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The Elephant in the Room - Liz Kalaugher ****

This is by no means a jolly read - with vivid stories, Liz Kalaugher takes us into the world of zoonotic diseases, both where humans are infected by largely wild animal diseases and where we spread disease among other species. The book voyages around the world and into the prehistoric past (entertainingly in a chapter that begins at Bristol bus station, the way all prehistory stories probably should), suggesting that perhaps the Neanderthals were wiped out by a lack of disease resistance. Kalaugher takes us on a genuinely engaging voyage of discovery, taking in a diverse range of fauna from honeycreepers and Tasmanian devils to ferrets, frogs and foxes. If, like me, you are distinctly averse to reading about anything medical, the thought of encountering avian pox, plague, West Nile virus and more can be a little unnerving, but on the whole the stories are more about the animals and their environment than too much medical detail. Probably the weakest part of the book, as is often the ca...
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Summer Sale - 50% off signed books

Summer is the ideal time to take a dive into popular science - until 18 August 2025 there is 50% off all Brian Clegg signed books, as long as the total price of the book(s) before discount is over £5.  Just head over to www.brianclegg.net - on the pages for most of the books you will find an option to buy a signed copy.  Simply add one or more to the bag, then click the pop-up shopping bag, click Redeem your coupon and use the code sale2025 . Enjoy! These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership: Offer by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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May Contain Lies - Alex Edmans ****

If we are to believe the media we are bombarded with misinformation and disinformation - there's certainly a lot of it out there and Alex Edmans sets out to give a guide to the many ways that information can be badly or misleadingly presented, and how we can defend ourselves from it. At the heart of his argument are two biases. I'm so glad he limits it to two - I get totally lost trying to keep on top of all the biases that psychologists introduce, so sticking to confirmation bias plus black and white thinking as the key errors to look out for, both in how we receive information ourselves and how others present it, is very helpful. At the heart of the book is a ladder of levels of something like quality of information. These are statement, fact, data, evidence and proof. Edmans goes into plenty of detail on each rung - how we get, for example, from statement to fact, or data to evidence. Most of all, he demonstrates brilliantly how both those undertaking studies and those inter...
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Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper - Five Way Interview

Niayesh Afshordi (left) is professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and associate faculty at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, Canada. He was a consultant to PBS’s NOVA, and outlets including Scientific American, Science, the Guardian, and the New York Times have featured his work. Phil Halper is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the creator of the popular YouTube series Before the Big Bang. His astronomy images have been featured in the Washington Post, the BBC, and the Guardian. Their book is Battle of the Big Bang . Why cosmology? Cosmology is the study of the universe, its distribution, its fate and origins. As a species we are fascinated by origins, we trace out family trees, treasure photos of the past and religious creation stories are ubiquitous across cultures. But with the dawn of twentieth century, it’s finally been possible to scientifically model the evolution of the cosmos and probe these dee...
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Thinking Small and Large - Peter Forbes ***

I've a huge amount of time for Peter Forbes as a writer. Both his The Gecko's Foot on the science behind some of nature's most remarkable abilities and Dazzled and Deceived on mimicry and camouflage in nature and human endeavour were brilliant. But I'm afraid I found it harder to engage with Thinking Small and Large . There's plenty of good stuff in it, but it didn't grab me in the same way. The topic here is the fundamental importance of microbes to life on Earth. By microbes, he is referring to single-celled organisms including bacteria, archaea, algae, fungi, protists and viruses, though Forbes does also point how much even in multi-celled organisms (like us) the important stuff happens on a microscopic scale. We start off by looking how we naturally incline to what we can see and directly experience - and how the common cultural idea that humans are in control of life on Earth (a concept that was originally down to divine intent, but now is more technologic...
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Science with Impact - Anne Helen Toomey ****

It may be a cliché that many scientists are bad communicators - but that doesn't make it untrue. All too often, scientists either don't want to communicate outside their own circle, or are very bad at it - but the reality is, both from a funding viewpoint and to make sure science has a positive impact (a keyword in Anne Helen Toomey's assessment of how scientists should look at their communication) we need scientists to be better at engagement. The opening of the book leans quite heavily on Star Trek, which might divide audiences a bit - one danger in communication is thinking that everyone else shares your enthusiasms, though as it happens, it works for me. (Incidentally, I don't know how a self-designated Trekker, apparently a 'more distinguished term' than Trekkie, could refer to the 'USS Starship Enterprise', a bit like referring to Dr Doctor Toomey.) There's an element here that's similar to books like How to Talk to a Science Denier , looki...
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Age of Extinction (SF) - Mark Gomes ****

I'm giving this dive into a dystopian AI-dominated future four stars despite some significant flaws because I enjoyed it. Mark Gomes likens the impact of AI on humanity over the next few years to one of the palaeological mass extinctions, though in this case potentially destroying a single species - us. Set in the present and near future, we see the AI-driven technology of billionaire Nolan Scent (a musky scent, I suspect) beginning to take away the majority of jobs that aren't manual labour, service industry or working on new technology. This is bad enough in itself and certainly has potential parallels in the real world (though Gomes' timescales are wildly over-exaggerated, as you can't, for instance, set up AI-automated factories to do all manufacturing in a couple of years). But Scent also has a chip that, when implanted in the brain, leaves workers contented with their lot - so, for example, people previously doing skilled jobs are happy becoming cleaners. The prot...
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