Futurist and science writer David Bodanis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bodanis) provides an excellent read in Electric Universe. He weaves tales of romance, divine inspiration, and fraud through a lucid account of the invisible force that permeates our universe. In these pages the virtuoso scientists who plumbed the secrets of electricity come vividly to life, including familiar giants like Thomas Edison; […]
Philip Ball (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Ball and http://www.philipball.co.uk/) encourages us to take our eyes away from the individual and focus on the broader currents of activity in human society. He asks whether there are ‘natural laws’ that govern the ways in which humans behave and organize themselves, just as there are physical laws that govern the motions of atoms and
What if you could predict your future — which political party you will vote for, what kind of person you will marry, which disease will end your life, whether your blue mood will fester into something more troubling, even debilitating. Would you want to know? Taking a uniquely intimate and cheeky approach to the personal
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How did life invent itself? Where did DNA come from? How did consciousness develop? Powerful new research methods are providing vivid insights into the makeup of life. Comparing gene sequences, examining atomic structures of proteins, and looking into the geochemistry of rocks have helped explain evolution in more detail than ever before. Nick Lane (http://www.nick-lane.net/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Lane) expertly reconstructs the history
As a prolific author, BBC commentator, and magazine editor, Nigel Calder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Calder) has spent a lifetime spotting and explaining the big discoveries in all branches of science. In Magic Universe, he draws on his vast experience to offer readers a lively, far-reaching look at modern science in all its glory, shedding light on the latest ideas
The universe, the 18th-century mathematician and philosopher Jean Le Rond d’Alembert said, ‘would only be one fact and one great truth for whoever knew how to embrace it from a single point of view.’ James Gleick (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gleick and http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Glei) has just this perspective, and signals it in the first word of the title of his new book, The
Antonio Damasio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Damasio and http://www.ted.com/speakers/antonio_damasio.html) does not claim to have solved the mystery of consciousness in The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. This is fortunate, because in many senses Damasio’s book does not provide much new information about consciousness and why its highest forms occur only in humans. Instead, Damasio
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Gavin Pretor-Pinney (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Pretor-Pinney) achieved unexpected success with his previous book, The Cloudspotter’s Guide, an appreciation of the different types of water vapour masses that fill our skies. Now the author has produced what he claims is a natural follow-up. ‘A mere cloud-spotter is, in fact, without even realising it, a wave-watcher, since clouds are often borne
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This is Eric Kandel’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Kandel) account of how his personal quest to understand memory intersected with the emergence of a new science. In Search of Memory relates the astonishing story of how four different and distinct disciplines – behaviourist psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and molecular biology – converged into a powerful new science of mind. Through
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