Giovanna Tinetti is an expert on detecting signs of life across interstellar space. She has worked at JPL, Caltech and the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, and has just won an Aurora Fellowship to pursue her research on biosignatures at University College, London. We caught up with her as she made an exploratory visit to the city that will be her home for the next three years.

How do you describe yourself?

From Mary, in response to my request for more information about the scientists who gave us the YORP effect:

If Richard Dawkins had been smacked around the head with the double-slit experiment at an age when his skull was soft enough for him to feel the pain, he wouldn't be suffused with such luminous certainty about how the world works.

Evolution, the fundamental theory of biology, is tough for some folk to swallow. But that’s because a bunch of old bearded guys wrote something different a long time ago – and because the intuitions of an animal that lives for 70 years can’t handle what complex systems can get up to in 4.5 billion.

But unlike quantum theory, evolution has nothing mind-warpingly weird about it. So the nature of the real world seems obvious to an evolutionary biologist.

As Des Browne strides up to me and demands to know who I am, the answer momentarily escapes me. It is on the tip of my tongue and will come to me in a minute, I am sure. But whoever I am, I suddenly realise, this close to Britain's combative Minister of Defence is not where I would like to be.

The occasion is a debate about the morality of replacing Trident, organised by one of Browne’s constituents, Father Joe Boland of St Matthew’s, Kilmarnock.

I don’t normally write much about the social sciences, apart from education. But some of the research results in these sciences are strange and interesting, and it seems a shame to do nothing with them. So I’ve devised a little quiz. I’m going to leave it up here for a week, before posting the answers and where they come from.

I'll also offer a prize to one person who gets all twenty answers correct. This is a copy of The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook 2007, which has eight hundred pages of contacts and advice on getting started in newspapers, magazines, books, online and broadcast media.

It’s a good book. So good I bought it twice.

Right, here we go:

Snail-racing is an action-packed spectator sport compared to watching the drift of Earth’s continents, which usually move just a few centimetres a year – about as fast as fingernails grow. But occasionally events quicken dramatically, and become interesting enough for a "desk-bound geophysicist" like Dr Tim Wright to pack his bags and go camel-trekking across a desert.