Iwan Rhys Morus is a professor of history at Aberystwyth University, specializing in the history of science. He’s written a number of books, including Frankenstein’s Children (1998), Michael Faraday and the Electrical Century (2004), When Physics Became King (2005), Shocking Bodies (2011), Nikola Tesla and the Electrical Future (2019), and most recently How The Victorians Took Us To The Moon (2022). He studied Natural Science at Emmanuel College, Cambridge before moving on to do a PhD there in the history and philosophy of science. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Learned Society of Wales. • Why science and technology? As a historian of science, I spend a lot of time trying to understand the relationship between science, technology, and culture, particularly for the nineteenth century. It’s important, I think, because our contemporary world is entirely dependent on scientific and technological systems that are often invisible to most people. We just don’t thin

Image from Unsplash There may not be any reviews here now until January 2023 as we like to take a break - but our reviews will be back again in January. Topics come and go in the popular science world - looking back over 2022, brains/consciousness, climate change, AI and space/cosmology have been the most dominant in terms of review titles. As someone with a particular interest in physics and maths, I'd love to see a few more of those next year. And chemistry remains the least covered of the core science subjects.  A few years ago I speculated on why this was the case . Back then (2017) this site had 22 books under 'chemistry' as opposed to 97 maths, 126 biology and 182 physics. Admittedly, there is always a danger of editorial bias, but I have certainly never avoided chemistry titles if publishers sent them my way. They simply don't arrive. Publishers I spoke to at the time suggested that chemistry was, perhaps not 'sexy' enough. Meanwhile we have seen some top

The standard version of the old saying 'You shouldn't judge a book by its cover' misses a final few words: 'but most people do.' And in the case of this book it's a shame - because the cover is pretty awful and really doesn't do the book justice. The feeling from the cover is that this is going to be the worthy, laboured tome of an academic - probably a touch amateurish in its writing style. In practice, it's a slick piece of popular science writing. Tobias Hürter is apparently a well-known German science writer, here translated by David Shaw. This is a book in the peculiarly American style of pop science - extremely focused on narrative and giving details in the manner of a docu-drama - so, for instance, we read that 'a young man in a checked suit hurtles down the steep, narrow stairway from the second floor of the house at Kramgasse 49, along the cobbled streets and through the covered medieval arcades. In his hand, he clutches an envelope. Passers

This is the latest in the Kosmos series on the planets, previously including Mercury ,  Venus , Mars , Jupiter  and  Saturn . Like its predecessors, it is well illustrated, though the subjects themselves are rather less photographed than most planets, so we get more historical context photos - not a bad thing because the history is usually more interesting than pure facts about the planets. In the Uranus section, for example, we read of the planet's origins, Herschel's discovery (including a photo of a reproduction of his telescope of the period, where we usually only see illustrations of the later, bigger telescopes), its naming and more. Similarly, with Neptune we get lots of interesting detail on the rather messy story of its discovery. The bulk of the astronomical content inevitably comes from the probes that have given us far more detail about the planets and their moons. In each case there's a whole chapter, for example on Voyager 2's contribution, followed by wha

As soon as you see the cover of this book, it feels like it's going to be light hearted and super fun (or at least it seems the authors want it to be this). In practice, it's not. It might have big, Joy of Sex style line drawings and an odd shape with cheap feeling paper, but the content is fairly straightforwardly serious.  In the introduction Greg Gage and Tim Marzullo tells us that 'There are many examples of how amateur scientists add to our collective understanding of nature.' This feels a dubious statement at best - it's obviously true historically when professional scientists didn't exist, but these days amateur contributions are distinctly niche. If you think of any of the really big scientific breakthroughs of the last 100 years, there isn't a lot of amateur input. And using this book certainly won't add anything. Once we get into the book proper, it delivers on at least part of the subtitle 'neuroscience experiments for everyone' - the