The regular presenters are physicist Brian Cox and comedian Robin Ince, a self-confessed “keen idiot” when it comes to science. They’re joined in the first episode by the comedian Dara O’Briain, who studied cosmology at university, and Alice Roberts, an anatomist and science communicator. You may remember that Cox and O’Briain previously worked together on Physics Rocks, which formed part of the BBC’s LHC coverage last year.

It’s a good cast, and the chatty tone makes it easy to imagine yourself joining them down the pub for a drink and a natter about science, but I think billing the programme as a comedy is misleading. O’Briain draws an interesting parallel between scientists and comedians, who both effectively spend their lives comparing things to other things, but the conversation quickly takes a more serious turn.

When I’m listening to a comedy show, I don’t expect questions such as Cox’s “how do we educate people to respect the scientific method?” – not that it isn’t worth discussing, but its not funny either. They later try and bring things back with a sketch on the absurdity of science funding, but this was extremely “Radio 4″ comedy – in other words, dire.

Following up with Cox briefly interviewing science minister Lord Drayson just adds to the overall feeling of a programme trying to do too much. Is it about cracking science-themed jokes, or is it about discussing science as part of our wider culture? Am I meant to laugh, or learn?

Mixing science with comedy is difficult to do well, and The Infinite Monkey Cage doesn’t quite manage it. I’d much prefer something like Punk Science – big on laughs and lighter on content, but you still come away with some sort of insight. I’ll be checking out the next episode (it’s running for another three weeks) to see if they do any better.

I managed to miss the first episode thanks to a confusing BBC press release, but caught this week’s which featured the media’s go-to mathematician and not-so-recently appointed Oxford Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, Marcus du Sautoy. He submits himself to a variety of bizarre experiments in an attempt to answer a puzzling question: how do we know who we are?

Humans are one of just nine species that pass what is known as the mirror test for self-awareness. A dot is placed on the test subject’s face and they are placed in front of a mirror. If they notice the dot, by trying to look at or touch it, they’ve recognised the reflection as themselves. Otherwise, the subject views their reflection as an entirely separate individual.

Du Sautoy sees this test in action early on in the programme, and it’s quite striking. A young baby completely ignores the dot, while a slightly older child immediatly attempts to peel it off. Is this where conciousness begins? What does conciousness even mean?

The programme doesn’t have an answer – it’s still an open question in science, of course. It’s certainly interesting watching du Sautoy exploring the limits of his conciousness though. One experiment placed him under the effect of heavy anaesthetic while in an MRI scanner, his conciousness seeming to slowly slip away as he rambled in a drunken fashion. In another, du Sautoy wears a pair of video glasses that can appear to place his sense of self behind his body – or even inside another person.

I’ll admit I’m already fairly familiar with all of these experiments from my readings in the annals of popular science, but seeing them being performed really adds to the experience. A shame then that some of the programmes editing had quite the opposite effect.

Look. I understand that putting together a science programme is a difficult task – shot after shot of talking head doesn’t make for great TV. Did we really need to see du Sautoy walking around hooked up to a Steadicam as he ponders? It made him look like a cleaned up Sir Digby Chicken Caesar.

Camera gripes aside, this episode was certainly an improvement on the last time I sat down to watch Horizon. It’s worth a watch, and I’ll be making an effort to check out a bit more in the coming weeks.

Paul Bettany and Martha West as Darwin and his daughter Annie are superb, and I was genuinely moved by their on-screen relationship. But, for every touching father-daughter moment there came scene after scene of Darwin manically running after the ghost of his dead child.

The real Darwin struggled to live with Annie’s death, and suffered throughout his life from a mysterious illness that likely caused him great mental trauma. He was not however stark-raving mad, as the film portrays him, and after the first few interactions with the ghost of Annie, my sense of immersion was shattered.

The film is a dramatisation though, and not a documentary, so some bending of the truth is allowed. I imagine what more people will take issues with is the portrayal of religion. Darwin’s wife Emma, played here by Bettany’s actual wife Jennifer Connelly, was deeply religious, and Darwin delayed publication of his theory for many years because he feared her (and the world’s) response.

This is played out in the film, but perhaps in the most ham-fisted way possible. “Science is at war with religion,” declares Thomas Huxley near the start, and Darwin must win the fight for science.

Why must the theory of evolution always be set against religion in this way? It is perfectly possible to both accept the truth of evolution and believe in God – not a philosophy I ascribe to personally, but nor one I feel the need to constantly assault.

