There have been plenty of good books on black holes, such as Marcus Chown's A Crack in Everything but it's a subject that will always benefit from a different take, and Jonas Enander manages to bring in some new viewpoints as well as exploring the basics of the concept well. After a journey into a black hole described (with the observer's inevitable destruction), we jump back to Michell's dark stars, then start to get the theoretical basis from Einstein and Schwarzschild alongside observational work. This starts, interestingly, with supermassive black holes before getting onto the common or garden variety. Enander's writing style is light and conversational - no danger here of being overwhelmed with technicalities. It's good, readable stuff. In some ways the most interesting part of the book is the final section that addresses the subtitle 'black holes and our place on Earth'. This (admittedly sometimes at quite a stretch) tries to link the study of bla...

Ever since computers became useful tools, mathematicians have had mixed opinions about using the technology to solve mathematical problems. Obviously this is particularly topical when we look at what AI can (and can't) do - but there are plenty of opportunities for the brute force of computing to deal with a tricky mathematical road block, and that's what Paul Nahin sets out to cover here. I'll say straight up front that I think this book would have been better and would have had a wider audience if it had not made excessive assumptions of what a reader knows. In his introductory chapter, Nahin says 'There is nothing in this book that attentive high school students who have taken an AP-calculus or AP-statistics class will find beyond them. This assumption lets me, for example write (as I do in the first chapter) the symbol X without explanation with the expectation that a reader will instantly recognise it as denoting the binomial coefficient...' (I have written X h...

This near-future dystopian view of a tech giant taken to the extreme still has the power to bite thirteen years after it was first published, though some flaws are now more obvious. Central character Mae gets a job at the Circle, a sort of Google+Meta+Musk. To begin with all is wonderful, though even early on she gets a shock when she is disciplined for not RSVPing an invitation to something she wasn't interested in, sent simply because her socials said she had once visited a country. As things get more intense, Mae (who frankly can be a little slow on the uptake) becomes a key figure in the Circle, wearing a streaming camera all day and taking viewers around the campus showing what's happening. The message of the company is no secrets, no lies - with everything in the open the world will be better. This may seem a naive view, but it's interesting that in 2009 the then CEO of Google (referring to the Glass product) said ‘If you have something you don’t want anyone to know, ...

Scott Solomon is a biologist, professor, and science communicator. He teaches ecology, evolutionary biology, and scientific communication as a Teaching Professor at Rice University in Houston. Dr Solomon is also a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History , and the author of Becoming Martian: How Living in Space Will Change Our Bodies and Minds . Why science? To me, the appeal of science has always been about understanding the world around us. Science gives us a way to address big questions like 'Where did we come from?' But it also helps us to make useful predictions about the future– everything from what the weather will be like tomorrow to what will eventually become of our species? Why this book? As an evolutionary biologist, I am intrigued by the fact that we are at a point in which for the first time some people may soon be truly living on other planets. I wanted to explore what we know about how people will be affected by the ...

The first in this series, The Tainted Cup , was superb - and Robert Jackson Bennett has come up with an equal in its sequel. Though labelled fantasy, for me this is definitely science fiction (there is no magic involved), crossed with a complex murder mystery involving a heady mix of political intrigue. As with its predecessor, the narrator, Din is a young assistant investigator, relatively recently started in his first position in the legal arm of their empire. His enhancements as an engraver are slightly reminiscent of a mentat in Dune, giving him perfect recall and leading to surprising sword fighting abilities. His boss, Ana, is more complex - a combination of Mycroft Holmes from the modern-day set Sherlock TV show and Judge Dee from van Gulik's remarkable books. Except she wears a blindfold most of the time and swears a lot more.  We learn more about Ana's abilities and why she is so strange in a story that takes the central characters to a location on the edge of the empi...

Apparently it comes as a surprise to many that medicine was not particularly scientific until the end of the twentieth century (to be honest, it's no surprise to me - we had a GP who used homeopathy in the 90s). Instead it was based on anecdotal guidance - the kind of thing that appeared to work. Evidence-based medicine has since improved the field, trying where possible to base decisions on evidence, ideally based on randomised controlled trials. The first part of Helen Pearson's book covers this well - though I think it's by far the least interesting part of what we discover. Instead what's truly fascinating is the rest of it, looking at a wide range of other fields where evidence was rarely properly used and that are only now starting to dip a toe in the water. These include social policy, policing, conservation, business and education. The main part of the book gives us examples of how bad these areas have been in terms of basing decisions on what's always been ...