Secret Science: The Amazing World Beyond Your Eyes is a new release from Scholastic Books. Written by Stand-up Comedian, Mathematician and Scientist Dara O'Briain, it's like taking a foray through his head as he goes about his every day life, and if you know him from TV like I do, you'll read it entirely in his voice.


Subtitled The Amazing World Beyond Your Eyes, in this book we don't see the world as we would normally, we are shown the science behind everything we take for granted, from sleeping to flying to building sandcastle, and it is fascinating.

Simple Science is full of interesting illustrations by Dan Bramhall and they work perfectly. The whole package is incredibly funny and witty, with plenty of dry humour, but this is also an intelligent book.

It's taken me 5 years and 2 weeks to reach 1500 posts, so I guess that means I've averaged 300 posts a year. It would be disingenuous to assume they were all brilliant, so please let me take a moment to apologise for all the drivel and  the posts that were crap. The blurry photos, the videos where I'd put the model together wrong or made up a phrase that made no sense whatsoever. The times I blagged it completely, the Twitter party where the product hadn't even arrived. The times I got the title wrong, or accidentally published a draft post which contained a few swear words and little else. The time Gary the cat wrote and published a post while I was on the school run. It wasn't even his best work.

It's dark, it's cold and everyone is shattered. No-one wants to play. With this in mind, here are a few of my most light-hearted posts. Hopefully something here can bring a smile to your face, whatever the weather outside....