In 2011Britan suffered a shortage of railfreight locomotives. This in itself was a good news story though it’s not the subject of this blog (freight is at last returning to the railways). This shortage led to an event of pure serendipitous magic – something that almost never happens in any realm happened in the grinding world of heavy industrial infrastructure. To haul its raw mineral ore trains to the aluminium smelters in Northumbria and Scotland, Rio Tinto Alcan UK hired a preserved classic diesel locomotive, usually employed on raifans' excursions. The locomotive in question was a Deltic, the most illustrious diesel locomotive ever to run on British rails.

The Deltics covered the route of the Flying Scotsman, from London to Edinburgh, the East Coast Mainline. Their reign was brief – from 1961 to 1981, when they were replaced by the HST.  Only 22 were built but they were so loved that no less than six survive.

I discovered all this a year later. In May 2012. Having become interested in the railfreight revival, I came across a video of the Deltic on the Alcan train on Youtube. This piqued my interest in the aluminium smelters themselves.

Always on the look out for stories that suggest industry might not be beyond revival in this country, I started Googling Lynemouth aluminium smelter, founded in 1974.  I was pleased to hear of this modern plant. And if the owners had had the imagination to hire a Deltic, the site was doubly blessed – no mere utilitarians they.

My pleasure lasted for about 5 minutes. Googling Alcan Lynemouth, I discovered that production ended on 29 March 2012. I am no longer on the trail of the Alcan Deltics and the railfreight revival. I want to know how the aluminium industry, emblem of modernity for the 30s poets, had sunk to the point where it was about to disappear from the UK.

Just discovered that the Victorian explorer Stanley was an Eric Clapton lookalike. Can't find the perfect Clapton match for this pic but I'm sure you'll get the idea.

“Facebook ready for biggest ever technology float”, the Guardian tells me this morning. But Facebook is not a technology: it is a social medium. If people get together in a social grouping, say, a book club or the freemasons or a political party, you wouldn’t call that a technology. Sure, cars and phones and roads and houses are necessary for people to get together but you don’t call these social groupings or the enabling of them technology or infrastructure.

I once thought that everyone understood the division in computing between hardware and software. The whole point of the computer is that it is a universal machine: it can be programmed to do things the hardware designer never thought of. Facebook is a software phenomenon, not a piece of technology. In the early days of the Syrian uprising a British/Syrian activist told Newsnight that the police rounding up demonstrators were asking: “where's your Facebook machine”, thinking it was a device.

Treating Facebook shares as a technology stock is only the latest and most prominent example of this confusion. For decades people who don't like using computers have been calling themselves “technologically challenged”. But negotiating a computer isn’t getting dirty under a car: it means following logical operations. You wouldn’t call looking up items in a book index “technology”, neither is poking someone on Facebook.

The Fibonacci series is an intriguing piece of mathematics with deep roots in the natural world. The series runs:

0 1  2  3  5  8  13  21  34  55  89 etc

Each term is derived by adding the previous two (except for the beginning which is slightly irregular). The series has long had a quasi mystical status because the pattern appears in many natural phenomena, especially flowers and seeds such as sunflower seedhead spirals and pine cones. Recent experiments have shown what balance of chemical repulsions in the growing tip produces this pattern.

The series has been used in architecture but the most intriguing example I’ve seen is the Lily Impeller, described by the Australian inventor Jay Harman. This looks like a nautilus shell, that many-chambered wonder of the sea, and that's because the nautilus too uses the Fibonacci series. The Lily Impeller is more energy efficient than standard screw action mixers. It has been claimed as an example of bioinspiration which it is but surely the maths came first? The Fibonacci series would exist in maths even if no plant had ever exploited it. In this case, nature is a mathomimic. Since maths seems to lie behind all of the patterns of nature you could say that mathomicry is the organizing principle of nature and the mother of biomimicry.

I did some literature research a couple of years ago on the spread of milk tolerance in human populations. A single mutation decides whether or not human beings can digest animals’ milk and this mutation spread very fast through human populations in the last 10,000 years. Obviously this correlates with the practice of dairying: it is thought to be an example of co-evolution between genes and a cultural practice. The geographical spread of this mutation is extremely interesting and has been linked to one of the world’s great unsolved puzzled: the Indo-European language question. The Indo-European language family is one of the largest and links all of Europe to the Near East and India. The question is where did this language originate?

