quite often doesn't have the most recent series of a programme. That's happened to us twice recently with shows that had a strong following when on 'normal' TV, but that we never got round to watching - Last Tango in Halifax from the BBC, and The Bridge from Sweden. In both cases we've cruised through season 1 on Netflix, and know that season 2 is out there - but it has alre...

Heritage asset and liability simultaneously The poor old Church of England is getting bad press again. And in this case it certainly deserves it - or at least some individuals on Parochial Church Councils (PCCs) do. Apparently around 250 PCCs are using a medieval law that allows them to register 'Chancel Repair Liability' against properties that have this provision in their deeds. This anachronistic law requires the owners of certain houses to pay for the upkeep of the local church - sometimes it can be  single household that in principle is responsible for this liability. This is appalling, ridiculous behaviour, which to be honest I don't blame the Church of England as a whole for, but rather those PCCs. I know something of these, as I was on one accidentally for 3 years when I was in my 20s (don't ask) and sadly PCCs, like parish councils (think Vicar of Dibley ) all too often seem to get frequented by the kind of committee-loving person who really hasn't...

I enjoyed   Trouble in Teutonia (by S. P. Moss, who recently contributed a guest post  for this blog), because for me it was pure nostalgia. Since I stopped reading to my daughters (something I really miss) I don't read many children's books, usually only straying into the rather older targeted YA books that are intended to cross over to an adult readership, where this seems solidly for young people. But the nostalgia wasn't so much for those bedtime stories as for the kind of tales I used to read when I was that age. For one thing, a lot of my comics when I was young were still set in World War 2, with the Germans inevitably the baddies, and the heroes being plucky British servicemen (not many women, sadly). This story may be set primarily in the early 1960s (where our modern hero is plunged back in time on a carousel to once more meet his then young airman grandfather), but the feel is still very reminiscent of those war stories. There's almost a touch of Biggl...

If your only association of ‘tannin’ is that stuff that makes tea taste astringent, you’ve got some surprises to come in my new podcast for the Royal Society of Chemistry. After all, 'tanning' and 'tannin' don't just sound similar by coincidence... and then there's the tannenbaum. To find out more about the stuff that links leather trousers to a nice cup of tea, 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 its page on the RSC site .

I have to confess to a sneaking liking for Coronation Street . (I'm from near Manchester, I am obliged to. It's an old charter or something.) But I do think it is high time the Street was allocated a permanent family counsellor.  Because its children are suffering like no others in the UK. At the moment, Coronation Street features approximately 15 children under the age of 18. These are: Faye - adopted Craig - lives with mother, father unknown Simon - mother died, lives part time with father and part time with (separated) stepmother Amy - lives part time with mother and part time with (separated) father Hope - father died, lives with mother and boyfriend Joseph - lives with mother, separated from father Liam - father dead, lives with mother Ruby - lives with father, separated from mother Dev's children (2) - mother dead, live with father Cal's children (2) - mother dead, live with father Kylie's children (2) - one father unknown, the other lives wit...