Science writers rarely mention astrology, other than to moan when someone accidentally uses the word instead of astronomy. There is, of course, no scientific basis for astrology, but when we are considering history of science it is impossible to ignore astrology as many of the early astronomers earned a fair amount of their living doing a spot of astrology on the side. This didn't mean that they necessarily believed in it (though Roger Bacon, for example, makes an argument for it as an environmental influence, as opposed to a predictor of the future), but it brought in the cash and often the support of the nobility. The reality with astrology and other fortune telling approaches is that, even though it has no basis for working, inevitably some of the predictions will come true. If every single prediction didn't happen, it would actually be a very significant outcome - astrologers would be successfully predicting what wasn't going to happen. I was struck the other day when w...

I'm currently enjoying Tim Harford's three part series on Houdini on his Cautionary Tales podcast . Although best remembered as an escapologist, in the later part of his life, Harry Houdini included a section in his act that involved unmasking spirit mediums as fake. Earlier, Houdini had become friends with Arthur Conan Doyle, who became a fervent spiritualist and whose wife was a medium. Apparently, in one final attempt to persuade Doyle of the folly of his beliefs, Houdini did a demonstration for Doyle in his New York apartment. He hung a small blackboard from the ceiling out of reach, asked Doyle to to go out of the apartment and write a message on a piece of paper. When Doyle returned, Houdini got Doyle to stick a cork ball soaked in white ink on the board - to Doyle's amazement, the ball then wrote out his message (the Aramaic phrase Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin - mentioned in the Bible's book of Daniel) on the board. Houdini did this to demonstrate how the apparent...

Whenever the possibility of a trade deal between the UK and the US crops up, 'chlorinated' chicken comes back to menace us, much like Frankenstein's monster. But really it's a paper tiger. (This must surely be a mixed metaphor?) There is no doubt that there are potential dangers to such a deal for the UK, notably around food and medical supplies and services. However, when the press gets over-excited about chlorinated (or more properly chlorine-washed) chicken, it dilutes the whole argument, because this is absolutely fine. If you buy a bag of ready-to-eat salad in the UK it will have been chlorine-washed. This kills off the dodgy bacteria such as E. coli, Salmonella and Listeria that can easily be carried by salad leaves - the treatment makes it safer to eat. No one seems to panic about this. Now let's consider chicken. In the old days we used to be told to wash chicken before cooking it. We don't anymore because there is a real danger that doing so will splash...

Many decisions that a government takes have unwanted side effects. For example, while everyone surely thinks it's a good idea to stop people smoking, the government takes £6.50 plus 16.5% of the retail price from every packet of cigarettes: tobacco duties raise about £8.8 billion a year at the moment.  The response is often 'yes, but if we can get people off cigarettes it would reduce costs to the NHS'. It would - but only by an estimated £2.6 billion. So the exchequer would still be £6.2 billion a year worse off if we got everyone to stop. There is a similar issue with electric cars. At the moment, the fuel duty on petrol (gasoline) and diesel in the UK raises an eyewatering £28 billion annually. If we could wave a magic wand and switch everyone overnight to electric vehicles, that income would currently disappear. And though drivers might cheer, the government would certainly not be happy. So for some time there have been schemes afoot to recoup these potential losses. I ...

REVISIT SERIES -  An updated post from March 2015 Every now and then I get a semi-spam email (i.e. something I probably accidentally signed up to receive, but never really wanted) offering me the opportunity to buy cut-price 'treats', like a super car experience. I know some people love this kind of thing, but I just don't get it. I've got three problems with the whole 'super car experience' thing. But before that, I need to distinguish this from the early  Gerry Anderson series , which I loved as a boy. Here in the UK it was a black and white series, but it appears from the DVD that it was shot in colour. For primary school me, the best thing about it was that our Ford Anglia was excellent for playing Supercar, as the heater controls (the heater was an optional extra) made an excellent substitute for throttles, and it even had little fins on the tail, though they aren't visible in my picture below. However, I am not referring to Supercar , but rather an ...

Having recently revisited the Monty Hall problem, I thought it was worth also taking a look another, arguably even more mind-boggling probability problem that also got Marilyn vos Savant a lot of complaints when she included it in her column. The problem sounds trivial enough, and comes in the form of a statement for which we have to predict the probability. It reads ‘I have two children. One is a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability that I have two boys?’ It sounds trivial. The Tuesday bit is just window dressing, so we are looking at ‘I have two children, one a boy. What is the probability I have two boys?’ So with one child a boy, surely there is 50 per cent chance that the other child is a boy and a 50 per cent chance it’s a girl. Which makes the probability of having two boys 0.5, or 50 per cent. There’s a one in two chance.  But unfortunately that is not correct. The reason we get confused is that when trying to imagine the situation we think of the ‘first’ child w...