If Creation is meant to convince people of the truth of evolution over God, then it will fail. As the lack of a US distribution deal indicates, those who do not wish to have their minds changed will simply refuse to see it. But if the film is meant to appeal to Darwin’s loyal supporters, then the sight of him raving at the ghost of his daughter is unlikely to please.

Who then is Creation intended for? I don’t know. It’s certainly a film worth seeing; I enjoyed it as a well constructed piece of cinema. I’m just not sure that I liked it.

Sitting down to watch, my first impressions can be summarised in two words: “oh dear”. The CBeebies style intro and open-plan set immediatly made me think of Blue Peter, and a four minute section on dodging CCTV cameras left me wondering whether we’d get any science at all.

Eventually they got to the point: new technology has been developed to identify people on CCTV from the way they walk. Two of the presenters, Liz and Dallas, demonstrated the capabilities of the system, but when Dallas decided to do a John Cleese-style silly walk in an effort to fool the system, we weren’t told whether he succeeded or not. “Oh that’s really annoying, we had to cut that bit out,” he said back in the studio. Yes, it was really annoying!

I was ready to give up at this point, but the next section hooked my interest. Cribbing from both Top Gear and Mythbusters, presenter and special effects guy Jem introduced us to the vortex cannon. This contraption forms a concentrated ring of air that can travel long distances, and with the addition of explosive gas it can pack quite a punch. Pretty cool stuff:

Other segments included an interview with geneticist Craig Venter, who is attempting to create artificial life. I cringed when they used the word “Frankenstein” in what seemed like a persistent effort to introduce “controversy”. There was also a rather nice science-as-street-magic from Dr Yan Wong, Bang Goes The Theory’s genuine scientist. He demonstrated how to cook an egg using a paper frying pan, and his street audience were clearly impressed.

It was a nice bit of TV, but it worried me. The promotional material implied that all four presenters would work as a team, but Wong appeared only briefly, and didn’t interact with the other three. His official bio is also a bit “ooh, what a boffin”. I’m concerned that the guy on the show with the most scientific knowledge is being somewhat ghettoised.

Overall, the first episode of Bang Goes The Theory was decidedly average. I really liked the vortex cannon, so I’m hoping we’ll see more segments in the same vein. I’ll definitely be watching the second episode, but I have a vested interest. My girlfriend, who is of the non-sci comm persuasion, wasn’t so sure she’d be tuning in, making me wonder how the programme faired amongst the general public. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

The central argument of the book goes like this. Most people hold some kind of supernatural belief, ideas which defy natural laws. Hood thinks that supernatural thinking is in fact a perfectly natural mechanism which develops in childhood and often persists into adulthood, even in otherwise perfectly rational people. According to Hood, supernatural thinking is an intuitive process and is not dissimilar to common sense; hence he terms it ‘supersense’.

Hood blends together anecdotes, psychological experiments, argument, popular culture and hints of philosophy exceptionally well, making Supersense a fantastically engaging book. I read so much of it on the tube that I actually began to look forward to tube journeys, which is about as much praise as I can give.

One of the particular strengths of the book is the range of supernatural thoughts it covers. Going beyond the well-trodden ground of religion and the paranormal, Hood draws our attention to all sorts of supernatural beliefs – sentimentality, mind-body dualism, the superstitions of tennis players and the idea of transferring essences to objects like cardigans.

The science is interesting and well explained, but not too dense. The experiments about childhood thinking are intriguing and prompt the reader to examine their current beliefs in relation to their childhood beliefs. Musings about the psychological implications of disgust permeate throughout the book and keep your attention. And even though Hood is a scientist and explains a lot of science very well, you never get the feeling you are reading book about science – which for me, on the whole, is a good thing.

At times Hood labours his central argument a little too much, but he acknowledges this himself and the surrounding material more than makes up for it. I think the reason he works so hard to relate the material to it is because he strongly believes that what he calls our supersense is natural and fundamentally embedded into the way we reason, and that it is unlikely that we will ever be rid of it.

This conclusion is bad news for the likes of Richard Dawkins, but for Hood our supersense allows us justify our sacred values – our morals, our ideas about interconnectedness, our sense our self and our attachment to objects.  This is enough to make them rational and even desirable on some level.  Whether you agree with this ultimate conclusion or not Supersense makes for a highly entertaining read and makes you think. So read it.

Those of you expecting The Tiger That Isn’t to be a book on the evolution of the big cat family, prepare to be disappointed. The book’s subtitle, “Seeing through a world of numbers”, gives the game away – it’s about maths. More specifically, The Tiger That Isn’t exposes the common misuse and abuse of numbers by politicians, government institutions and the media.

