A roaring success? The Walking with Dinosaurs Arena Spectacular

Surely these days everyone loves dinosaurs? After all, the original Jurassic Park movie made over a billion US dollars worldwide, enough to generate a plethora of merchandise and three sequels. In a less fictional vein, the BBC's television series' Walking with Dinosaurs broke viewing records - perhaps just as well, considering its equally record-breaking budget - and led to several TV spin-offs, including a 3D feature film aimed at very young children.

But it's rare for a television documentary (or should that be docudrama?) series to spawn a live show, which is exactly what happened in 2007. Walking with Dinosaurs: The Arena Spectacular has to date has been seen by a worldwide audience of over eight million. Again, this probably all to the good, considering the enormous expense involved in the production. So having seen the television series on DVD, my daughters were desperate to go to the live show here in Auckland. Due to the expense of the tickets I hummed and hawed but eventually bowed under pressure. This was nothing to do with my own interest in seeing the event, of course!

So was it worth it? The ninety minute show followed the chronological order of the series, from late Triassic to the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. My first impression wasn't particularly good, as the narrator Huxley (incidentally I'm not sure what Thomas Henry Huxley would make of the enterprise, considering he was even against opening the Natural History Museum to the general public) explained about dinosaur footprints whilst lights projected some very oversized examples of the same. I assume the scale was to allow visibility from the furthest rows, but even so it seemed a bit clumsy. In my book, there's a fine line between artistic licence and poor science communication.

However, things improved with the arrival of the first beasts. Although it looked as if it was immediately heading in a Disneyesque direction when several cute herbivorous Plateosaurus hatched from a nest of eggs, this was quickly quelled when one hatchling was gobbled up by a Liliensternus. It was excellent to see Nature in warts and all mode - or should that be a literal 'red in tooth and claw' - considering that the audience largely consisted of pre-teen children and their parents? Talking of which, in some cases the roaring monsters and dramatic lighting proved too much, with a girl sitting near me spending more time cradled under her father's armpit rather than looking at the show. I was in general surprised by the lack of anthropomorphising elements that the 3D movie was criticised for, a brave move considering the target audience. Perhaps the major concession to the junior spectators was the young T. rex, whose weak attempts at imitating its far more powerful parent induced laughter from the audience.

In addition to describing the behaviour of the dinosaurs – and one pterosaur (a decent-enough marionette hung in front of poorly projected background footage, although my younger daughter initially thought it was a giant bat) Huxley also covered plate tectonics and the development of vegetation. At one point he even stuck his hand into a steaming pile of fresh herbivore poop to retrieve a dung beetle, leading to an explanation of food chains past and present. Both the inflatable growing ferns and a forest fire were particularly well done, as well as some simple yet charming butterflies made of what looked like coloured paper blown around by hidden fans. My children agreed that the only thing they didn't like were the skate platforms required to move the larger dinosaurs, although I found these less distracting than the marginally camouflaged operator legs in the smaller species. Interestingly, neither of my daughters asked how the larger species were controlled. I guess they've grown up in an age of electronic wonders and this was seen to be just another example of impressive technology.

So what about the educational element of the show? Edutainment can be a difficult balance as well as an appalling word. In addition to the lavish praise that it deserved, the original television series was criticised for presenting speculation as fact. In particular, the large size of some of the species has been questioned. However, the arena event did acknowledge some of the developments since the series was first broadcast fifteen years ago, such as by adding feathers (or proto-feathers) to the mother Tyrannosaurus and even more so to her juvenile.

Judging by the appreciative audience, many of the younger crowd members were already familiar with a wide range of dinolore. For example, as each animal starting entering the arena I could hear children as young as four or five shouting some of the names - and correctly. This created a pleasing contrast to many of the adult visitors to London's Natural History Museum, whom I recall not only failed to differentiate a sauropod from a T. rex but assumed that every large skeleton they saw must be a dinosaur (for example, the giant sloth Megatherium in the Fossil Marine Reptiles gallery).

