A study of mens' habits has revealed that they cling on to the TV remote control, even when they are not even watching a TV programme ! What's more, in the 8 households that were spied upon during the study, when women used the remote, they returned it to the man straight afterwards. Now that's remote control for you !

It isn't just Concorde that breaks the sound-barrier - whips do too. Scientists originally thought that the crack produced by a whip is because the tip of the whip breaks the sound barrier and makes a minature sonic boom - this is when something travels faster than the speed of sound and overtakes its own sound wave so that the sound waves are all compressed together behind the object, making a very loud sound. But now scientists have found that it is not the tip of the whip that is making the noise - because that they have found that when the crack occurs the tip is actually moving at twice the speed of sound - 1434 miles per hour. So what is breaking the sound barrier and making the noise when the whip actually cracks then ? Physicists Alain Goriely and Tyler McMillen at the University of Arizona in the US have found that it is in fact the loop that travels along the length of the whip that breaks the sound barrier and makes the cracking noise.

Allergies are horrible. They are made worse by the fact that we don't know much about them, how to prevent them from occurring, and how to stop them from recurring. But Brian Sutton and his team from Kings College, London, have made a potentially important discovery this week - about how antibodies called IgE work. Everyone has IgE antibodies, but people with allergies have much higher levels than most. The Y shaped IgE antibodies attach themselves to mast cells in our tissues. When the antibody picks up an allergen, such as pollen, it triggers the Mast cell to release irritants such as histamine, the substance responsible for the unpleasant effects including swollen, itchy, weepy eyes, runny nose and asthma. Now the King's team have found that when the IgE antibody attaches to a mast cell it changes its shape. This shape change seems to lock the antibody in place, making the individual more prone to allergic reactions. Sutton says "if you could design a drug that keeps the antibodies in their bent shape you could stop them binding to mast cells, or even pop them off, stopping allergic symptoms". There is such a drug, called Xolair, which is made by biotech company Genentech and which has shown promising results in clinical trials. But the drug is very expensive and needs to be given by injection so it is not practical as a therapy yet. But the new results from King's are very encouraging and might herald some relief for some of us in summer in future !