Kevin Mitchell is a graduate of the Genetics Department, Trinity College Dublin and received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley (1997), where he studied nervous system development. He did postdoctoral research at Stanford University, using molecular genetics to study neural development in the mouse. Since 2002 he has been on the faculty at Trinity College Dublin and is now Associate Professor in Genetics and Neuroscience. He writes a popular blog on the intersection of genetics, development, neuroscience, psychology and psychiatry  His latest book is Free Agents , published by Princeton University Press, which is out now. Why science? I think I couldn’t help myself! I grew up with a fascination for the natural world, enchanted especially by animals and their behaviour. I also have always just wanted to understand things, at a deep level – it’s so frustrating not to! That led me to become a biologist and eventually to research at the intersection of genetics...

This is a weird one with a capital W. It really is about auras - or should that be aurae? (The plural surely isn't 'aura' as the title seems to suggest.) I was highly doubtful when someone mentioned this as a popular science book, but they argued 'Plenty of phenomena have been treated with gravity by the sciences without being deemed real in any kind of empirical sense. For example, today we wouldn’t implement any medicine based on the model of the four humours – but it’s important to reckon with that history as part of the history of biology.' Okay, so were this about the dodgy history of the concept that people have auras - invisible coloured glows around them that can be seen by sensitive souls and captured on camera, it arguably is about psychology and history of science. But I'm not sure the book really does this. What does it even mean, for example, to photograph an aura? Jeremy Stolow tells us that when he had his aura photographed, 'expert' Guy ...

It feels as if there have been way too many SF books about humanoid robots with artificial general intelligence set in the near future, because it just isn’t going to happen any time soon. The human form is very difficult to reproduce mechanically, while current AI is a long way from having human-like general intelligence (even if it's quite good at faking it). But, despite that proviso, I enjoyed Silvia Park's novel featuring... humanoid robots with artificial intelligence in the nearish future. One of the reasons the book is striking is the setting. We are in a post-reunification Korea (after a vicious war), to a degree modelled on Germany in the way that the old communist part is looked down on by the rest. This is a world where human-like robots are commonplace, and what Park does well is explore the interface and boundary between human and artificial, with several of her characters effectively cyborgs to the extent we're not even certain to begin with if one character,...

Free will is one of those subjects that you have to be brave to take on: Kevin Mitchell makes an impressive job of defending a concept that some feel is incompatible with science. We start by taking a look at the common reasoning against free will - that because everything that happens is deterministically based on the interactions of particles (fields if you prefer), then there is no actual ability to 'choose' - everything simply follows on from its previous state in a mechanical fashion. Admittedly when we then add in quantum physics, there is an element of randomness introduced, but that does not appear to provide any room for agents to select what will happen next. So far, so common a view. But Mitchell argues that this is too limited an approach. While there are indubitably structural limitations on our ability to act with agency, whether down to nature or nurture, he still suggests that we (and other organisms) have the opportunity to make choices, in part due to being ca...

Keith Cooper is a science journalist and editor. He has written for numerous publications and websites, and is the Editor of Astronomy Now magazine. His latest book is Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact , published by Reaktion Books, which delves into the topic of exoplanets, how they are presented in science fiction and how the fictional planets compare with the real ones that are being discovered.  Why this book? I like science fiction. And I like space exploration and exoplanet research. I only want to write books that I would want to read, so it seemed sensible to put them together. A more pertinent question might be, why now? Exoplanet research has developed to the point that we can start to say something about these worlds, even if it’s just from the statistics of the sheer number of worlds that we’re finding. At the moment, detection of potential life on exoplanets is very indirect - could we have a way of definitively showing this to be true? There’s no soli...

Thank you so much to everyone who has already used the 'Buy me a Coffee' link below to support my online book reviews, general science and writing life articles. As it says below, my posts here on the Popular Science website and on my blog  Now Appearing  will always be free, but if you'd really like to help keep me going (and to avoid running intrusive adverts, which I hate) I've introduced a membership scheme that involves a small monthly contribution. There are three levels: Bronze - £1 a month (or £10 a year), like the individual coffee purchases, this will help me be able to dedicate the time to writing these posts and reviews, but makes it more secure. Silver - £3 a month (or £30 a year) - by moving up to a coffee a month, I'm adding in additional posts and messages just for silver and gold members, plus discounts on signed books. Membership also includes the option to suggest books for review. There will be still be as many free posts for all readers, but the...

David Mindell's take on learning lessons for the present from the eighteenth century Lunar Society could easily have been a dull academic tome, but instead it was a delight to read. Mindell splits the book into a series of short essay-like chapters which includes details of the characters involved in and impact of the Lunar Society, which effectively kick-started the Industrial Revolution, interwoven with an analysis of the decline of industry in modern twentieth and twenty-first century America, plus the potential for taking a Lunar Society approach to revitalise industry for the future. We see how a group of men (they were all men back then) based in the English Midlands (though with a strong Scottish contingent) brought together science, engineering and artisan skills in a way that made the Industrial Revolution and its (eventual) impact on improving the lot of the masses possible. Interlaced with this, Mindell shows us how 'industrial' has become something of a dirty wo...

This seemed to be a book that had a lot going for it. The topic of 'the science of certainty' appealed to a reader like me who is fascinated by probability and statistics, and I enjoyed the way the introduction made use of the uncertainty of the impact of the Eyjafjallakökull volcano on flight safety, then the delight that is the Monty Hall problem. But although the rest of the book had some highlights, I couldn't get on with much of it. In a way, the title is highly misleading, because the book isn't really about 'proof' - after all, very little science involves proof. Certainly most of the studies we see misreported in the press don't. We can only prove something with perfect knowledge. This is fine when applying basic logic. We can make deductions, for example, if we are able to make a statement like 'no square is circular'. But such statements are rarely applicable in the real world. Instead we have to rely on induction or abduction, which is usu...

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

Joshua Howgego is currently the Acting Head of Features at New Scientist magazine. He’s been on staff at the magazine for nine years and before that completed a PhD in chemistry. His first book is The Meteorite Hunters .  Why meteorites ? Years ago I was at a scientific conference and I heard meteorites described as time capsules from the birth of the solar system. I realised that, although we usually use telescopes to study space, these extraterrestrial stones provide another unique way of doing so. I found that prompted a lot of questions for me, including 'how on Earth do you find a meteorite?' and 'how do you read the secrets inside them?' It was these questions that led me to write my book. Why this book? As a magazine feature editor, I’m interested in how stories are told and how a good narrative is structured. What appealed to me about hunting meteorites is that presents a ready-made narrative: you have a person setting out on a quest to find incredible treasure!...

This wasn't the book I expected it to be from the subtitle 'exploring classic Sci-Fi stories through the lens of modern science'. For me, to be 'classic' something has to be both relatively old and high quality. Without the quality part, 'dated' might be a better word - and that's primarily what we get here. I had the same problem with the recent book Classic Science Fiction Stories , so I can't really blame Stephen Webb, but I had in mind a kind of 'science of' book for Golden Age SF. Instead we get end of the nineteenth/early twentieth century proto-SF, often with very little science to be 'science of' with. The problem with this approach, for me, is illustrated by the best story (as a pure story) in the collection, G. K. Chesterton's The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown,  which first appeared in 1903. This is part of Chesterton's entertaining 'Club of Queer Trades' series of stories, using a Sherlock Holmes-ish ...

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...