But just how much of an interest in the giant beasts of the Mesozoic is likely to lead to a more detailed understanding of the wider world of palaeontology as the audience members grow older? Unfortunately, at times it was difficult to hear the narrator's details due to a combination of the sound effects and intense music, which whilst emotive and dramatic, had a tendency to drown out Huxley's description of the antediluvian scenes. Combined with the palpable excitement that most of the younger audience members were clearly experiencing, it's dubious just how much anyone learned during the show. The associated website does contain some educational material, although it makes such basic mistakes as listing the pterosaur Ornithocheirus in the list of dinosaurs.

You could suggest that dinosaurs have become just another part of the great consumerist machine, with any associated science a lucky by-product of flogging stuff. After all, dinosaur-related merchandise features highly in the range at many museum gift shops, even those with a marginal connection to the fauna, as discussed unfavourably several decades ago by evolutionary palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould. It could be argued that any attempt to introduce science-based knowledge to the general public is a good idea, but with the quality of special effects in this live-action show as well as in film and television it may be difficult for children brought up on this material to separate fact from fiction. It is undoubtedly an exciting time for dinosaur discoveries, but science is more than just a series of facts: without the rigour and understanding, the material is subject to the same whims of fashion as the rest of popular culture. If science is to be promoted as the most objective methodology our species has for understanding such fascinating subjects as ancient mega fauna, we need to ensure that audiences are given enough of the reasoning besides all the roaring.

Have spacecraft, will travel: planning the first manned Mars mission

As a space travel enthusiast since I was knee-high to a grasshopper it took me many years to appreciate robot probe missions with anything like the zeal engendered by manned spaceflight. As a schoolboy I watched the first space shuttle mission launch in 1981; no doubt like a multitude of others I initially considered this the start of the ‘casual' rather than pioneering phase of astronautics. Therefore it wasn't long before I asked myself the obvious question: when will there be a crewed mission to Mars?

Mars seems extremely familiar, no doubt due to the myriad of science fiction novels and films concerning the Red Planet. The last decade has seen a proliferation of news stories as various orbiters and rovers gather enormous amounts of - at times puzzling - data. However, none of the numerous projects of all scales that have investigated a manned mission have ever lifted off the launch pad. So here's a brief look at the state of play, not to say of course that this might not look woefully dated within the next few years.

1) Who will go to Mars?

Obviously the USA will supply the most funding so they will run the show. Or will they? The NASA budget available for planetary science is less than half that for International Space Station (ISS) operations, although of course the former are all unmanned missions. In fact, the Planetary Society has claimed that NASA spends less each year on interplanetary probes than the USA does on dog toys! A manned mission would have to negate this trend, as realistic estimates could be around US$500 billion for a single mission.

President Obama's announced half-billion dollar increase to the NASA budget is unlikely to be replicated by any Tea Party candidate who might (God forbid) achieve power. Unless that is we see a return to Cold War rivalries, with China offering a two-horse race to Mars. That might sound unlikely, but in 2006 the Chinese Government announced a long-term goal to land a crew there between 2040 and 2060. Since the US refused to allow them ISS involvement due to not wanting its technology to become available to Beijing, it is doubtful the Whitehouse would be any happier to cooperate in a Mars mission.

Either way, it's probable that some of the ISS partners would collaborate. However unrealistic it now appears in light of the financial crisis, back in 2001 the European Space Agency (ESA) announced its own plan for a crewed Mars landing in the 2030s. There was even a suggestion to include Russia as a minority partner, but the political situation there may prove prohibitive.

It doesn't just have to be other Western nations who participate in a NASA-led project, as numerous private companies are now involved in the commercial space programme. No doubt collaboration between some of the long-established aerospace giants and recent start-ups such as Space-X - whose long-term goal is to establish a Martian colony - with various Western governments would be more palatable to finance ministers. But it's still early days for the private sector: smaller infrastructure may shorten timescales compared to monolithic state enterprise, but as the Virgin Galactic SpaceshipTwo crash shows, developing even sub-orbital craft at this level still carries enormous risk.

