EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE – Science & Technology

From the tens of thousands of books and papers on human evolution, where should one start? I would recommend Robin Dunbar’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Dunbar) 2014 introduction Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. The past 12,000 years represent the only time in the sweep of human history when there has been only one human species. How did we alone survive? […]

There is a comparatively new discipline in biology which is ‘Behavioural Ecology’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_ecology). It seeks to provide theoretical frameworks to answer questions about animal behaviour especially in relation to ecological context. It has proven to be a highly fruitful and fascinating area of study. The book examines how animals struggle to survive and reproduce. It shows how they exploit

In this spellbinding blend of memoir, science journalism and literary criticism, Eula Biss (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eula_Biss and http://eulabiss.net/) unpacks what the fear of vaccines tells us about larger anxieties involving purity, contamination and interdependency. Deeply researched and anchored in Biss’s own experiences as a new mother, this ferociously intelligent book is itself an inoculation against bad science and superstition,

Elizabeth Kolbert (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Kolbert and http://elizabethkolbert.com/) reports from the front lines of the violent collision between human civilization and our planet’s ecosystem — from the Great Barrier Reef to her own backyard — in this, her third, book. Traveling to some of the world’s remotest corners, she examines how man-made climate change threatens to eliminate 20 to 50

Let’s face it. A great deal of science writing is impenetrable to the non professional. Not only is modern science so deep, broad and complex, it is full of its own jargon. Richard Dawkins has put together an anthology of some of the finest science writing of recent times. It proves that science can be

What do atoms have to do with your life? Millions of human beings have obviously lived their lives in the past without the faintest suspicion of the existence of atoms. In Your Atomic Self, scientist Curt Stager (http://www.curtstager.com/About__Biography_.html) reveals how they connect you to some of the most amazing things in the universe. Stager will show how your oxygen atoms move through

Plants have profoundly moulded the Earth’s climate and the evolutionary trajectory of life. Far from being ‘silent witnesses to the passage of time’, plants are dynamic components of our world, shaping the environment throughout the past as much as the environment has shaped them.  In The Emerald Planet, Professor David Beerling of Sheffield University (https://www.shef.ac.uk/aps/staff-and-students/acadstaff/beerling) puts plants centre stage,

The Fisher Professor of Natural History and Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University takes us on a tour of the first 3 billion years of evolutionary history. Australopithecines, dinosaurs, trilobites -such fossils conjure up images of lost worlds filled with vanished organisms. But in the full history of life, ancient animals, even the

Without our Sun in (the relatively) close proximity of 93 million miles it would be a cold and dark world indeed. It is the source of all our light and heat. The object is a massive ball of gas and plasma. Thanks to the nuclear fusion reactions taking place at its core, the Sun has been shining