Every now and then I think it's a good idea to dip into a basic aspect of physics that may not have been in the school curriculum. Take, for instance, the quark. I don't refer to the low fat cheese sometimes given this name but the particle at the heart of every atom in your body (and everywhere else for that matter). Proton structure Once upon a time we talked about the basic particles in the nucleus in the middle of the atom being protons and neutrons. They haven't gone away, but they are no longer considered fundamental particles. Each is made up of three smaller particles – quarks. There’s a whole mess of quarks distinguished by characteristics known as flavors (no, really). The different flavors are charm, strangeness, top/bottom and up/down. (Even the more prosaic names can sound a bit odd with antimatter versions. One is the ‘anti-bottom quark.’) The proton is two ups and one down; the neutron two downs and one up. Up quarks have a 2/3 charge and down quark...

The cover of my rather ancient Penguin copy I occasionally like to revisit books I've read before, and recently picked up a title from my shelf by an author that seems to have almost disappeared from the collective memory of science fiction - John Brunner . When I was in my teens and early twenties, Brunner was everywhere in the SF bookshops. He was a prolific author, and frankly some of his books were poor rushed jobs. But his best were excellent, and deserve to be remembered. His most famous title is probably Stand on Zanzibar - not one of my favourites, but interesting in its use of news clippings etc to give the book a different feel. It's an over-population book and I was never thrilled by disaster novels. For me, one of his best was The Shockwave Rider . This used Alvin Toffler's extremely popular (and very inaccurate) stab at futurology Future Shock as a model. That part in itself wasn't very interesting, but Brunner gave us images like the computer vir...

It's   Royal Society of Chemistry podcast   time again, and in this podcast I'm dealing with a slippery customer. PTFE - or teflon if you prefer was not invented. It was discovered by accident. And, in case you've heard otherwise, it wasn't a spin-off of NASA's space effort - they used PTFE, but it had been produced for years before NASA was even formed. And as for the involvement of a French housewife...  Take a listen .

We drive over to France at least once a year. It's a lovely place to visit and the roads are much nicer to drive on than ours. But I am getting a little tired of the game played by the French authorities where each time you go, they think of a new thing you have to carry in the car. Recently it was a reflective jacket. Next a reflective jacket for everyone in the car. And this year it's breathalysers. Yes, unless you have a breathalyser in the car you can get an on-the-spot fine. I'm really not sure what they are for. After all, if you use your breathalyser, even if it comes up clear you can't drive, because you won't have a breathalyser in the car (OK it's a twin pack, but you know what I mean). It's hard not to see this as a way to rake in easy fines. So I've been thinking about what next year's imposition might be. And I reckon it will be a corkscrew. You will be fined if you don't have a corkscrew in the car. This is partly because it is ...

There is no doubt that the best detailed source of information on the real science that is being done is in the published papers that scientists are required to turn out to prove that they are still alive and working. But the problem for everyday human beings is a) They are often expensive to get access to (hence the open access business that gets the likes of the excellent Stephen Curry so worked up)  b) The are often almost unreadable unless you are already an expert in the field. A new initiative called The 21st Floor Wiki Project aims to change that be asking scientists to contribute a page to a Wiki for each paper they publish that explains what the paper says to the general reader. It sounds a great idea, though I suspect many scientists couldn't be bothered to do it, and if they did do it would struggle to make it readable. However, let's not damn it before it's tried. Here's more details from the handy press release. Why not take a look at the real thing...

There's a nice game used by economists and psychologists to help understand human decision making that I investigated for The Universe Inside You called the ultimatum game. In it you and a second person are asked to make a decision about some money. The two of you mustn’t discuss your decision in any way. You are given £1 (say) to share. There are no strings attached, it is a genuine gift, you simply have a decision to make before the money is given to you. The other person decides how the money is split between you. They can split it however they like. The money can be split 50:50, they can keep all the money to themselves, or they can give you a penny and keep the rest… or split it any other way they like between the two of you. You then say either ‘Yes’ and the two of you will get the money, split between you the way the other person decided, or ‘No’ in which case neither of you gets any money. There can be no discussion between the two of you. This game has been under...

After they'd packed up the crew's kit was quite compact (bottle for scale) - but this was still no iPhone job Last week I had the fascinating experience of a film crew coming round to my house. I've done TV interviews in the past, but never had this level of direct exposure to the visual media at work. I've had suggestions that I was engaged in an episode of Wife Swap or something similar. In fact it's both much less and much more at the same time. It's less because what I did will probably result in 10 seconds on screen, and it's more because this wasn't Channel 4 but a role with a Hollywood connection. I'll reveal more when we get closer to the date, but the interview was for one of those bonus features you get on a movie DVD. It was about time travel and will accompany a science fiction movie that will be in the cinemas in September. What made it rather exciting was that I was sent a preview DVD of the film (with dire warnings about what...