A classic curate's egg of a book. Some aspects of it are brilliant, but there is enough that isn't to make it frustrating. Wisely, Oliver Johnson decided to do a book on very practical aspects of maths - applications that are a wonderful counter to the old moan at school of 'but what use is it to me?' This is great, but two aspects are less positive. One is that this would be a sensible argument if we taught school students this stuff. Just as I think we should teach interesting physics, this is genuinely interesting maths that doesn't necessarily involve more work to learn the basics. But we don't. The second issue is that Johnson decided to do maths without formulae and equations. This is a common enough practice in popular science, where you can often get away without the mathematics, but in popular maths it is a real stumbling block. When, for example, Johnson is telling us about Bayesian methods - really useful stuff - rather than presenting us a with a ver...

This was a difficult review to write. The idea is a good one - sixteen innovative scientists whose ideas were first doubted but came to be mainstream thinking. Donald Kirsch does a good job of making their work accessible. The focus is heavily biased towards medical science (reflecting the author's background) with the likes McClintock, Semmelweis, Rous, Prusiner, Cushman and Ondetti, Sehgal and Warren and Marshall. If most of these names are unfamiliar, I'd also suggest that most aren't as transformative as the likes of Galileo, Planck, and Wegener, but they still provide interesting stories. I'm not sure I would have included Rachel Carson, who despite being a scientist isn't well known for visionary science (and whose advocacy resulted in the abandonment of DDT, even in controlled fashion that could have saved many lives). But my big concern about the book is the result of two others names already mentioned above. These are the ones I know a significant amount ab...

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

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...