From that title with the strangely archaic 'hallo' spelling to the subtitle 'meet your new friend and workmate' the cover of this book promises either quirkiness or cringeworthiness. When it comes to the contents, thankfully it's more the former than the latter in this survey of the world of robotics. (It could also be because the book has been translated from Dutch.)

Starting with historical automata (strangely never called this) and bringing in humanoid robots, industrial robots and the whole science of robotics (plus quite a lot of artificial intelligence), the format gives us a series of chapters dealing with specific challenges such as sight, cognition and speech, each ending with a case study. The whole thing is finished off with a rather nice fiction/fact timeline on robotics through the ages, though it is rather unfortunate that the authors thought that Daleks were robots.

On the whole the coverage is good, though the level is perhaps a little superficial …

Personally, I think stars are underrated. Not the ones in the sky – if it weren’t for one of them, the Sun, the Earth wouldn’t exist (and even if there was an Earth, there would be no life on it because it would be far too cold). For that matter, if it weren’t for stars in general there would be no atoms other than hydrogen, helium and a touch of lithium – making the whole concept of a planet (or a person) inconceivable. So the stars of the cosmos are seriously rated. Nor am I talking about the stars of stage and screen. Because, let’s face it, most of them are seriously overrated. I refer instead to stars in reviews. A good while ago I wrote to the journal Nature, complaining about some of the book reviews they carried. I pointed out that the (long) reviews said nothing about whether the book was any good – they merely gave the reviewer a chance to do his or her potted version of the theme of the book. They said what the book was about, but not if it was any good or whether you shou…

The news is riddled with numbers that we often taken for granted. Brian Kernighan sets out to give us the tools to test numbers in the headlines and see if they really add up. The fact that they often don't is made clear by the range of examples Kernighan gives where a news source has got a value wrong, whether it's out by a factor of a thousand, using the wrong units or impossibly accurate, perhaps due to a spot of calculator work converting one unit to another.

This isn't the first book to take on misleading numbers - as well as the classic How to Lie with Statistics, there was the excellent The Tiger that Isn't. Although Kernighan covers many of the common errors in this slim volume, I didn't get the same sense of fascination here as I did with those earlier titles (particular The Tiger). Kernighan gives us useful tips on checking numbers, but often the examples felt like hard work for numbers it's hard to care too much about (the US's 60 billion barrel…

This is the third of Michael Carroll's novels I've read from the 'Science and Fiction' series (the others wereOn the Shores of Titan's Farthest Seaand Europa's Lost Expedition), and it's undoubtedly the best of the three.

Like the other books in the wider series, there's some interesting 'science behind the story' at the end, particularly on generating electricity from bacteria, but that's just a nice-to-have. It's still a novel, so wins or loses on the quality of the fiction. There are some provisos, but the good news is that this is an interestingly meaty and complex story with action taking place in the atmosphere of Venus, on Earth and primarily on Saturn's moon Enceladus (Carroll loves a good gas planet moon).

An asteroid collision has left Earth's civilisation teetering on the brink and in dire need of new energy sources as both solar and wind collapse in the after-effects of the impact. Engineer Gwen Baré, who lived brief…

It's that time of year again when many of us are searching for good presents for difficult-to-buy-for people: the latest title from science writer and London expert Matt Brown seems an ideal stocking filler for scientifically-minded types. It's not that many purchasers are likely to run a quiz from the book (although you certainly could), but there's plenty of entertainment to be had from having a go at the 101 themed rounds, which range from questions on the science of alcohol to science on TV and the IgNobel prize.
The blurb on the back reads 'Do you know what item of clothing Einstein refused to wear or what embarrassing mishap cost NASA a $125 million Mars orbiter', and I was feeling rather smug that I knew the answers to both - but although for those who know their science there will be some familiar questions, there was plenty inside that was new to me and that gave that fun frisson of surprise. It's the kind of book where you end up irritating anyone si…

This book was previously published with the misleading title The Universe in Zero Words - the new title is a much better fit. In awarding this book four stars I am reminded of the infamous Samuel Johnson quote on women preachers: ‘A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.’ The reason I say this is because I’m reviewing a book about mathematical equations. There have been plenty of histories of mathematics (more, if anything, that histories of the whole of science), so to make its mark, a new one has to have a good hook - some different way of looking at the subject that gives it structure and gains our interest. Dana Mackenzie's approach of picking out 24 great equations is risky, because you have to wonder whether people who find maths scary or boring will be drawn in by this concept.

We meet, for example, 1-1=0, used to explore the nature of zero, while a squared + b squared = c squared introdu…