Alexander von Humboldt biography wins Royal Society science book prize
Andrea Wulf wins £25,000 award for The Invention of Nature, a biography of the 19th-century explorer who has more things named after him than any other human A biography of the 19th-century explorer...
View ArticleGet off the treadmill: living well in the age of plenty
Cancel your gym membership and come off the Paleo diet. Your basic human needs are all catered for, and life is too short to spend in the pursuit of longevityDo you ever learn about health from the...
View ArticleWhy have women finally started winning science book prizes?
Andrea Wulf’s victory in the Royal Society prize this week continues a trend that has seen female authors triumphing after many years on the margins There wasn’t much fuss about Andrea Wulf’s gender...
View ArticleWhen it comes to winning book prizes, gender has nothing to do with it
Suggestions that winners of major literary prizes have benefitted from their gender is insulting to the judges, to the prizes and most of all, to the writers Gaia Vince won the prestigious Royal...
View Article‘Oh Excellent Air Bag!’ review – two centuries of laughing gas
This wonderful collection of writings on nitrous oxide features carnivals, dentists’ chairs, Humphry Davy in ecstasy and William James talking nonsense“It made me dance about the laboratory like a...
View ArticleUltimate questions with Adam Biles and Sean Carroll – books podcast
We examine beginnings and endings, with a novel set in a nursing home and a physicist who explores the influence of the big bang on our daily livesWhat happens when our story comes to its close? The...
View ArticleUniversal: A Guide to the Cosmos by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw – digested read
‘To measure the distance to Neptune, we work in parsecs, which are a parallax of one arcsecond. Actually, let’s just look at some pictures’Cosmology is amazing. It allows us to dare to imagine a time...
View Article'Science will never know it all': Richard Dawkins, Margaret Atwood and others...
As the 2016 London Literature festival begins, this year exploring the theme ‘living in future times’, science and sci-fi writers share their visions of humanity’s future. Interviews by Lucy...
View ArticleAre We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal – review
Virtually every ‘uniquely human’ characteristic has turned out not to be so. This engaging study has the latest thinking on the intelligence of humans and other animalsIn 1747 the French doctor and...
View ArticleA Day in the Life of the Brain by Susan Greenfield review – a new approach to...
Greenfield considers the brain processes behind the experience of a single day – as ‘you’ work, engage in fantasies, walk the dog, and so on. But is it an exercise worth doing?Yet another book about...
View ArticleTop 10 books about intelligent animals
From Machiavelli to Karen Joy Fowler, the author of Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? considers some of the best writing on brainy beastsThe first modern writers to bring animal...
View ArticleHow does English weather relate to national identity?
Kate Flint looks at books by Alexandra Harris, William Vaughan and Peter Davidson exploring how painters and Victorian novelists have shaped the English’s fascination with weatherBy Kate Flint for...
View ArticleColin Thubron and John Aggleton on memory – books podcast
How can we construct a sense of self from the fragments of life we can recall? We dissect how science and fiction shed light on the mysteries of memoryScience and the humanities are too often poles...
View ArticleCarlo Rovelli: ‘Science is where revolutions happen’
The physicist and bestselling author on the radical politics and drugs of his youth, his life’s work and why we all need a breakCarlo Rovelli is professor of physics at Aix-Marseille University. He is...
View ArticleHelen Czerski: ‘Physics isn’t all quantum weirdness. It’s about daily life’
She’s a ‘bubble scientist’ on a mission to broaden understanding of the physics of the everyday world – take the foam on your cappuccino…Helen Czerski has the coolest job in science – she’s a bubble...
View ArticleRichard Mabey: 'Suggestions from outside act on my imagination like a magnet...
The idea of plants as rebellious, intelligent organisms took years to take root – and with some care grew into The Cabaret of PlantsIt seems to be an article of faith among most writers that the making...
View ArticleBee Time: Lessons from the Hive review – the imperilled world of the bee
A passionate celebration of bees combined with a calmly reasoned critique of industrialised farmingMark Winston has spent 30 years studying and working with bees. His book is a passionate celebration...
View ArticleEasternisation by Gideon Rachman and The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh –...
With capitalism discredited and climate change taking effect, it’s high time commenters woke up to the myths of progress and a benign spread of wealth around the globeIn Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The...
View ArticleBirds are more like ‘feathered apes’ than ‘bird brains’
For centuries scientists dismissed birds as dumb based on physical differences in their brains. How wrong we were. When Jane Goodall observed chimpanzees making tools in 1960, humans lost their...
View ArticleCan You Solve My Problems? by Alex Bellos review – an excellent anthology,...
This skilfully curated collection of conundrums will have you kicking yourselfReviewing good puzzle books is frustrating, because you get to page one of the introduction, find a curious puzzle, become...
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