O.C. Heaton's Blog

I have to say this latest expedition to Mars has really caught my imagination. Way more so than the previous voyages to the red planet and I think it’s mainly down to how NASA have approached the whole thing:

Take its ‘mission’ for example. According to their website it is essentially to ‘find out whether Mars ever had an environment able to support small life forms. In other words is the planet habitable?’ You can’t get more ambitious than that.
And of course Will.i.am got to beam his new...

About 4 weeks ago I stopped blogging. If truth be known I was a bit fed up with it. The realization came after I had read an excellent entry in Penelope Trunk’s blog about How she had received a big advance from a publisher but self published anyway. However the bit that really caught my eye was near the end. I remember the words very well.

‘I love love love my blog.’

That’s when I realized. I had stopped loving mine. It had become a big drag. A chore in fact. Something to be rolled out eac...

Exactly one year ago today Atlantis touched down at the Kennedy Space Centre in Central Florida for the very last time after flying 135 missions. Since then the whole programme has been decommissioned. Many (not me) would probably argue that it was long overdue given that it cost the US government over £73BN and caused the loss of 14 lives. Having said that it also delivered quite a lot back. The International Space Station and the launch of the amazing Hubble telescope to name but two.

Ho...

I work in technology and along with my writing it provides me with a very good living but every so often something happens that makes me realize, firstly how horribly dependent we are on the stuff and secondly how its failure can pitch us into chaos, literally at the click of a mouse. I refer of course to the RBS debacle that I was unfortunately caught up in, along with millions of others last week.

It was quite a surreal experience to say the least, which began with a call from my wife to...

I recently blogged about robot cars and our subsequent loss of one more area of personal freedom as computers start doing something else for us. Well, when writing said blog I never considered that we might actually be moving into a post car world.

Before you holler too loudly, consider the facts. Since 1996 there has been a 13% decline in annual trips by cars and vans in the UK and a 4% reduction in annual distance travelled over the same period. And it’s not just the UK – the ratio of ve...

As everyone who has read The Human Race knows I love stats and facts and recently came across a really interesting take by the US Geological Survey on how to represent the amount of water on the planet.

What I liked about their approach is that they present it in a way that you can really grasp the scale of our water resources or, rather, lack of them:

- About 3,100 mi3(12,900 km3) of water, mostly in the form of water vapour, is in the atmosphere at any one time. If it all fell as precipit...

I went to see Coldplay last night in Manchester at the Ethiad Stadium along with 50,000 others. It was brilliant. We were dazzled with a fabulous 2 hour set complete with PyroTechnics, the most incredible monster size HD screens and a dazzling light show courtesy of the 25,000 or so wirelessly triggered wrist bands which flashed different colours at various points during the concert. We drove the 40 or so miles back across the Pennines, tired but with big smiles on our faces. It reminded...

The Government published its annual report last week lauding the growth in the UK’s green economy – apparently the green goods and services market is now worth £122bn and the low carbon economy now employs almost one million people. Impressive figures by any measurement, particularly since the sector is reported to have grown by 4.7 per cent against the2009/10 figure of £116.8bn. Not bad in the current climate.

The numbers were so impressive I went to take a quick look at them and as alway...

Are we slowly sucking the fun out of life? I refer of course to the news that Google has been given the go ahead to launch a self driven car in Nevada. That’s right. A car that drives itself without the need for human intervention. Why? Because everyone knows that cars driven by humans are not safe – there is always the possibility of an accident because of human error. Not so with a computer though. They can never be distracted. Can never fall asleep. Can never misjudge a distance or ign...

This passed me by last year but is back this coming weekend for its second incarnation. I’m talking about the UK Green Film Festival, which will be screening films from around the world that explore some of the big environmental issues of the day.

There’s some fascinating topics up for viewing – from the obvious to the not so obvious. Below I have highlighted four that you might find interesting:

You could try Happy, which examines what makes you happy. Is it money? Kids and family? Your wo...