Marty Jopson

But evolution is not a process of increasing complexity, nor any other measure of superiority you can find.

he system was invented back in 1735 by one of the great scientists of the eighteenth century, a Swedish naturalist called Carl Linnaeus

none of us is an island and we all live out our lives surrounded by other humans.

the humble and dull-looking lymphocytes turned out to be at the heart of the system. Not only that, there are three distinct flavours of lymphocyte: the B-cells make antibodies, the T-cells identify foreign agents in our bodies and the natural killer cells seek out and destroy our own cells that have become infected with viruses.

and to my mind there is nothing more fascinating than the science of being human.

Our genus Homo contains just one species at the moment, and that’s us

Saccharina latissima, or sugar kelp as it is commonly known.

If you pause for a moment and scratch the surface, though, the gleam of fascinating science shines through.

The sweetest chemical so far discovered goes by the name of lugduname and ranks about 250,000 times sweeter than sucrose.

Instead you could turn to glycyrrhizin, found in the woody roots of Glycyrrhiza glabra, more commonly called the liquorice plant, and used in the production of liquorice sweets.