Why is the Earth not shaped as a smooth sphere like a marble? Why are there immensely deep trenches under the oceans and mountains towering into the sky? Devil in the Mountain is the story of scientist Simon Lamb (https://thiniceclimate.org/simon-lamb), and his attempt to grapple with this great geological question. The truth, like the devil, is in […]
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Alan Boss (http://home.dtm.ciw.edu/users/boss/) has been a key scientist with the Kepler space telescope. He believes Earth-like worlds are common in the galaxy, and hence life itself to be ubiquitous. In Crowded Universe he offers a first-hand account of the race to discover the first truly Earth-like exoplanet. The story picks up pace as more and more exoplanet discoveries
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Remember the hilarious 1966 film ‘One Million Years B.C.’ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060782/) featuring Raquel Welch in a bear skin and her co-star John Richardson? They are portrayed having to fend off dinosaurs. Hilarious because dinosaurs became extinct 66 million years ago, whilst modern humans (‘homo sapiens’) only appeared around 200,000 years ago. So the discrepancy was a
All around us all the time, a silent process is taking place. Plants are fixing the radiant energy of the Sun by the process of photosynthesis. Oliver Morton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Morton_(science_writer)) explains how it all happens. The story of how we came to understand the process is itself interesting. It involves biochemistry, the nuclear physics of isotopes
Stephen Senn (https://www.lih.lu/page/research-group-senn) explains here how statistics determine many decisions about medical care. This ranges from allocating resources for health, to determining which drugs to license, to cause-and-effect in relation to disease. He tackles big themes: clinical trials and the development of medicines, life tables, vaccines and their risks or lack of them, smoking and
Sean B. Carroll (http://seanbcarroll.com/about/) presents a summary of the emerging field of evolutionary developmental biology and the role of toolkit genes. He argues that evolution proceeds by modifying the way that regulatory genes, which do not code for structural proteins (such as enzymes), control embryonic development. In turn, these regulatory genes are based on a very old set
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The presence of peculiar forms of life such as the horseshoe crab, the nautilus, echinoids, and assorted other animals and plants puzzled Darwin. How could these species have survived millions of years with little change while most other species evolved, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, and then mostly becoming extinct? He resolved the question to his
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The experience of looking at art has neurobiological correlates in the brain. Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain describes these. Semir Zeki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semir_Zeki) uses a range of examples from artists including Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Magritte, Malevich and Picasso. The book constitutes a kind of aesthetic tour of the brain. Zeki offers a systematic
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Catching a mysterious pool of early morning sunlight playfully cast across his kitchen ceiling gave Caspar Henderson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar_Henderson) pause for wonder. The experience inspired him to think more closely about the nature of wonder. His reflections have issued in this enthusiastic tour of much that seems ordinary but which is upheld by the complex and
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