It has to be something to do with stacking them more easily or so they don't roll around in the van! It could also be so that there's somewhere to put the little tub of cheese sauce to dip your crust in afterwards. You need corners for that!

Put simply, those are the cells in the pancreas that make insulin. The islets of Langerhans contain beta cells, which are sensitive to how much sugar or glucose is washing around in the bloodstream. They tailor how much insulin they make. Insulin is a protein that comes out of the cells, and more is produced the higher the glucose levels. The insulin comes out of the cells and enters the bloodstream through the rich supply of blood vessels. It then goes around the bloodstream telling the cells in the rest of the body to turn on a special transporter, which draws glucose inside the cell rather like a vacuum cleaner. Once it's in the cell, the glucose is then turned into other things like fats and a bigger molecule called glycogen.

There are a couple of issues with this. Meningitis comes in two flavours or two forms. There's a viral flavour and a bacterial flavour and by far and away the most serious form of meningitis is the bacterial form. This is because in this instance you have bacteria physically growing and multiplying in the fluid that surrounds the brain. When they do that they secrete lots of factors that promote intense inflammation and can damage the underlying brain. One of the things they do is cause inflammation around the nerves that flow through that space and these include the auditory nerve that supplies your ears and connects your ears to the brain. If you have a lot of inflammation around those nerve roots, it can unfortunately pinch them off and cause permanent deafness. There are other problems of course. If people aren't treated in time with meningitis it can be very serious and can result in people dying. Fortunately we now have vaccines that have been introduced and this has brought the mortality right down. In the UK for instance in young children, there was a type of meningitis caused by meningitis strain C and that was introduced as a vaccine about five years ago. Since then there's been a dramatic reduction in the number of cases. Among adults the most common form is strain B and this still remains a major problem and there is no consistent vaccine for this, so you should be on the look out for signs and symptoms. These include a non-specific feeling grotty for a few days first, and then you start to get a headache. Then you can start to feel quite sick and get scared of the light and your neck can become very very stiff. Then people start to develop a rash which is non-blanching. In other words if you press on the rash with a wine glass or something and look through the glass, the rash doesn't go away. If you have those signs and symptoms, you ought to maybe get checked out by a doctor. Now the other flavour of meningitis I mentioned is viral meningitis and this isn't necessarily so bad. This is when a virus attacks the membranes that surround the brain and it causes many of the same symptoms but usually these cases are self-limiting, which means they just go away and get better of their own accord. Sometimes if it's caused by the herpes virus which is the same virus that can cause cold sores, then you might need to go into hospital for a while and have a drug called acyclovir which knocks it on the head. But thankfully most of the cases don't have long term sequelae, not like the bacterial form.

That's an area that's been looked at with some of these imaging tools because they enable us to look at the human brain in action. Certainly in the context of pain relieving mood when people use music to help relieve a chronic pain syndrome, a very calming pleasant piece of music can not only enable one to be distracted from the pain but it can also induce endogenous opioids. This can be a strategy for cognitive behavioural therapy to help people boost that endogenous system that we've got to get that added benefit. We are less familiar with the actual brain regions that modulate the mood but these are areas that are being looked at in the context of depression and other types of mood disorders and music is one of the areas that is being looked at. We know less about it at the moment.

Pinching is a classic example of mechanical pain. If you squeeze mechanically with pressure on any part of your body it's actually quite hard to make it painful unless you've got a bruise or some damage there already. What you might like to do is to take a pin and very carefully try the pin on that part of the elbow compared to another part of the body. What you'll probably see is that the perception of pain to that pin prick is actually pretty similar. It's just specific to this mechanical crushing type of pain and feels as though there are no pain receptors in that part of the skin. That's actually not the case.

Because it's very important for us to empathise with other people's pain and suffering. It's part of human nature. A very nice experiment was done by Tania Singer just a couple of years ago using imaging. Basically they put women in the scanner and they looked at their brains as they were given a painful stimulus. They then put the women's partners at the end of the scanner and they burnt their partners, but they imaged the women's brains as they watched their partners being burnt. The interesting thing they found in that study was that the areas of the brain that were active when they looked at their partners were pretty much the same areas as those areas active in response to that woman having pain in the first instance. So you basically activate a very similar set of structures, which means you really are having a painful experience yourself watching somebody else. They were very cunning because they actually put women in because they thought that they would empathise better so the control experiment would be to put men in the scanner and see what happens.

Yes there is. There are many ways to do it but basically they all boil down to learning more about it, educating yourself, learning what's going on and looking at the way people are manipulating you. You can practise by looking at examples on the telly, learning what the tricks and techniques are to manipulate your mind and then once you've learnt those you can get to notice them, pick them out and resist them.

Actually you can tickle yourself and Sarah Jane Blakemore did some nice experiments showing how you can do this. What you have to do is get a tickle stick, and when you move it, it has a delay. So from your movement there's a pause between actually when the thing does a tickle on you. You find that that will actually make you laugh. She did some experiments to show why that is. In terms of the pain bit, if you do prepare and block yourself you can boost those endogenous opioids just like in that fight or flight response or in the placebo effect. When you know the pain's coming and you psyche yourself up for it you can actually just take the edge of it and modulate that pain a little bit.