So all in all, it could be the US and ESA, with or without substantial private investment, or China in a race with a Western bloc or (as an extreme longshot) Dutch engineer and entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp, whose Mars One mission plans to regularly send crews of four non-professional astronauts on a one-way trip to the Red Planet from 2025. So far he has raised about 1/8000th of the project's already shoestring budget, but that hasn't stopped thousands of would-be colonists from applying. In addition to the necessary privations, these volunteers would also be the subjects of a fund-raising reality television show. If doesn't sound even vaguely like the product of an insane society then I don't know what is. Perhaps we should just turn our backs on the rest of the universe and just spend our lives uploading selfies to social media sites?

2) What will happen?

In theory it sounds simple: a small group of professional astronauts with various scientific backgrounds will spend up to two years on a high-risk mission, exploring the Martian surface for perhaps a month or so, then bring back copious samples of rock, soil, atmosphere and ice for more detailed examination on Earth.

The BBC ‘s 2004 mockumentary Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets showed the deadly effects that ionizing radiation can have on interplanetary travellers. The Mars Science Laboratory, carrier of the Curiosity rover, spent the Earth to Mars transit recording the radiation levels. It confirmed that they were high enough to risk crew members contracting various serious conditions such as cataracts and cancer. Incidentally, female astronauts would apparently be more prone to radiation-induced cancers than male colleagues. A 2012 mission plan considered developing an electromagnetic anti-radiation shield, but most designs are looking to use traditional aluminium construction, perhaps with polyethylene shielding around the pressurised cabins. This definitely appears to be a case of fingers crossed as much as relying on advanced materials science.

The long duration spent in shipboard micro-gravity will also cause physical problems such as bone and muscle deterioration. The astronauts/cosmonauts/taikonauts (delete as preferred) will then have to adjust on Mars arrival to the one-third Earth gravity. As well as avoiding radiation on the Martian surface they will have to minimise contamination from the fine dust: minute particles suspended in the atmosphere could cause lung and thyroid problems if allowed into the lander cabin.

Besides the physical problems, the pioneering crew will also have to contend with the psychological effects of having travelled further from the Earth than any other humans - by an enormous margin. It's one thing to undertake a mission on the ISS - with a regular exchange of crew and a close-up view of the Earth via the cupola - but quite another to spend several years away from fresh air, blue skies, and all the other fantastic things we take for granted. The interplanetary distances would of course be exacerbated by the lack of real-time conversation: the one-way journey time for radio signals from the Martian surface is between four and twelve minutes.

There has been much research into astronaut's disturbed sleep patterns, which can obviously have deleterious effects on their work as well as their mental health. The claustrophobic conditions may contribute too: negative emotions blighted the small group of inhabitants of the Arizona-based Biosphere 2 sealed ecosystem in the 1990s. In addition, this experiment had distinct problems maintaining the environment, with a primary issue being the fluctuating oxygen and carbon dioxide levels. All in all, there are likely to be problems even the best planned mission won't have predicted.

3) When will it take place?

By comparison to low Earth orbit missions, a trip to Mars would be several magnitudes greater. If you want a pioneering aviation analogy I've just figured out that ratio of the Earth-Moon distance compared to the mean Earth-Mars distance is akin to the Wright Brothers' first flight of 36.5 metres being followed up by another spanning over 5 kilometres!

I can foresee two main issues to consider when planning mission timelines, which should ideally coincide to suggest an ideal launch window. The first is the relative orbital mechanics of the two bodies, which can be exploited so as to utilise a minimum fuel trajectory. The second relies on the eleven-year solar cycle: maximal solar activity helps to block interstellar cosmic rays and so reduce the risk of radiation poisoning. Although the sun's output would be at its peak, the astronauts would be safe from solar flares and coronal mass ejections providing they didn't need to undertake any spacewalks or surface EVAs for their duration.

There are several research projects that if one were to prove successful, could reduce by several decades the time before humanity is ready for its first manned Mars flight. The University of Washington and Lockheed Martin are both working on nuclear fusion technology suitable for such a mission. By reducing the journey time from between six and eight months to just three months there would be far less health risk to the crew, as well as presumably considerable weight savings on air and consumables.

Therefore it may become feasible as early as the 2040s but I doubt any earlier, regardless of how much advance is made in fusion technology. On top of all the usual political and socio-economic fluctuations there are just too many important longer-term issues that need resolution here first.