There's nothing the right-wing newspapers like more than a touch of wokeness-gone-mad - and back in February this was trumpeted by an article in the Daily Telegraph headlined Lego can be anti-LGBT says Science Museum (this is behind a paywall, but I was able to access it via Apple News). The story has since been picked up by many other news outlets. The outrage in the press is based on a self-guided tour called Seeing Things Queerly telling visitors that 'Like other connectors and fasteners, Lego bricks are often described in a gendered way. The top of the brick with sticking out pins is male, the bottom of the brick with holes to receive the pins is female, and the process of the two sides being put together is called mating. This is an example of applying heteronormative language to topics unrelated to gender, sex and reproduction. It illustrates how heteronormativity (the idea that heterosexuality and the male/female gender binary are the norm and everything that falls out...

As a science writer I get sent lots of press releases about scientific studies. Some describe serious research, but there is always a smattering of studies sponsored by companies with entertaining PR in mind (think the ones that give the formula for making the perfect sandwich, or some such thing), rather than any scientific outcome. I've just received the most entertaining one I've had in some time, which I feel needs sharing. The press release opens with: Born in August and named John or Mary? You might be a genius. A new study analysing more than 1,000 of history’s greatest minds reveals common traits among the world’s smartest people—from birth month to name. Could you be one of them? You might think this study was performed by a publicist with a degree in dog grooming (say), but unlike many such press releases, it does refer to an original paper. Admittedly they get that a bit wrong, saying it was 'published on ResearchGate' which is a portal - it was published in ...

A book I'm currently reading ( Proof by Adam Kucharski) starts by introducing the Monty Hall problem and adds a piece of info I wasn't aware of. It's my favourite example of the counter-intuitive nature of probability, featuring at some length in my book Dice World , so I thought it worth revisiting here. The problem (of which more in a moment) gained worldwide fame when it featured in the 'Ask Marilyn' column in Parade Magazine in 1990. The column was written by Marilyn vos Savant, whose claim to fame was appearing in the Guinness Book of Records as the person with the highest IQ in the world.  (She was born Marilyn Mach, but despite appearing to have a phoney attempt to get the word 'savant' into her name, vos Savant was her mother's surname.) What was remarkable about the problem was that  so many people - some of them mathematicians and professors - got it wrong. It is fascinating now to look back and see some of the letters published in Parade say...

In their The Studies Show podcast The Science of Johann Hari , the excellent Stuart Ritchie and Tom Chivers point out the entertaining way the blurbs for former journalist Hari's books boast about his epic journeys to interview scientists. These include 'Confused, he set out on a three-year, thirty-thousand mile journey to discover what really causes addiction - and how to solve it.' ( Chasing the Scream ) and 'Finding the answer to this high-stakes question led him on a journey from Iceland to Minneapolis to Tokyo...' ( Magic Pill ). Ritchie and Chivers also include a claim for another book with a forty-thousand mile journey, though this seems to have disappeared. The podcasters point out that these 'epic journeys' seem to have consisted of flying to a few places to interview people. But I think there's a more worrying issue in a globally heating world - what was the point of making the journeys in the first place? All he appears to have done was inte...

This is Sherlock Holmes, the next generation - with Holmes' daughter Joanna centre stage. Despite the cover, where she appears about 12, presumably to appeal to Enola Holmes fans, she is now Mrs Watson, married to John Watson's son who narrates the story. As this is her second marriage and has a 17-year-old son we can assume Joanna is at least in her late 30s.  Watson senior is still around, if elderly (Sherlock being long gone), while Mr & Mrs Watson live at 221B Baker Street, looked after by one Miss Hudson... and there's even a son-of-Lestrade at Scotland Yard. The plot centres on an increasingly dubious blackmail featuring the scandalous behaviour of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's granddaughter, which Joanna solves with rather more equanimity than her father, if exhibiting many of his traits. Along the way we are plunged into opium dens, a break-in to a suspect's mansion, theatrical goings on, scientific experiments and more. Leonard Goldberg is a doctor...

