Lewis Carroll famously came up with the nonsense riddle ‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’ - which was never intended to have a meaningful answer. But for some reason a piece of science news I read in Physics World inspired the question in the title of this post: why is an insect like a leased aircraft? The leased aircraft in question was one that British Airways borrowed from Aer Lingus. The plane was then repainted in BA colours for the duration. But part of the deal involved repainting the aircraft in the Irish airline’s livery and generally putting it back with the configuration Aer Lingus required before returning it. When the engineers finished, they fixed a little plaque to the instrument panel in the cockpit reading ‘FLY GREEN SIDE UP.’ The science story that made this come to mind was the answer to a long-term puzzle: why do insects seem to be so attracted to lights at night? I had heard the suggestion that they used the Moon to help with navigation - but the study shows t...

Asking when 99% is less than 99% sounds like a riddle - but it's not. I recently heard a Sky Mobile radio advert in which they claimed 99% UK coverage. In the 'small print' words at the end, they said this meant they covered 99% of the population. I don't know about you, but unless I'd heard that proviso, I would have assumed that 99% coverage meant you could connect to their service in 99% of UK locations - I expected the figure to be based on area of coverage, rather than population. It might seem like this is splitting hairs, but it really isn't. Let's just imagine an unlikely version of the UK where 99% of the population lived in London (this is, after all, what most advertising people think). Having 99% coverage by Sky's definition would mean that you could only use your mobile phone in 0.65% of the country. The whole point of a mobile is to be able to use in on the move, not just at your home location. Of course, the real UK is not like my imagined...

The late Fred Hoyle was one of my favourite scientists. He did impressive work on astrophysics, wrote imaginative science fiction and was an excellent science communicator, famously devising the term 'Big Bang' in a radio broadcast when he was throwing doubts on the theory. In the late 1940s, Hoyle, along with colleagues Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold at Cambridge came up with the steady state theory as an alternative to the Big Bang. One of the driving reasons behind this was that they felt that the Big Bang theory was too uncomfortably close to alignment with theological creation, and Hoyle was a staunch atheist. When I was growing up, with Hoyle as one of my heroes (a fellow northerner, if from the wrong side of the east/west border), I was sad that steady state was disproved. Hoyle never gave up on it, modifying it to match observation (just as, to be fair, Big Bang had to be modified to match observation), but it dropped out of fashion as Big Bang made an easier match to th...