4) Where will it take place?

Mars, of course! The planet has a wide variety of locales (hint of travel brochure there), some rather more interesting than others. If the public get to vote on sites for exploration - bearing in mind that taxpayers will no doubt be funding the majority of the mission - conspiracy theorists and assorted nutbars might promote the curious tetrahedrons (note, not pyramids) of Elysium. Presumably they're enormous ventifacts, but they still appear to be very interesting geological features.

Then there's the great canyon system of Valles Marineris, over 4000 kilometres long and up to 7 kilometres deep. Or how about the 25 kilometre high Olympus Mons and its surrounding escarpment? In Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Carl Sagan suggested that it might be fruitful to explore the slopes of the Martian volcanoes in case they are scattered with diamonds ejected from the carbon-rich mantle!

Other locations that are just begging for detailed exploration are the polar caps, now thought to be mostly composed of water ice rather than frozen carbon dioxide, and caves or caverns, which would not only be a good place to search for native microbes but also to hide from radiation or dust storms.

5) Why will it happen?

This is perhaps the most difficult question to answer. Carl Sagan argued that the mission would fulfil the deep-seated need for exploration that our species - only recently converted from a nomadic existence - still feels. There is something to be said of this provision of a surrogate for human wanderlust, as identified in Bertrand Russell's 1959 quote: "a world without war need not be a world without adventurous and hazardous glory." This form of argument seems fairly mainstream in astronautic circles: even NASA's budget estimate for 2016 includes the phrases ‘reveal the unknown' (very likely) and ‘benefit all humankind' (which seems rather less obvious, except for Earth resources and weather satellites).

Against this notion are rather more pragmatic motives such as a combination of accelerated technological development and national prestige. But if nuclear fusion power is acquired in time for the first mission it's difficult to see what else will be gained from spending say half a trillion US dollars on a single crewed flight: wouldn't it be wiser to spend such vast sums on environmental stabilisation or medical research here on Earth? I've already commented on the potential white elephant of the ISS and there are no doubt many who don't consider any manned space exploration a suitable use of such enormous resources.

It's obvious that there are distinctive practical advantages to having humans on the spot rather than relying on robots. One issue that a single manned mission might be able to resolve that countless probes wouldn't is the question of life on Mars. The haze and plume seen in 2012 and the seasonal methane suggest some very interesting meteorological phenomenon if there isn't a biological explanation, but if there is any Martian bacteria then surely the mission could be deemed worthy of its immense budget? Somehow, I have my doubts…

One day in the next few centuries there could well be - unfortunately - branches of Starbucks and McDonalds on Mars and the Red Planet will be an alien frontier no more. But until then, any humans who undertake such an incredible journey will be pioneers in the Yuri Gagarin/Roald Amundsen/Edmund Hillary mould. However, I doubt the first human to step onto the Martian surface will use the latter's keen Kiwi phraseology: "we knocked the b***d off!"

Unprofessional endeavours: amateur paleontology in New Zealand

There is currently an exhibition touring around New Zealand called Dinosaur Footprints: A Story of Discovery, which as its name suggests concerns traces of our much-beloved prehistoric beasts. Besides being the nation's first dinosaur footprints (known to science, that is) the story of their discovery is all the more interesting for their having been found by accident. In this particular case the discoverer was a professional geologist but in many cases New Zealand's great fossil discoveries have been equally serendipitous findings by amateurs.

Whilst New Zealand science is comparatively young, amateurs have always played a pivotal role in both the discovery and analysis of native fossils. Although the beginnings of Kiwi paleontology appear rather haphazard (see for example Quinn Berentson's superb Moa: The life and death of New Zealand's legendary bird for details on Walter Mantell, Julius von Haast and co.) the involvement of amateurs has far from diminished even today.

Although I've previously discussed non-professional fossicking before and even written a more New Zealand-focused April Fool's post, the more I've learnt about the Kiwi give-it-a-go approach the more I've wanted to write about the discipline from a local perspective.  Having undertaken three fossil hunts over the past year in the North Island (two successful, one a complete failure) I also now have some practical experience to aid me.

