You will be familiar with the scene, you are leaving the house and after spending fifteen minutes rounding up your children and strapping them into the backseat of the car you call to your wife to hurry up as you know that if we d'ont move now we'll get stuck in traffic. Finally everyone is in the car and you go to look for the car keys you look in the usual places but to no avail. You rush out to the car to see if the keys are there, they are not, you shout at the children demanding that they tell you where the keys are, your wife shouts at you for shouting at the children and tells you to calm down and stop acting like a irrational child.

Its at this point that she will ask" Are they not where you left them?" you turn away muttering to yourself "that if they were where I left them I would have found them by now". You return to the house leaping from place to place, lifting,no throwing things up in the air to see if they are underneath. Your wife enters the house to "help" insisting that you "calm down and look properly". Well lads here is the good news we are looking for them properly and its now been proven by science.

The behaviour outlined above is perfectly natural and has its origins can be traced back to the hunter,gatherer phase of our evolution. Apparently scientific research has now uncovered that we did not search for game or fruit in a systematic way but we leapt from place to place looking.The scientific community names this as "Levy flights" after the French mathematican Paul Levy who first described it.

It is claimed that Levy flights minimise energy expenditure,but maximises the discovery of resources. So the next time you are told to "look properly" turn and say "I am looking properly and science has proved it".

As men we have been waiting for this day when science has vindicated our irrational response to the petty irritations of life. We must now press on and lobby the scientific community to find scientific basis for other habits like staying in the pub all night, forgetting birthdays and anniversaries, being unable to share our feelings and never having the ability to stick together a flat pack piece of furniture.

Good science has begun it journey all we can do is to pray that it will help us to emulate Homer J Simpson.