Don’t be too downhearted though, because Blastland and Dilnot, the creator and former presenter of Radio 4′s excellent More Or Less programme on statistics, have written a fantastically interesting book based on their knowledge from the show.

The unusual title refers to the human capacity for pattern recognition. We have evolved the powerful ability to identify patterns, and to notice deviations from those patterns. This important skill allowed our ancestors to see, for example, the distinctive stripes of a tiger in the jungle and run away to safety.

Pattern recognition comes at a cost however. Sometimes our over-active brains will see the tiger that isn’t – a chance occurrence of light shining through the long grass that gives the impression of a non-existence tiger.

This downside is reflected in modern life by our need to enforce order on a random world. We forget that correlation does not imply causation and find tigers where there are none.

The Tiger That Isn’t guides readers through common mistakes in the use of statistics with examples plucked from the headlines. An NHS deficit of £1bn sounds immense, but it works out as less than 1% of the total NHS budget, and just £16 per head. League tables are revealed as effectively useless, with schools shooting up and down based on little more than random chance. And as we already know, the media is notoriously bad at reporting health risks.

If you’ve ever enjoyed an episode of More or Less, read a newspaper and wondered where all the numbers come from, or even just uttered the phrase “lies, damned lies and statistics,” this is a book you will enjoy. In addition to being entertained, you’ll finish The Tiger That Isn’t with a much better understanding of what numbers can and can’t tell you. Read it.

Wallace & Gromit, the nation’s most beloved plasticine duo, have arrived at the Science Museum. I went along with I,Science editor Mico Tatalovic to check out the new exhibition, Wallace & Gromit present A World of Cracking Ideas.

The duo are known for their crazy inventions that inevitably go horribly wrong, and it seemed that the Science Museum’s lifts were getting in to the spirit of things. As we waited for a ride to the exhibition floor one of the Museum’s sleek glass lifts arrived, but refused to open its doors before shooting off again. It eventually returned and we step aboard, only to find ourselves stuck between floors. “Perhaps we’ll get the stairs next time,” I said to Mico. Thankfully we were not trapped for long and, for the rest of the morning at least, the inventions on display behaved themselves.

Working in collaboration with Wallace & Gromit creators Aardman Animation, the Science Museum have recreated their home, 62 West Wallaby Street, and stuffed it full of things to see and do. With funding from the Intellectual Property Office, the £2m exhibition is designed to inspire the nation’s creativity and get us all inventing.

Visitors will find “Idea Stations” in each room of the house where they can scribble down their new creations, before sending them off to Wallace & Gromit through a suitably wacky delivery process, the Eureka Brainwave. This overhead conveyer belt channels ideas through the exhibition to the Thinking Cap Machine, which…turns them into paper hats. A bit of a let-down if you have just submitted your idea for the next iPod killer, but kids will love it.

As well as coming up with your own ideas, you can play around with Wallace & Gromit’s. In the living room you’ll find the Tellyscope, their answer to the television remote. After throwing enough balls at a target (both myself and Mico were hopeless throws), a television will move towards a massive sofa. Take a seat, and a series of levers move a gloved hand to select the button of your choice, which will play a short video clip. Very silly, very Wallace & Gromit. Other fun things include a slide down the plughole from the bathroom to the garden, where you’ll be to take part in a modelling clay activity.

It’s not just Wallace & Gromit’s inventions on display though. The Science Museum have dug through their extensive catalogue to find examples of weird and wonderful inventions from the real world. Displays range from an early electric kettle to 1960’s food packaging. You can also track the development of inventions like the telephone, from Alexander Graham Bell’s original to the latest shape-shifting Nokia prototype – unfortunately a model, and not the real thing just yet!

If old inventions aren’t your thing, there’s still a lot on show for Wallace & Gromit and fans. Sets from the films are lovingly displayed, and simply walking through the house really feels like you’re taking part in one of their crazy adventures. It would be very easy to spend almost two hours taking in everything the exhibition has to offer.

I have just one very minor criticism, of an ideological nature. A message throughout the exhibit is the importance of protecting your intellectual property by registering inventions with the Intellectual Property Office, and I have no qualms with that. Up in the bathroom, in a display all about music, was a poster that left me feeling rather different.

