Ever since I discovered the amazing technical properties of spider silk (recounted in my book The Gecko’s Foot) I’ve had a soft spot for the garden orb spider. We have a small but spider-friendly garden –  a tall honeysuckle, plenty of shrubs and perennials and not much done to disturb it from early summer through to autumn – and I try to look after the spiders once they set out their stall. Last year, though, was pretty disastrous for them, with numbers well down.

This year, though, they’re back with about ten large spiders setting out their stall most days.  This year I’ve seen a couple of events I’ve never witnessed before. The largest spider in the garden was responsible for both. Firstly, the very large creature bundled up in the web one morning looked suspiciously like another garden spider. I didn’t disturb it to check but by size and markings it seemed to fit the bill. And today I saw a battle between the spider and a bee. For a couple of minutes it looked as if the spider would immobilise the bee: it furiously turned the bee over and over, following it down the web as the bee tried to escape. But the bee was just too big and eventually flew away. The spider, large though she is, must have wasted a lot of energy on that.

Most days, though, they don’t do much, except hang there, getting slowly bigger. Occasionally, I catch one repairing the web and that’s always a delight. Even when they’re motionless, the subtle markings on the large ones always give pleasure. It’s strange, given that many spiders are not prepossessing, just how elegant the garden orb spider is.

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With the long Olympics feelgood summer finally over, the harsh awakenings are coming thick and fast: the killing of the US Ambassador in Libya; the revelation of widespread corruption in British institutions following the Hillsborough tragedy 23 years ago. One that won’t be noticed by many is the startling revelation that BAE, Britain’s’ largest manufacturing company, wants to tie up with the European giant EADS. That would be 60% EADS/40% BAE. You need to know the back story that was completely ignored by the BBC News report last night.

BAE is the rump of Britain’s’ once diverse aviation industry.  EADS is primarily a civil aircraft maker, parent company of the enormous and successful Airbus range of airliners. BAE is mainly a defence contractor (now also owning the UK warship and tank industry) . Six years ago it sold its 20% stake in Airbus because it wanted to concentrate on defence, especially in America. It is a subcontractor for work on the way-over-budget-and-schedule Joint Strike Fighter.  BAE hoped, it seems, this would all lead to a full tie-up one day with Boeing.

The American ambitions always looked dubious. The US has never had much respect for British military aircraft, the Harrier excepted. They bought the plane, adapted it, and built it under licence. When Britain foolishly decided to pension off the Harriers as a quick budget cut the US paid it the ultimate compliment of buying up the entire stock. But that’s about as far as it goes.

Come the financial crash and all has changed. BAE is a weak exporter  – it has just lost the contract to supply Typhoons to India. It is heavily reliant on supplying the UK armed forces. This of course is not a growth area at present.  US defense budgets are similarly down.

So now BAE wants to REBALANCE IN FAVOUR OF CIVIL AIRCRAFT! Six wasted years in other words. It should have upped the stake in Airbus 6 years ago, not sold it. BAE seems to be doing its best to follow in the wake of the British car industry and ICI. The latter, in a suicidal fit, sold all its heavy chemical businesses and bought into perfumery and flavours. “You’d never know us”, they crowed in an asinine advertising campaign. A few years later, the once giant of British industry had gone, the rump Dulux paint business sold to the Dutch Akzo Nobel.

So where does this leave Britain’s rebalancing in favour of manufacturing industry? I ask the question.

The ever-acute Richard Williams in the Guardian yesterday commented that “Perhaps we were given a clue that these Games were going to work in a rather surprising way when something as simple as the countdown to Danny Boyle's opening ceremony turned out to be such a witty and imaginative montage”. It was indeed a delight, as the numbers flashed up with London-specific or universally significant content  attached. It was the best kind of graphic art, reminiscent of the classics portrayed in A Smile in the Mind: Witty thinking in graphic design, Betty McAlhone and David Stuart’s compendium of verbal/visual punning advertising art and branding.

Visual/verbal fusion is the name of the game and the great pioneer of this was Abram Games with his wartime posters urging us to grow our own food etc.

So now it’s official: the international Encode project has confirmed that the 98% of the genome that doesn’t code for protein is not “junk”, as it was labelled for decades, but the repository of tens of thousands of regulatory sequences. In other words, the real business end that makes you a man rather than a mouse. It isn’t exactly news to any one not prejudiced but it draws a line under the junk saga.

It is scientists’ least appealing characteristic that they often pretend to turn ignorance into knowledge: spurious knowledge. A hundred years ago no one knew the nature of the cell’s contents so they called it “protoplasm”as if that represented a gain in knowledge. We’re still at it. It’s one thing to say, as they should have done 40 years ago, that we don’t know what the 98% does; it is quite another to label it junk and thereby to discourage anyone from investigating it. Not that it did, of course. It’s the same tendency that Francis Crick showed when he asserted the so-called Central Dogma, that information only flowed in the direction DNA –RNA-protein. RNA and proteins have a huge influence on what DNA is expressed and where.

But we can all breath more easily now. That irritating “junk DNA” has been consigned to the trash.