I am utterly thrilled to have The Sensorium of God picked out by the Daily Mail in their round up of the year’s fiction:

“I cannot commend highly enough Stuart Clark’s The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth trilogy.  This is the second volume about the great men whose knowledge and passion did so much to advance our understanding of our planet and the skies above us.

The Sensorium Of God focuses on the professional rivalries between Isaac Newton, Edmond Halley and Robert Hooke.  Thwarted in his understanding of Johannes Kepler’s century-old explanation as to why the planets move as they do, Halley enlists Newton’s help.  But accusations that Newton is actually stealing Hooke’s research threatens to derail any progress that is being made.

This novel is not just for those of a scientific bent: Clark’s narration is easy to follow and his prose flows. This volume can be read in isolation, but with the final book due in February you may want to add the first to your Christmas package, to be fully up to speed.”

You can see all the selections here.

Many congratulations to David Colquhoun and Suzi Gage who were joint winners of the UK Science Blog Prize 2012. It is an honour to have been shortlisted with such accomplished bloggers across such a range of scientific topics. The prize giving evening was a fun night. Read the press release from Good Thinking here.

The European Space Agency has agreed to collaborate with Russia on two future missions designed to look for evidence of life on Mars. Meanwhile, Nasa's Curiosity team says it is poised to make a 'historic' announcement.

This is the latest piece for my Across the Universe blog over at The Guardian. 

“This week in Naples, Italy, the European Space Agency (Esa) approved Russia as its partner for a brace of Mars missions set for launch in 2016 and 2018. Russia will now step in to fill the gap created when Nasa pulled out of the ExoMars missions in February.

The 2018 ExoMars rover will be the first mission to look for evidence of life on the red planet since Nasa's Viking missions back in the 1970s. But could it have been trumped by Nasa's Curiosity before it even makes it to the launch pad? ...”

Read the full story here.

I have a feature in New Scientist this week:

“Nothing is supposed to speed up or slow down radioactive decay. So how come the sun seems to be messing with some of our elements?

IT WAS one of those evenings. You know the kind: after a draining day at work, all you want to do is relax in front of the television. The last thing you expect to do is make a breakthrough that could change the face of modern physics.

Yet that's exactly what happened to Jere Jenkins on 13 December 2006. After a busy day in the lab, he recalls watching the news in a "semi-catatonic" state. The story was about how astronauts had been outside the International Space Station during a solar storm and had caught a blast of X-rays.

Jenkins sat up and took notice. This could be the answer to a puzzle he had stumbled across at work. Results from one of his experiments suggested that the sun was somehow speeding up the radioactive decay of an isotope he was studying - something that was not supposed to happen. The news report gave him an idea about how to test this peculiar finding. If the sun was indeed affecting radioactive half-lives, he wondered, what would happen when a solar storm slammed straight into Earth? He pulled out his laptop, logged into the university server and checked his experiment. What he saw stunned him. ...”

You can read the full story here, a registration is required.

It has generated a couple of interesting responses through my website:

Firstly, here is a paper by Professor John Hardy who has measured the decay rate of gold-198 at seven different Sun-Earth distances. The isotope is a beta-emitter with a half-life of 2.7 days. He observes “no systematic oscillations in half-life”.

Secondly, a reply came from Lewis Larsen of Lattice Energy LLC who believes that Jenkins and Fischbach’s results can be explained with neutrinos if the Widom-Larsen theory is true. Crudely, the Widom-Larsen theory attempts to explain the controversial ‘cold fusion’ experiments of the late 80s/early 90s. Lewis’s technical comment on my New Scientist article can be found here.  A recent, popular discussion of his ideas in general can be found here.

I am thrilled to report that my Guardian blog, Across The Universe, has been shortlisted for the 2012 UK Science Blog Prize.

The prize has been initiated by Good Thinking, a small UK-based organisation devoted to promoting science and debunking pseudoscience. The awards evening is presented in association with Soho Skeptics. My grateful thanks for this recognition go to both organisations.

The prize night is on Sunday 25 in London. I will be there to give a short talk and to applaud the other nominees. I am honoured by the nomination and to be in such company. You can buy tickets to the event here.

Read the official release, and see the other shortlisted blogs by clicking on the Read More, if you can’t see the full post already.