Nestled in a corner, away from the karaoke disco in the shower and a charming vinyl jukebox, it said that the music industry is the only way for artists could “avoid losing out to copycats” and “benefit from hitting all the right notes”. In other words, sign a record deal or go broke. In a world where internet exposure and digital distribution is making the music industry increasingly irrelevant, it struck me as nothing more than an out-of-place attempt at propaganda. I’m sure though that kids will just run past without a second glance as they head for something fun to do, so perhaps it doesn’t matter.

My woolly liberal sensibilities aside, Wallace & Gromit present A World of Cracking Ideas is well worth a visit. You might not learn anything as such, but you’ll be too busy having fun with all the crazy contraptions to care. The exhibition will run until 1st November 2009, and the usual fees apply: Adults £9, Concessions £7, with extra deals for families. Cracking good time, Gromit.

I’m writing this review as a break from revision, with the ideas of science philosophers Kuhn and Popper still swimming round my brain. Both men have their supporters, but with 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense Michael Brooks is definitely throwing in his lot with the Kuhnians.

Kuhn argued that science is framed by paradigms, established bodies of knowledge that define the scientific questions of the day. Eventually problems with the paradigm will emerge, and science will undergo a “paradigm shift”. 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense is a compilation of problems with our current understanding of the universe, and Brooks suggests that solving any one of them could lead to a paradigm shift.

A classic example of such a change is the move from Newtonian to relativistic physics, and the book begins firmly in the physics camp. Over the first two chapters dark matter is put forward as a possible explanation for both the apparent “missing” mass in the universe, and the unexplained drift of the Pioneer probes. From there we move to the prospect of varying fundamental constants (like G, the gravitational constant) and a look in to the controversial subject of cold fusion.

Next we get six chapters dealing with the troubling subject of life. Where did we come from? Is there life elsewhere in the universe? And why do we die? These are just some the questions that science doesn’t yet have an answer to, but Brooks lays out some possible explanations.

The end of the book deals with two ongoing controversies in medicine, the placebo effect and homeopathy. I was intrigued to learn about the concept of epitaxy, in which the molecular structure of one material can influence another without any chemical reactions taking place. In the same way that plasticine forced through a mould will take on a certain shape, is it possible that the molecular structure of water could be rearranged by homeopathic substances to produce healing properties? No one has done the research, so I remain sceptical, but it’s an intriguing possibility.

So far I’ve skipped over one chapter in this review; number 11, entitled Free Will. In it Brooks describes a device called a transcranial magnetic simulation, in which two electric coils create a magnetic field to induce currents in the brain. Neuroscientists can use such devices to cause unconscious bodily movements in their subjects, which Brooks experience first-hand.

It is with this evidence, along with other brain experiments, that he claims the concept of free will is nothing but an illusion. Maybe it’s just my fundamental philosophical objection to giving up free will, but I found this chapter to be on far less firm ground than the others. The experiments described just didn’t seem to say to me what Brooks wanted them to.

One dodgy chapter aside, 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense is a very good read. The chapters are short and for the most part self-contained, making it easy to dip in to, and it’s refreshing for once to read a popular science book about what we don’t know. The book looks to the future rather than just recounting the past, and left me wondering when the next new discovery will allow us to whittle the list down to a nice even dozen.

Now, there really is no substitute for the real thing; a night’s sky crammed with stars truly is a wondrous sight to behold, but unfortunately I’ve only ever experienced it on rare holidays to the middle of nowhere. If you live in a city like London, a combination of cloud cover and light pollution mean it’s hard to even see the brightest stars on most days.

Enter Stellarium and Celestia, two free open source simulations of space with two slightly different approaches.

Stellarium

Stellarium is a planetarium for your computer. The slick interface allows you to select any location on Earth from which to view the stars, as well as a whole host of other options.

Stellarium after the initial load (click for bigger)

You can move about the sky at will, zooming in on objects of interest at any point in time – controllable at will, backwards and forwards. As you can see from the initial image, I couldn’t see much to begin with – it was day time! After a bit of fiddling, such as removing the atmosphere and adding in some labelling, I was able to come up with this:

That's more like it (click for bigger)

There are a whole host of other options however, such as some rather nice constellation art – and not just Western constellations. Other cultures have their own starlore, and Stellarium can accommodate many other celestial join-the-dots. You can even change the ground view from the default field to a few other options – including the view from a Mars rover.

Stellarium is a very nice piece of software, and the ease of use is especially impressive considering it is currently at the very early version 0.10.0! My only criticism is that it’s very Earth-centric – exploring the galaxy (or beyond) is a little tricky. To be fair, that’s because Stellarium is designed to be used from the Earth’s point of view, unlike our next piece of software.

