I was mildly irritated by an advert for smart meters in my newspaper, placed by ‘The campaign for a smarter Britain.’ It claimed ‘If we all had a smart meter, the CO 2 savings would be like planting more than 10 million trees a year.’ Note this says would not could - a claim that cannot be factual. The ad even emphasises this by having small print saying ‘Savings possible by customers measuring energy use and cutting waste.’ Possible is true, would be isn’t. What the ad doesn’t point out is that exactly the same savings are possible without smart meters if people cut back on their energy use. It's entirely possible that everything the smart meter could achieve in energy savings could also be obtained by giving customers a laminated card with a priority list for things to switch off to save energy. At a tiny fraction of the cost. In practice, smart meters are being pushed by the energy companies for two reasons. One is that they can save money by not employing meter read...

Before considering the contents, I ought to say what a great-looking book this is - small and beautifully formed with a really unusual cutaway front. It's a great gift book if you know someone who's into their horror. Because that's the topic we're dealing with here: ghosties, ghoulies, long-leggity beasties and things that go bump in the night. There is always a danger in having an academic write about genre fiction that it all gets a little po-faced (or, in this case, Poe faced). And, I'm afraid, Darry Jones, an English professor specialising in nineteenth century literature and popular fiction, does rather have this tendency. It's not that his analysis lacks interest, but it can be a touch short on readability. There's also a distinct over-reliance on Freud, apparently not realising his work, from a scientific viewpoint, is more fiction than science. The book is divided into sections on monsters - including, of course, vampires and zombies - 'th...

Photo by  Alex Iby  on  Unsplash I have just read an (unintentionally) hilarious article on the BBC News website . In it, Justin Rowlatt sets out arguments as to why you have (probably) already bought your last car . Aware that this sounds a little unlikely, Rowlatt starts by suggesting we'll be scoffing - I'm not. I understand the arguments - but I think they show an impressively bubble mentality. The article tell us 'tech analysts' predict that in less that 20 years we'll all have stopped owning cars and all cars will be electric. Let's leave aside the obvious point that most of us buy cars more frequently than every 20 years and look at the main arguments in the article. They are: Self-driving cars cut taxi journeys from $10 to $5 Electric cars have less moving parts so should last at least 500,000 miles Electric car prices will fall as they become mainstream, reducing self-driving journeys even further to $1 Accident rates will plummet. Within 1...

Although my main business is writing science books, I've always enjoyed writing fiction and I've recently had the chance to revisit a title I made a first draft of about 30 years ago. It's now finished and available (if you use Kindle, you can get a copy free of charge if you download it by Friday 5 October 2018 at the latest - see Kindle links here ). Called Oberland , the book is set in the Swiss alps, centring on the beautiful Lauterbrunnen valley. I wrote parts of that first draft while on holiday there, so the locations were still very fresh in my mind. In the story, when English twenty-something Jo Fuller takes a summer job on a campsite in the Swiss alpine valley of Lauterbrunnen, she does not expect her whole understanding of the world to be turned upside down. A camper dies in suspicious circumstances. With three broken individuals - Bob from America, Paula from Australia and Werner from Germany - Jo discovers a strange alternative world at the top of the Sc...