There are a number of different things that are coming on line now for cars. Volvo have got a system that literally shakes you awake if you show signs of driver fatigue. In other words, the car is sensitive to characteristic changes in driving habit that people show when they're nodding off at the wheel. Mercedes have got something called a crawl function. When you're in a traffic jam, it's really annoying having to keep braking and changing gear. What they've developed is a car that uses radar to detect the car in front and see how far it is away. When the car in front nudges forward, your car edges forward too. It makes driving in heavy traffic much more enjoyable. Research in air pilots has shown that if everything is automated for the pilots, their brains almost go to sleep. This makes them react badly in an emergency. If they're having to think all the time to control the plane, then if something bad happens they're already aware of what's going on.

COPD is Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. This is the inflammation and accumulation of excess mucus within the airways, which makes them narrow and difficult to breathe. Once you have it, it tends to keep coming back, and it gets worse as time goes on. That's the proper text book definition, but it actually exists in a spectrum. Some people have very mild COPD, while some people have very sever COPD. It's generally associated with smoking.

I have no idea! One possibility is that when you sneeze, you take a lot of air and push it out quickly. It's like your body trying to scratch the inside of your nose. The air hopefully dislodges whatever's aggravating your nose. This may bring up some mucus and put it near the respiratory epithelium, which may be what you're smelling.

There have been quite a lot of people who've looked into this sort of thing to see whether it was actually a real event. In fact, my lecturers when I was back at university wrote a paper on that exact same thing. He looked at the theory that if you get Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and as many planets as possible in the same spot in the sky, can you get a star bright enough to look like the Star of Bethlehem? He found that that probably wasn't the case, as it wouldn't have been bright enough. However, there are some other possibilities. These include comets, asteroids and possibly supernovae as well. When stars explode, they can give out as much light as an entire galaxy, but they don't last for a very long time. This could be an explanation.

Someone did a really clever experiment on this recently. They had special apparatus where they could tap your finger with this automatic device, and it made you think you were doing it yourself. They recorded to see how much they thought they were being tapped when they were actually doing it themselves and when the machine did it for them. What they found was that when the brain programmes a movement to make a sensation such as a tickle or a scratch, what it actually does is sends an inhibitory signal to the part of the brain that would normally be tickled. So in other words there is a kill joy area in the brain that says if you are tickled in this area, you will ignore the tickle. As your brain is sending the message itself, you ignore the tickle. However, when someone else tickles you, your brain doesn't know it's going to happen and turns off the kill joy signal.

There are a couple of reasons for this. It's usually to do with how dry the wood is. What splits the wood apart is the expansion of pockets of water vaporising as the wood gets very hot. The expansion is like its own mini explosion.