Key to the Indo-European language question is India. Indian cattle were domesticated from a different wild species to the European cattle but there are cultural similarities in ancient Hindu writing that suggest that pastoralists spread both east and west taking the milk mutation with them.

Or did they? African pastoralists have lactose tolerance but their mutation is slightly different, so this is a case of convergent evolution. But now in a major genetic study, Professor Mark Thomas and his team have shown that the genetic background of Indians with the lactose tolerance mutation is identical to that of Europeans. This is an enormous boost to the idea that pastoralism and the Indo-European language originated in Turkey or somewhere north of the Black Sea and then spread both East and West.

There has been much argument over whether farming spread by means of cultural transmission or whether it was taken by physical migration of peoples. The Indian study is powerful evidence and it is further backed up by a paper by another team involving Thomas showing that within Europe it was southern populations that took farming to the north rather than merely showing the northerners how to do it. It does rather look as if that single base pair mutation shaped the destiny of about half the human race.

Romero et al, ‘Herders of Indian and European Cattle Share Their Predominant Allelle for Lactase Persistence’, Mol. Biol. Evol. 2012, 29 (1), pp. 249-260.

Skoglund et al, ‘Origins and Genetic Legacy of Neolithic Farmers and Hunter-Gatherers in Europe’, Science, 2012, 336 (No 6080), pp. 466-9.

Biomimetic architecture has been making waves for some time. The latest stunning addition to the ranks is the One Ocean Pavilion at EXPO 2012 in Yeosu, South Korea, designed by the Austrian architects Soma. The pavilion is a homage to the ocean and marine life and its most dramatic feature is the gill-like array along the facade. These are flexible elements that buckle under compression to create the gill-effect. They are not merely decorative: they open or close to regulate both ventilation and light. The buckling mechanism is a classic out of the D’Arcy Thompson bioinspirational handbook. Forms created under such physical forces take up beautiful “graded forms” as D’Arcy Thompson called them. As the degree of flexure varies along the facade a pleasing serried cascade effect is achieved. I guess the facade could do a Mexican wave if you so programmed it. The pavilion opens today if you’re in striking distance of it.

Giants of the Infinitesimal, a new exhibition at Magna Science Centre, Rotherham, does what it says on the tin: artists Tom Grimsey and Theo Kaccoufa have taken the idea of magnifying the nanoworld literally. They have created kinetic sculptures on a large scale, abundantly visible to the eye, that mimic some of the astonishing things that happen in the nanoworld. Although a key thing to grasp about the nanoworld is that they do things differently down there (gravity for instance which weighs so heavily on us, has no bearing, whereas viscosity, the drag of fluids, and the incessant restless motion of atoms, are all important), in fact much of the restless energy and creativity of that world can be recreated on a large scale. Much of the fascination of the project stems from wrestling with magnets, electric currents and turbulent water to create a balance of forces similar to that in the nanoworld and hence to make visible the astonishing creativity of matter that can self-assemble under its own tug of attractions and repulsions.

Giants of the Infinitesimal start at Magna Science on Saturday, May 5. You can read about it in my article in the Times Eureka section, Thursday, May 3.

I’ve noticed an increasing tendency for book titles to be at odds with their contents. The reason is obvious – these are marketing titles. The most egregious example is that otherwise brilliant book Turing’s Cathedral by George Dyson. The book hardly mentions Turing and is almost entirely about people who could be regarded as Turing’s rivals: the mathematicians of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. It’s a bit like calling a book about the Reformation: The Pope’s Churches. Well, I exaggerate but you get the idea.

At the moment I’m reviewing Philip Ball’s Curiosity. Another fine book by my favourite science writer. But for a while I was puzzled because although curiosity is an organizing concept behind the book, it is really A History of Science in the 17th Century. Now that would not be a selling title, whereas “Curiosity” – we’ve all go that haven't we?

A few lesser examples come to mind. Bill Bryson’s At Home purported to be a look at life, the universe and everything seen though the lens of the rooms in his house. A good idea – each familiar object linked to its history in the universe. But it isn’t that:  actually its a ragbag of random observations. Nicholas Rankin's Churchill's Wizards is about camouflage and deception in WWI and 2. The title strictly refers only to WW2. Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s What Darwin Got Wrong is really an attack on the Modern Synthesis promulgated almost a century after Darwin's time. And so on . . . It says much about our culture that we cannot declare accurately what our books are about. Marketing departments insist on a selling title at all costs. For the moment, you can’t judge a book by its title.