Recently, I’ve been rather taken with the word thingy (stop sniggering at the back).  Everyone must agree that it’s a wonderful word; a catch-all for all those things in life whose proper names are either unknown to us or whose pronunciation is clumsy.

Some of my friends use a thingy to change the channel on their TV, though personally I use a doofah and others I know use an oojamaflip. 

In fact, our lives are joyously full of thingys (or should that be thingies?) It’s the corrugated cardboard sleeve on your takeaway coffee cup (it’s actually called a zarf), the plastic tip on the end of a shoelace (or, to give it its proper n...

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In the grand scheme of things, you know something might have gone wrong when you’re heating something up in a microwave and there’s a sudden loud bang, a shower of sparks and the house is plunged into sudden darkness.

Like most ordinary people, I know what electricity does, but not how it does it. I can change a lightbulb and, if the circumstances are right and there’s a diagram to work from, a plug. When there’s a normal power cut – in other words, the sort that isn’t accompanied by loud noises and sudden fireworks in the kitchen – I also know where to look to see if a fuse has blown (though what to do next would elude me).

But that’s pretty much as far as my expe...

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In the late 1970s Bruce Alexander, a psychologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, developed a contentious hypothesis. In a global society which focused entirely on the role drugs played in addiction, Alexander looked instead at a different enemy: the environment.

At the risk of over-simplifying things, he believed drug use – and therefore addiction – was much less likely to be prevalent if people were given alternative choices to make. Unsurprisingly, the science community all but laughed at him.

But Alexander believed he was onto something and to prove it, he developed the Seduction Experiment based in something that came to be known as Rat Park.

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