New Zealand fossil finds from 2014

There are several amateur New Zealand palaeontologists who have made key discoveries, perhaps the best known being Dave Allen and the late Joan Wiffen. The latter found the first dinosaur material in the country, as well as some Mesozoic marine reptile remains. And this was after many professionals claimed there was unlikely to be any such material in New Zealand! Dave Allen has also made some key finds and is occasionally even asked by the likes of Te Papa for advice.  Clearly, in a nation served by less than thirty full-time professionals, such people are able to make a big difference. To show it isn't just the province of adults, in 2006 children from the Hamilton Junior Naturalists Club found bones from a 35 million year old giant penguin, which just shows what a mind even semi-prepared for such material can discover.

One of the common misapprehensions about fossil hunting is that it involves excavation in the same way as is often required in archaeology. In fact, many fossils can be found eroding out of cliffs or roadside cuttings, or even found in loose material on beaches. Therefore there is a finite period between fossils being easy to spot and becoming worn down into useless fragments just by natural erosion, never mind man-made development. One report for example, suggests that weather will severely erode over fifty known fossil locations in the next half century. As such, it seems to make common sense that the more people trained to spot fossil material and be able to carefully extract it, the better. The late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, an expert on snails, once lamented that whilst in the Great Rift Valley he was unable to spot any of the hominin remains but instead homed in on the copious fossil snails that everyone else had missed!

This isn't to say that amateurs should have carte blanche. About one third of New Zealand's fossiliferous locations are protected from extraction due to the importance of the material. However, that still leaves at least thirty to forty sites that are easy for non-professionals to access whilst also allowing the removal of fossils. Amateurs are well served by both books and websites that supply details of locales and common fossil species. James Crampton and Marianna Terezow's family-friendly The Kiwi Fossil Hunter's Handbook is particularly good for the former whilst the same authors along with three others have written A Photographic Guide to Fossils of New Zealand, an invaluable resource. For the more serious amateurs, finds details can be found at resources such as the Fossil Record Electronic Database (FRED), which has over 86,000 locations. So all in all, there's plenty of help for the casual fossicker.

In addition to the argument that the greater the number of fossil hunters, the greater the opportunity to discover material before it is eroded, there is also the problem that the lack of professionals is apparently causing the loss of knowledge in basic areas such as taxonomy. According to James Crampton and Roger Cooper's 2010 report The State of Paleontology in New Zealand, around 40% of Cenezoic mollusc species have yet to be fully described. They state that there are still large areas of the country that have not been fully explored by palaeontologists so who knows what other surprises may lurking in the deep bush or hidden river valley?

There's even the slim chance that the involvement of amateurs may stimulate public interest and activity in important associated fields, such as the protection of endangered species, environmental pollution, sustainability and the promotion of science in general over woolly thinking. After all, it appears most politicians would rather side with big business than the greens, so only continuous and concerted efforts from a fair-sized element of the general public will likely aid the future state of the nation's environment. And that's not something any of us can afford to ignore, regardless of whether you are interested in the remains of organisms that have long since turned to stone.

Easy fixes: simple corrections of some popular scientific misconceptions

A few months' ago I finally saw the film 'Gravity', courtesy of a friend with a home theatre system. Amongst the numerous technical errors - many pointed out on Twitter by Neil deGrasse Tyson - was one that I hadn't seen mentioned. This was how rapidly Sandra Bullock's character acclimatised to the several space stations and spacecraft immediately after removing her EVA suit helmet. As far as I am aware, the former have nitrogen-oxygen atmospheres whilst the suits are oxygen-only, necessitating several hours of acclimatisation.

I may of course be wrong on this, and of course dramatic tension would be pretty much destroyed if such delays had to be woven into the plot, but it got me thinking that there are some huge fundamental errors propagated in non-scientific circles. Therefore my Christmas/Hanukkah/holiday season present is a very brief, easy -on-the-brain round-up of a few of the more obvious examples.

1. The Earth is perfect sphere.
   Nope, technically I think the term is 'oblate spheroid'. Basically, a planet's spin squashes the mass so that the polar diameter is less than the equatorial diameter. Earth is only about 0.3% flatter in polar axis but if you look at a photograph of Saturn you can see a very obvious squashing.
   
