TV nature programmes leave me cold, but I was quite interested in Walking with Dinosaurs , which arguably picked up on the impact of Jurassic Park to give us a vivid visual exploration of dino life. The main problem with it was that the makers made assertions as if fact that could not have been more than hypothesis about the details of dinosaur appearance and behaviour, so the subtitle of this book 'What they did and how we know ' (my italics) really caught my attention. To be honest, my first thoughts were not wholly positive when in the first page of chapter 1 I read 'Throughout this book I will refer to dinosaurs and Dinosauria as a paraphyletic group' - although David Hone goes on with 'therefore excluding both Mesozoic and modern birds unless explicitly stated otherwise' - most potential readers, like me probably still aren't really clear what paraphyletic means. This is sold as for the general public, but a more care with the editing might have ensure...

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...

After expressing some doubts about one of 'Professor Dave's videos it only seemed fair to take a look at his book - and I was pretty much sold on this 2021 publication by the title - but it turned out to be considerably more than I expected. I had assumed it would be a book poking fun at ignorant pseudoscientific ideas, but in reality the biggest parts of it are solid and entirely serious introductions to chemistry, biochemistry and energy (plus a touch of quantum physics). The reason for this eclectic mix is that Dave Farina feels that they provide the knowledge foundation required to counter much online woo, whether it's about things 'not containing chemicals', so-called alternative medicines or the random use of the word 'quantum' to try to make a treatment that is nothing more than a placebo seem more scientifically based. In between the basic science chapters we do get into the dodgy claims, also taking on, for example, that marketing term 'organic...