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If you are interested in installing solar panels on your home then the best place to start is the Energy Saving Trust. An independent body which is funded by the industry and by the government. Their website is .

You need to make sure the company doing the work are members of the and are certified under the .

It's particularly important for the installer to be certified as otherwise you won't qualify for the government's solar power subsidies.

Otherwise as with any other home improvement get several quotes and ask friends and neighbours if they can recommend installers they have used. And we'd be interested to hear your stories in the comments at the end of this post.

Well that will teach me to listen to gossip and bloggers and not wait for the scientific paper!

Last month I mentioned rumours that the researchers at CERN might be getting close to finding the Higgs boson. The final piece in the jigsaw puzzle of physics as we know it.

But as I said last month;

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.

Well now we're a little bit closer as CERN have put together data from two separate experiments and discovered that what they thought was the Higgs is now looking more like a statistical bump than a new particle.

Worse it's looking increasingly likely that if the Higgs exists it will be found in a range of lighter potential masses that are more difficult for CERN itself to study.

By Christmas we'll know enough to settle this particular potential possible particle candidate. And some physicists actually hope it isn't the Higgs. Why? Well it makes things much more interesting, although as one confessed to me;

Personally, I'm hoping for no Higgs - that would be much more interesting. But difficult to sell to the public!

Well what do you think, "public" ?

Today we report on the interesting study that shows the brains of obese people with diabetes react differently to images of fatty foods. In particular the areas associated with pleasure light up. It's so pronounced that the higher the fat content of the food in the picture the bigger the effect.

As we said on the programme the researchers are now looking to scan the brains of teenagers between 13 and 18 years old. Prospective subjects for the study can be obese, healthy or have type 2 diabetes. You also get to keep a scan of your brain when it's all over.

It does seem likely this effect is one reason some people find it hard to stick to restricted diets, even for the sake of their health. But is it caused by the diabetes, obesity or a more complex combination of factors?

Finally as some of you will have spotted the MMR scanner in our film is actually a non-working mock-up. It's used to get subjects used to a scanner and has the advantage that it doesn't produce a strong magnetic field. A real scanner would erase the electronics in our camera just miliseconds before wrenching it out of the camera operators hands!

If you want to take part in the the next study email Dr Arie Nouwen at the University of Birmingham; a.nouwen@bham.ac.uk

You can dowload the paper by clicking this link. Paper.pdf [240KB]

If you would like to follow the blog I mentioned that's acting as a clearing house for information on the riots you can click .

Obviously this information relies on tips from all sorts of people and mistakes are possible in a fast moving situation. Tip-of-the-hat to the man behind it

You can find more details on today's Twitter clean-up on the Digbeth is Good blog . Hopefully another clean-up won't be necessary. But if you want to volunteer to help keep an eye on this website .

You can find me on Twitter .

Back in April much of the region switched off their analogue tv signal and moved into a fully-digital tv world. Now it's the turn of these rest of us. Hopefully when the Fenton and Sutton Coldfield transmitters start to make the switch on the 7th September it will once again be plain sailing. There is plenty of help available and for all the details please click here. And if you have any questions just leave them in the comments.

So recently we discussed the speculation that University of Birmingham researchers may well have discovered the Higgs boson. Along with three thousand other researchers at CERN in Geneva.

Today we bring you the latest news from the T2K experiment in Japan which has heavy involvement from the University of Warwick. And it's more exciting news in particle physics.

In September we visited the lab, you can read more about our trip here and more about the research here. But to cut a long story short this research is important to understand just why our universe is like it is and in particular why it's made of matter at all.

At the big bang equal amounts of matter and anti-matter should have been created and then instantly annihilated each other leaving nothing. Of course that didn't happen and since our world is made of matter it's pretty obvious there was an imbalance. More matter than antimatter.

We think it's a difference between the neutrino and anti-neutrino that's at the bottom of this imbalance and that's why the behaviour of the neutrino is of so much interest to scientists.

Of course since this data was gathered Japan has been through the earthquake and tsunami. The laboratory where the Warwick experiment was based was lucky in that no one was injured or killed, but it has been shifted a metre to the right.

It's a tribute to the resilience and bravery of the Japanese people that this experiment is being repaired and the hope is it will be gathering data once again by the new year. I often say science is an extraordinary achievement, but in this case it's doubly so.

The paper itself is pretty accessible and you can find it . Or if you prefer, there's a press release .

That advantages are clear. You can put students in difficult real world situations where you couldn't ethically put an unqualified person in charge. And you can then repeat things over and over for different students. Perfect for exams.

As you can see the virtual patient has come a long way since I first filmed them back in 2009. Now thanks the sort of immersive technology usually seen in the car industry Keele University can put students through their paces in a virtual hospital ward. Having experienced it myself I can safely say it's an extraordinary achievement. I found myself leaning in to talk to patients as they reacted to my presence.

Perhaps most impressive is how far the virtual patients have come. While the 2009 vintage (on the left in the picture) were definitely human the latest version (on the right) can be programmed to have all sorts of problems the students need to spot. As the models become more refined so the problems become more subtle, right down to a tell-tale tremour in the hands for some patients.

The more realistic the virtual experience, the better the pharmacology students do when unleashed on the real world.

Here's the report;