   
2. Continental drift is the same thing as plate-tectonics.
   As a child I often read that these two were interchangeable, but this is not so. The former is the hypothesis that landmasses have moved over time whilst the latter is the mechanism now accepted to account for this, with the Earth's crust floating over the liquid mantle in large segments or plates.
   
   Geologist Alfred Wegener suggested the former in 1912 but is was largely pooh-poohed until the latter was discovered by ocean floor spreading half a century later. As Carl Sagan often said, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
   
   
3. A local increase in cold, wet weather proves that global warming is a fallacy.
   Unfortunately, chaose theory shows that even the minutest of initial changes can cause major differences of outcome, hence weather forecasting being far from an exact science.
   
   However, there is another evidence for the validity of this theory, fossil fuel lobbyists and religious fundamentalists aside. I haven't read anything to verify this, but off the top of my head I would suggest that if the warm water that currently travels north-east across the Atlantic from the Gulf of Mexico (and prevents north-western Europe from having cold Canadian eastern seaboard winters), then glacial meltwater may divert this warm, denser seawater. And then the Isles of Scilly off the Cornish coast may face as frosty a winter as the UK mainland!
   
   
4. Evolution and natural selection are the same thing.
   Despite Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species having been published in 1859, this mistake is as popular as ever. Evolution is simply the notion that a population within a parent species can slowly differentiate to become a daughter species, but until Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace independently arrived at natural selection, there really wasn't a hypothesis for the mechanism.
   
   This isn't to say that there weren't attempts to provide one, it's just that none of them fit the facts quite as well as the elegant simplicity of natural selection. Of course today's technology, from DNA analysis to CAT scans of fossils, provides a lot more evidence than was available in the mid-Nineteenth Century. Gregor Mendel's breeding programmes were the start of genetics research that led to the modern evolutionary synthesis that has natural selection at its core.
   
   
5. And finally…freefall vs zero gravity.
   Even orbiting astronauts have been known to say that they are in zero gravity when they are most definitely not. The issue is due to the equivalence of gravity and acceleration, an idea which was worked on by luminaries such as Galileo, Newton and Einstein. If you find yourself in low Earth orbit - as all post-Apollo astronauts are - then clearly you are still bound by our planet's gravity.
   
   After all, the Moon is approximately 1800 times further away from the Earth than the International Space Station (ISS), but it is kept in orbit by the Earth's pull (okay, so there is the combined Earth-Moon gravitational field, but I'm keeping this simple). By falling around the Earth at a certain speed, objects such as the ISS maintain a freefalling trajectory: too slow and the orbit would decay, causing the station to spiral inwards to a fiery end, whilst too fast would cause it to fly off into deep space.
   
   You can experience freefall yourself via such delights as an out-of-control plummeting elevator or a trip in an arc-flying astronaut training aircraft A.K.A. 'Vomit Comet'. I'm not sure I'd recommend either! Confusingly, there's also microgravity and weightlessness, but as it is almost Christmas we'll save that for another day.
   

There are no doubt numerous other, equally fundamental errors out there, which only goes to show that we could do with much better science education in our schools and media. After all, no-one would make so many similar magnitude mistakes regarding the humanities, would they? Or, like the writer H.L. Mencken, would I be better off appreciating that "nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the (American) public"? I hope not!

Consumer complexity: engineering the public out of understanding

Last weekend my car stopped working. If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, then an hour of internet research is probably worse. Convinced it was either the transmission or gearing, it turned out to be lack of petrol, the fuel gauge and warning light having simultaneously failed. At this point - breathing a sigh of relief that I wasn't facing an enormous repair bill so soon after an annual service - I realised that my knowledge of cars is extremely limited, despite having driven them for almost thirty years.

Obviously I'm far from being unique in this respect. In years past New Zealanders in particular were renowned for maintaining old cars long after other developed nations had scrapped them, with Australians referring to their neighbour as the place where Morris Minors went to die. However, anti-corrosion legislation put an end to such ‘canny Kiwi' tinkering so the country has presumably lost this resourcefulness when it comes to keeping ancient vehicles on the road.

