Do you spend Christmas Eve wrestling with brightly coloured paper, sticky tape and presents that just don’t want to fit into the paper that you have cut to wrap them in?

All that can now be a thing of the past if you apply the scientific principles formulated by maths expert Warwick Dumas of Warwick University.  He realised that the wastage caused by people overestimating the amount of paper needed to wrap a present amounted to more than a tonne a year and decided to do something about it.

So if you want to reduce your carbon footprint this Christmas remember: A1 = 2(ab+ac+bc+c), where A is the area of paper needed and a,b and c are the dimensions of the present.

Sorted.