I once met the inimitable Adrian Berry (he took me and my wife to a fantastic seafood restaurant in Boston when we were guests of the Telegraph at a AAAS meeting). Anyway, his blog is fascinating and his views and understanding of science are tipified by one of his articles that explains why fixing the Hubble Space Telescope with robots is “preposterous”: Baffled Computers.
At that meeting, I was trying to enthuse about chemical chirality and a feature article I’d written for the paper’s science editor Roger Highfield on enantiomerically selective chemical syntheses. Unfortunately (for me), Adrian didn’t mince words and put me on the spot to explain chirality and quickly knocked the wind out of my intricate and long-winded molecular explanation with one word – handedness. Which is chirality in a nutshell. For more on chirality check out my cyclo-octatetraene molecule of the month