Of course cars just aren't built to last any more: modern vehicles continue to be ever more fuel efficient and built of lightweight materials, but I doubt few will last as long as the classic cars still running after half a century or more. Built-in obsolescence is partly to blame, but the sophistication of today's designs means that their repair and maintenance is becoming ever more difficult without a complete workshop and diagnostic computer. As a teenager I learnt how to change my car's spark plugs but have since been told this should now only be undertaken by professionals as the tolerances required cannot be achieved by hand!

It isn't just motor vehicles that are affected by ever increasing complexity: high-tech consumer gadgets, especially those with integrated circuits (which let's face it, is most of them these days) are seemingly built to prevent tampering or repairs by the end user. Yet this is a fairly recent phenomenon. In my grandparents' generation the most sophisticated item in their house was likely to be a radio that used vacuum tube technology, but a cheaper alternative was available in the form of a do-it-yourself galena or pyrite crystal radio. Even children - Arthur C. Clarke amongst them - were able to build these self-powered devices, which worked rather well except for the fact that they had no speaker and so the user had to listen via headphones. It might seem unlikely that such as device was easy to construct until you remember that pioneer aircraft were built by bicycle manufacturers!

In contrast, the most advanced technological item my parents would have had until their twenties - when television sets started to become affordable - would have been a mass-produced transistor radio. Compared to the valve-infested sideboard gramophone, simple problems such as loose wires in these radios could be repaired with basic tools such as small screwdrivers, needle-nose pliers and a low wattage soldering iron. Whilst requiring a bit of skill and some understanding of wiring, such repairs were still within the range of many consumers.

Today, my experience suggests that the expendable consumerism that first became overt in the late 1960's is a key mind set in developed nations, with do-it-yourself work on gadgetry largely absent. In fact, it is frequently cheaper to buy a replacement item than to have it repaired or purchase the tools in order to attempt those repairs yourself. The speed with which newer models are released is such that it may even prove impossible to source a replacement part only a few years after the item has been purchased. This inevitably increases our distance from the inner workings of the ever more numerous high-tech consumer gadgets we now surround ourselves with. Surely it is a great irony that despite our ability to operate all of them, the vast majority of users have little idea of the fundamentals of the technologies involved?

My own experience with attempting to fix consumer electronics is rather limited, but I can see that manufacturers are deliberately trying to prevent this by using techniques such as hiding screw heads and using one-way pins, ensuring that any attempt to dismantle an item will snap parts within the casing. Additionally, the more sophisticated the technology, the more sensitive it seems to be. An example from a rather different sphere of activity comes from 1976, when a defecting Soviet Air Force pilot delivered a state-of-the-art fighter jet into the hands of Western intelligence. The MiG-25 ‘Foxbat' was discovered to be using valve-based rather than solid-state avionics, yet despite its primitive appearance the electronics were both extremely powerful and able to withstand immense physical stress, which is obviously of great importance in such aircraft.

Back to household gadgetry, I've seen an old cathode ray tube television repaired after water was accidentally tipped down the back of it, whilst flat screen computer monitors that were inadvertently cleaned with water - not by me, I hasten to add - were sent straight to the scrap heap. That isn't to say that there aren't a few brave souls who post internet videos on how to disassemble devices such as iPads in order to fix hardware issues, but I think you would either have to be very confident or quite rich before attempting such repairs. There are also websites dedicated to technology hackers, who enhance, customise or otherwise amend consumer gadgets beyond their out-of-the-box capabilities. Again, I don't have the confidence for this sort of thing, especially since there are hidden dangers: a digital camera for example contains a flash capacitor that can store - and deliver to the unwary - a charge of several hundred volts. Ouch!

So the next time someone declares their bewilderment with the ever-widening array of consumer gadgetry, or bores you with a piece of New Age nonsense, you should remember although we are surrounded with some extremely sophisticated devices, various causes have conspired to remove insight into their inner workings. Our consumerist age is geared towards acceptance of such items whilst limiting our involvement to that of end user. And of course I haven't even mentioned the ultimate fundamentals behind all this integrated circuitry, quantum electrodynamics...