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Here's a personal story. I'm currently battling high blood-pressure and high cholesterol. Neither are stratospheric but they are higher than my GP would like.

Now I could start taking daily pills for the rest of my life to control both these problems. Indeed my brother who works in the NHS says the drugs to control cholesterol are amazing. As far as he's concerned I should find a anti-cholesterol drug that agrees with me, take it every evening, and get back to the cheese board.

But i've been trying something different. Making lifestyle changes. So I've been hitting the gym and watching what I eat. For the first three months my "bad" cholesterol actually went up! So since then I've been hitting the gym harder and taking even more care over what I eat. I've lost 9lbs in the past two months so with a bit of luck things are getting better inside too.

Now my doctor has supported all this rather than just hand me a prescription. But some patients find GP's would rather get them straight on the pills. That's what Graham Beaumont found and he ended up taking his prescription and filling it although he had no intention of taking the drugs.

That's just one example and one reason behind what is a huge problem. It's thought some £300 million pounds of NHS prescriptions are filled and never used. And about half of people on long term medication either don't take it or take it incorrectly.

Now researchers at Aston are trying to learn more about why this happens. Would people prefer to make lifesyle choices first like Graham? Or are they all "pilled out" and feel they have too many drugs to manage? At the end of the study the researchers hope to offer advice to GPs to help them spot patients who might not take medication correctly before they get into trouble.

You might not be surprised to learn that those who take their heart medication correctly are at lower risk of heart attacks.

If you want to help the researchers with their study you can download an application form by clicking . There is also a patients can take part in.

Or you can email the researchers direct. And of course you can follow them on . At the moment the team are only looking for people in Birmingham to take part. Particularly Oscott, Perry Barr, Ladywood, Nechells, Springfield, Handsworth, Soho, Sparkbrook, Aston and Lozells.

But wherever you are, please use the comments if you're one of the 50% who don't take their medicine. We'd be interested to hear from you and may well read out the best comments on tonight's show.

Normally you might expect us to cover a big science story whenever a proper peer reviewed paper is published in a major journal. But not always and the search for the Higgs boson is one of those cases.

Back in 2007 I travelled out to CERN in Geneva to look round and meet many of the researchers from the University of Birmingham who are heavily involved in the experiment and analysing the data. This involves smashing together protons at pretty much the speed of light and sifting through what's left. One of the major aims of all this is to look for the Higgs Boson.

Physicists have created a model of how all the particles that make up our universe fit together. And the Higgs boson is an important part of that, it's what we think gives everything in our universe mass.

There are several experiments at CERN to look for the Higgs boson. One of which is called .

A couple of months ago a memo began to circulate amongst the 3000 scientists that work on ATLAS. You can read it on this . But here's one part;

"This ... implies that the present result is the first definitive observation of physics beyond the standard model. Exciting new physics, including new particles, may be expected to be found in the very near future."

That's quite full-on language for physicists, so have they found evidence for the Higgs boson and perhaps more?

Well these memo's are really only intended for internal consumption and anyone in the group can write one. But it leaked out and began to get all sorts of people (including me) quite excited.

Since then things have moved on quickly. On Monday at a conference in Grenoble the researchers from ATLAS and another experiment at CERN called announced they had all observed something that could we be the first sign of the Higgs boson. The Americans too think they may see something. To have three separate experiments find something similar is a pretty good sign.

That said we need much more data to be sure. Around ten times as much and that will take until 2012 to gather. One of the researchers working on CMS is a bit more sceptical than I am, and indeed he's while on holiday to explain more about his results.

It's possible that with more data this result may just disappear. Sometimes in physics you end up chasing something that isn't there after all. In fact has been here before. But one way or another we won't have long to wait.

Finally here's a from Prof Brian Cox on the whole affair;

Smiley face indeed.

Here's a video we did last year for Autumnwatch looking at the difficulties our chestnut trees are facing. They're being attacked by the caterpillars belonging to a leaf-mining moth. Here's the blogpost I wrote at the time.

Well now we're updating the story. Researchers are hoping we can all help them to track these moths and see how far they've spread. You can do that via the website and now you can also do via a free app for your smartphone.

When you run the app you'll find a simple guide on how to use it. You take a photo of any damage, give it a "damage rating" and then confirm your location. In a few months scientists hope to have enough data to get a much better idea of how bad this problem is.

Search for "Conker Tree Science" or download the app direct by following these linkes, either from the or the

It's all part of a nationwide study by Herefordshire snake expert, Nigel Hand. We've reported in the past on his work using radio-tracking on adders and the DNA work grew out of that.

One you trap and swab your snake the DNA samples are sent to London Zoo for genetic analysis. The worry is that in some parts of the country there are so few adders close relatives are interbreeding and this is leading to abnormalities such as missing eyes and kinked spines.

One of the reasons for this interbreeding is small populations of animals that are isolated from other snakes. That's because adder territory is being carved up into small islands of land with roads and broken tree lines creating artifical boundaries. There's no where else for the snakes to go.

The results of this study will be revealed in the autumn, but already we're starting to learn more about our adders. It's very early days but it seems heathland adders are smaller than their hillside dwelling counterparts. Perhaps because heathland adders live on smaller lizards while the others enjoy larger, juicy rodents.

This was the closest I've ever been to a wild adder, all surperivsed by an expert of course, and as ever I am amazed by just how beautiful they are. Many people do fear running across them of course but in the unlikely event you do see one just leave it alone and they'll return the favour.