Anyone who has ever had a book traditionally published knows the joys of reading through a publisher's contract. There are some bits that make you wince (the part where they throw you to the dogs if they get sued, for example), and others that are quite pleasing (usually involving money). I've seen a good few contracts in my time, both mine and those for other authors who have asked me to cast an eye over them. (If there's anything too complex, I strongly advise authors to join the Society of Authors and make use of their checking service.) Of late, I've seen AI starting to rear its head in new clauses - and it has been a pleasant surprise. When publishers started mentioning AI in contracts, I assumed we were talking about clauses that banned authors from using generative AI to write their books for them - and, not surprisingly, they have started to appear. (Publishers need to be careful with this one, as the contracts do need to allow the inclusion of content from AI s...

No, I know that picture is not a hybrid car: bear with me. I have just started the process of buying a plug-in hybrid car. In principle, I'd love to go for the full electric experience, but there are still problems, as I had the opportunity to point out on Newsnight recently. Electric cars are still too expensive - but the same is true of plug-in hybrids. More significantly, there are range issues and the charging infrastructure is both far too sparse and pricey. My driving pattern consists of a combination of local driving, which the electric part of a modern plug-in hybrid can entirely cover, and 300 mileish round trips, much of it spent in places where chargers are very few and far between - which is why I still need the petrol side.  For the moment, then, I think I've made the right choice. But I embarrassingly realised when taking a look through the manual for the car I am yet to pick up (yes, I'm the sort of person who reads manuals) that I totally misunderstood how m...

An infinite series is a familiar mathematical concept, where '...' effectively indicates 'don't ever stop' - for example 1 + ½ + ¼ + ⅛... an infinite series totalling 2. This, though is the last of a short series of posts about infinity. Apart from Galileo, as ever standing out from the crowd, pretty well anyone who had dealt with infinity was really handling the potential infinity mentioned by Aristotle – and that’s what the familiar curve of the lemniscate ∞ is the symbol for. Not really infinity, but potential infinity. Towards the end of the 19th century, though, one man took the plunge to think about the real thing. His name was Georg Cantor, and it has been suggested that he went mad as a result of it. Cantor was born in 1845 and spent all his working life at the university in Halle. This is a German town famous for music, but frankly not for maths. Cantor saw it as a stepping stone to greater things – and it probably would have been, had he not come up with s...

Thank you so much to everyone who has already used the 'Buy me a Coffee' link below to support my online book reviews, general science and writing life articles. As it says below, my posts on the Popular Science website and here on my blog Now Appearing will always be free, but if you'd really like to help keep me going (and to avoid running intrusive adverts, which I hate) I've introduced a membership scheme that involves a small monthly contribution. There are three levels: Bronze - £1 a month (or £10 a year), like the individual coffee purchases, this will help me be able to dedicate the time to writing these posts and reviews, but makes it more secure. Silver - £3 a month (or £30 a year) - by moving up to a coffee a month, I'm adding in additional posts and messages just for silver and gold members, plus discounts on signed books. Membership also includes the option to suggest books for review. There will be still be as many free posts for all readers, but the...

Search engines are central to our everyday use of the internet - I must use a well-known search engine beginning with G at least a dozen times a day. But the search providers are displaying a worrying trend. Swept along by the enthusiasm for artificial intelligence, most have begun to display or offer an AI summary - in Google's case, this is the first thing you see at the top of the search results. And like all generative AI responses, it doesn't necessarily get it right. This is quite easy to demonstrate if you make use of a query that pushes the boundary a little. I happened to be writing something about the BICEP2 telescope, located at the South Pole. So, interested to see how the AI would handle it, I asked 'Why was the BICEP2 telescope built at the South Pole?' This is quite a tricky question for an AI to handle - and Google's response demonstrated this powerfully. (The highlighting above was already there, it's not from me.) It's certainly a good gues...

An infinite series is a familiar mathematical concept, where '...' effectively indicates 'don't ever stop' - for example 1 + ½ + ¼ + ⅛... an infinite series totalling 2. This, though is a short series of posts about infinity. We're going to take a look at Galileo's surprisingly insightful contribution to our understanding of infinity. Galileo Galilei was born in 1564, the son of a musician and scientific dabbler. He tends to be remembered for dropping balls of the Tower of Pisa, something which be probably didn't do (it’s only recorded many years later by his assistant) and for being locked up for daring to suggest that the Earth rotates around the Sun rather than the other way round (not exactly accurate historically). Also inventing the telescope (he didn't) and featuring in that Queen song. But he undertook some remarkable thinking on the subject of infinity. It took place after his house arrest. Galileo had put together his masterpiece, Discours...