The hard problem: Tom Stoppard on the limits of what science can explain
Can evolution explain acts of kindness, and morality? We arranged a debate between a sceptical Tom Stoppard and the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. Stuart Jeffries acted as refereeWhen Tom...
View ArticleDon’t Trust, Don’t Fear, Don’t Beg: The Extraordinary Story of the Arctic...
Greenpeace publicist Ben Stewart’s tale of the Arctic protesters arrested by Russia suffers from its partisan toneAs dramatic opening scenes go, having a helicopter full of Russian special forces in...
View ArticleSpirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells review –...
Helen Scales’s investigation offers a rewarding glimpse of another world, filled with strange and reclusive creaturesSeashells tantalise the eye in several ways. In shingle, in the chaos of haphazard...
View ArticleIan Stewart on the science of Terry Pratchett's Discworld – webchat
Professor Ian Stewart joins us at 1pm on Tuesday 9 June 2015 to talk about working with Jack Cohen and Terry Pratchett on The Science of Discworld. Post your questions now9.28am BSTI’m happy to say...
View ArticleFive of the best dinosaur books
From Jules Verne’s classic Journey to the Centre of the Earth to palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s essay collection, Bully for Brontosaurus – the five dinosaur books that inspired a love of...
View ArticleDinomania: the story of our obsession with dinosaurs
They made the Victorians shudder with awe, but before long dinosaurs were loved mostly by cartoonists and children. Then came a series of discoveries that began a dazzling chapter in the history of...
View Article@heaven edited by Kim Hastreiter review – the story of an online death
This intimate history of an early web community and a man’s choice to die in public shows that the internet can be a place where real social bonds are formedBefore Twitter, before Facebook, before...
View ArticleThe microscopic magic of plankton
Plankton are the tiny enablers of life on Earth, but their fragile ecosystems are under attack from climate change. A three-year study is helping marine experts understand them for the first timeThe...
View ArticleThe beauty of plankton - in pictures
An extraordinary new book highlights the remarkable diversity of planktonThe microscopic magic of planktonPlankton: Wonders of the Drifting World is published by University of Chicago Press. Click here...
View ArticleIt’s All in Your Head review – enduring mystery of psychosomatic illness
Neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan’s excellent book reveals that medicine remains as much an art as a scienceSuzanne O’Sullivan qualified as a doctor in 1991. She is now a consultant at the National...
View ArticleRain: A Natural and Cultural History; The Weather Experiment review – how...
From the inventor of the forecast to the US senator who thinks only God should control the climate – the story of the weatherIn January this year, just days after Nasa and the National Oceanic and...
View ArticleLife’s Greatest Secret: The Story of the Race to Crack the Genetic Code by...
We know about Crick, Watson and the double helix. But how did scientists solve the other great mystery of our existence?It is a surprise that the story of “life’s greatest secret” is only now being...
View ArticleUnseen papers reveal Ted Hughes's 'funny, loyal and affectionate' side
Extensive correspondence, due to be auctioned later this month, shows a humorous, tender man - very different from the popular image of the late poet laureatePenning a teasing poem for an old friend...
View ArticleThe Water Book review – a compelling insight into this vital resource
Alok Jha’s study of water is awash with astonishing data about an extraordinary substanceWater is everywhere. And almost everywhere is water. Nasa scientists have discovered a black hole 12 billion...
View ArticleLandmarks by Robert Macfarlane review – language and the land are continuous
To have the words to describe the natural world is to become more attentive, and, we can only hope, more capable of caringIn his 1988 collection, Beaivi, áhčážan (The Sun, My Father), the great...
View ArticleLife’s Greatest Secret by Matthew Cobb review – a thrilling account of the...
The historic race to crack life’s genetic code is revealed as a mixture of experiment, intuition and brilliant guesswork in Cobb’s authoritative studyIn June 1966, the British Nobel laureate Francis...
View ArticleThe Great Explosion by Brian Dillon review – exploring a Kentish disaster
Nature writing meets history as a writer follows the ripples of an accident in a munitions factoryOpen this book at random and you might imagine it to be another example of the new nature writing....
View ArticleMisbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics by Richard H Thaler review –...
A gripping, novelistic intellectual history from the man behind ‘nudge’ economicsProfessor Richard Thaler is a bit lazy, prone to procrastination and likes his booze: his observations, not mine. He is...
View ArticleQuartz and Feldspar: Dartmoor by Matthew Kelly – a British landscape in...
With its bracken, bogs and winds, Dartmoor can seem bleak and inhospitable, but this Devon-born historian is enchanted by the wildnessOur wildernesses require their own claims to fame to differentiate...
View ArticleColouring-in books boom continues with volume of mathematical patterns
Alex Bellos and Edmund Harriss’s Snowflake, Seashell, Star promises to be ‘both a field guide and a therapeutic exercise book’Adults who are running out of cats and gardens to colour in as part of the...
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