David Miles is an infectious disease immunologist who spent ten years researching diseases of childhood in Africa and the vaccinations that protect against them. He now tutors on the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine's online MSc course.  David is author of How Vaccines Work and Sneeze: The History and Science of the Common Cold . Why science? I find myself existing in an enormously fascinating and enormously complicated universe. I want to align my understanding of all that complexity with its objective reality, and nobody’s come up with a better way to do that than the scientific method. Why this book? Everybody is familiar with colds and everybody hates them but, after a couple of decades in infectious disease research, I realised I didn’t know much about them. The only people who do are the unsung few who research them. Yet if you mention colds in a bus stop queue, you’ll hear plenty of very firmly held opinions on how to avoid them and how to treat them. I wanted...

As Vivienne Ming makes apparent, there seem largely to be two views of AI's pros and cons, both of which are almost certainly wrong. It's either doom-saying 'It'll destroy life as we know it' or Pollyanna-ish 'It'll do all the boring work and we can all be wonderfully creative and live lives of leisure.' Instead, Ming gives us a clear analysis of the likely trajectory for the workplace, particularly for the IT industry. She describes three 'equally flawed, intellectually lazy strategies' to deal with the impact of AI. The first is substitution and deprofessionalisation, using AI to allow cheaper 'AI-augmented technicians' to replace more expensive professionals, producing more low wage jobs and fewer mid-range. This does save money but leaves a company at risk of being easily outcompeted. The second is what Ming describes as the '"A-Player" Hunger Games', the approach favoured by Silicon Valley. This sees the growing rif...

This is a hugely intriguing piece of science fiction writing. You might think, given that the main setting of this novel is the University of Warwick, that it's a scientific equivalent of Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man , but it's not humour - it's something very different, and much more interesting. Central character Chloe Chan has come from Hong Kong to Warwick expecting to find students excitedly seeking for knowledge, but instead they all seem to spend their time getting drunk and partying while doing hardly any work. In a way, this was the weakest aspect of the book - I don't know Warwick, but have recent experience of Bristol undergraduates, and they weren't at all like this. (Perhaps Chloe chose the wrong university.) Needing a job, she becomes an intern with the mysterious Professor Crannus, who seems more myth than reality. This is the beginning of uncovering an incredible undercover experiment that the bombastic professor heads up, which will have a...

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

The premise here is that around 2035 technology that had been developed to understand aspects of the brain and its medical failings accidentally results in the discovery that people with a certain genetic makeup experience an afterlife, the transition to which others can witness. The first part of the book gives us a 2060 where everything has fallen apart because of this breakthrough. Hardly anyone believes in religion anymore. There are social clashes between the few 'ascendants' who can have this transition to afterlife and the 'biomass' rest who don't. The institute behind the technology seems to operate in a quasi-governmental way.  We then take a jump back to the origins of the technology and what's really going on. Finally we return to the 2060ish present for a final reckoning. The middle section is by far the best. There is a genuinely engaging look at a startup looking for funding and how and if it should interface with the state - impressively foreshado...

Of all the sciences it's arguable that geology is the hardest to make appealing to the general public. Okay some rocks are pretty, and it's behind impressive landscapes, but it lacks a certain excitement for most. By presenting geology in a highly illustrated form (and stretching its definitions to the limits) David Bainbridge gives it an attractive edge in a coffee table fashion. The book is divided into five sections: Time, Energy, Process, Use and Life , which gives a feel for the way that Bainbridge expands the content beyond what most of us would think of as pure geology. Apart from introductory text and insert spreads like 'Insights: Periodic Table', the bulk of each section is a series of often impressive images, each with a longish caption. To show just how far Bainbridge takes us from the conventional, the Time chapter, which covers the way geology has changed our view of Earth time, starts its images with four artworks, including a creation image in the 12th...