Predicting the future is a popular pastime, especially at the start of the year. But how do we know which predictions might come true? And how can get better at it? Eric Shepherd looks into his crystal ball.

"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future!" said Niels Bohr, the Nobel laureate in Physics and father of the atomic model, and social scientists seemed to agree. As if to prove Bohr's point, the eminent physicist Stephen Hawking admitted in later years that some of his early predictions about the universe were not entirely correct.