Celestia

Would you like the entire universe on your desktop? That’s what Celestia offers – well, not quite. Memory limitations mean the “universe” is cut short at about 16,000 light-years from the Sun, but a fully 3D representation of even this relativity small section of space is pretty impressive.

Celestia's default view (click for bigger)

You’re not just shackled to Earth, either. A few keyboard commands will send you whizzing off in any direction, travelling at anywhere from walking speed to much faster than light. The entire solar system is modelled in 3D, as is much of the rest of the galaxy.

As with Stellarium, Celestia allows you to manipulate time to your whims at a number of speeds – although the date will freeze at the year 5,874,774! Also included are a guided tour of the solar system, and an eclipse finder, demonstrated below.

An eclipse due to take place later this year, simulated in Celestia (click for bigger)

Celestia is much less use friendly than Stellarium, however. Not much can be done with the mouse, so I was forced to leave the list of keyboard commands on screen (as you can see above) which rather spoils the view. Having said that, once you get to grips with it Celestia is the more powerful of the two programs.

In addition to natural phenomena, Celestia can also display a number of man-made objects up in the sky. I enjoyed watching the International Space Station floating serenely over the Earth’s surface – it’s seriously tiny. If that’s not enough, you can add to the default object set with a series of add-ons – even fictional places from Star Wars and Star Trek!

Roundup

It’s hard to choose between these two great pieces of software, as they both have their strengths and weaknesses. Ultimately, it’s a toss up between depth and dedication. If you just want a quick look at some stars, plum for Stellarium with its easy interface. On the other hand, for a galaxy and more at your fingertips, Celestia is your answer, provided you take the time to learn to use it.

I will add one caveat: as I said before, Stellarium is still fairly early on in development. Hopefully as the software improves more features will be added, and if so it might just pull ahead. Even so, both programs are a great way to admire the stars.

Upon entering the Science Museum’s Japan Car exhibition, you might be forgiven for thinking you’ve wandered in to the wrong room. Visitors are greeted by a display of bonsai trees, the miniature Japanese trees. Don’t worry, you’re in the right place – these were created by artist Seiji Morimae to complement the cars on display. Indeed, each bonsai display contains a small model car, evoking the natural stones typical of the bonsai art form. All very good, but isn’t this the Science Museum?

Moving in to the next room, we find “The view from there”, a short film that artistically explores the urban landscape of modern Japan. Roads weave across the three large screens in a pleasantly relaxing manner, but I couldn’t help feel like I was watching an extended car advert – an impression that would only grow as I walked through the rest of the exhibition.

Leaving the film to its eternal looping, I entered the exhibition proper. The stark white appearance of both the cars and accompanying displays gave the effect of being inside an iPod. Everything oozed style, but in a way that seemed extremely calculated. Looking down at my feet, I spotted the exhibit barriers, and winced. Bamboo-like poles supported by tripods made from chopsticks, clearly intended to evoke Japanese culture, just seemed a little bit crass.

Each of the 14 cars in the exhibit are displayed along side information about the relationship between their design and Japanese culture. It all comes off very slogan-like, with titles such as “One of the Very Best Off-Road Performers” and “Cars Finely Honed for Fuel Efficiency”. I almost expected to be offered zero-percent finance.

Determined to find some actual science content, I pressed on. One car had all of its inner workings laid out for easy viewing – interesting, but It didn’t tell me anything about how the pieces actually fit together to make the car run. Later displays explained the principles of hydrogen fuel cells, but with the information directly above Honda’s latest model, I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable about the commercial undertones.

One of the last pieces in the exhibition is the Toyota i-REAL, a concept car in the loosest sense of the word. Looking somewhat like a cross between a wheelchair and a motorcycle, its sleek aesthetic instantly reminded me of the film Wall-E. In Pixar’s 2008 animated hit, intrepid robot Wall-E discovers that human beings have been reduced to mega-obese consumers who glide around in hovering wheelchairs very similar in form to the i-REAL. Probably not the image intended by Toyota, but once I’d made the connection I couldn’t get it out of my head.

Understandably the exhibition was put on with the aid of leading Japanese car manufacturers, and a little bit of product placement can be forgiven, but having reached the end in under half an hour it seemed that Japan Car is all product and no exhibition. When you consider the £8 cost of admission, it’s hard to recommend to all but the most devoted petrol-heads or Japan-o-philes. If the exhibition had been put on at the V & A museum, the focus on design and culture might have felt more comfortable, but in the Science Museum I want a little more substance.

Japan Car is open until 19th April 2009 – see the website for details.