There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...

Although they are often bracketed together, 'nature' and 'science' are only loosely related topics. Sönke Johnsen's look at life in the open sea (both for scientists and its inhabitants) could have ended up as something close to the David Attenborough end of the spectrum, but I'm pleased to say that although it's more descriptive than some popular science, the book still gives us more insights than 'nature' books and TV provide, from its marine biology focus. Johnsen starts by remembering his first experience of the oceans - the same as most of us from seaside holidays. As he puts it 'I thought the beach was the ocean; that somehow the whole ocean was the sound of breaking waves, laughing gulls, and greenish murky water that smelled faintly of rotting seafood.' By the time he made graduate school as a marine biologist he saw the ocean as 'an oversized aquarium, clear and packed with life... If the beach was the peel of the ocean, though, ...

Mary and John Gribbin are bestselling authors and science writers. As a pair, they have written several science books, including Being Human, Fire on Earth, major biographies of Richard Feynman and Robert Hooke plus Edmond Halley , and the 'in 90 minutes' series of biographies. Mary is a previous winner of the TES Junior Information Book Award and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Sussex. John’s title Six Impossible Things was shortlisted for the 2019 Royal Society Science Book Prize and he is also a Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex. Their latest book is  Against the Odds .  Why this book? We enjoy writing biographies of scientists, which gives us particular scope to collaborate, with Mary rooting out the biographical background and John focussing on the science (although neither role is exclusive). We hadn't done one for a while, and particularly wanted to highlight a female scientist this time.  But we had great troubl...

This is an extremely engaging read on a subject that everyone is aware of, but few of us know much detail about. Usually, if I'm honest, geology tends to be one of the least entertaining scientific subjects but here (I suppose, given that geo- refers to the Earth it ought to be astrology... but that might be a touch misleading). Here, though, there is plenty of opportunity to capture our interest. The first part of the book takes us both to see meteorites and to hear stories of meteorite hunters, whose exploits vary from erudite science trips to something more like an Indiana Jones outing. Joshua Howgego takes us back to the earliest observations and discoveries of meteorites and the initial doubt that they could have extraterrestrial sources, through to explorations of deserts and the Antarctic - both locations where it tends to be easier to find them. I, certainly, had no idea about the use of camera networks to track incoming meteors, which not only try to estimate where they wi...

For a particular audience, this is an interesting book. Specifically, popular science readers who want to get their hands a little dirty - to dig in a little more to what is happening in the science than a high level overview. Antonino del Popolo (an Italian physics professor) addresses a range of 'big questions', though apart from one about life it would have been more accurate to call this The Big Questions of Physics . The topics covered include big picture items, such as 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' and 'Are there other universes?' and more focused questions such as 'What is a black hole?' and 'Can we travel through time?' These queries (strictly, one section 'What the World Looks Like Seen From a Ray of Light' isn't a question - and is really more 'What's the special theory of relativity about?') get about 20 pages each - enough to give an effective overview and sometimes to dig in with some alacrity....

The number of women working in STEM subjects has expanded dramatically, but as John and Mary Gribbin make clear, in the history of science this is a very recent occurrence. Here, they bring us the stories of 12 women, from Eunice Newton Foote, born in 1819, to Vera Rubin, born in 1928 - effectively covering nearly 200 years in that Rubin died as recently as 2016. There are some names that will already be familiar from popular science histories (and deservedly so). You will find, for instance, Dorothy Hodgkin and Rosalind Franklin represented. But there are plenty like Foote that few will have come across, including Inge Lehmann, Chien-Sung Wu and Lucy Slater. While arguably Foote is there primarily to demonstrate the difficulties she faced (her discovery of an aspect of greenhouse gas behaviour was independently bettered within weeks), the rest have all made significant discoveries or developments against the odds and often missed out the recognition the deserved. The most prominent ob...

I'm reviewing this book at the suggestion of one of my Buy me a Coffee supporters. I put off reading it for quite a while due to a perverse aversion to reading a book, or watching a TV show, that everyone is raving about... but I had to submit in the end, and I'm glad I did. There are elements of the book I loved, and aspects that really grated. What was brilliant was Cixin Liu's evocation of the impact of the Cultural Revolution in China on academics. The character whose life threads through the book, Ye Wenjie, an astrophysicist who witnesses her father's murder by Red Guards is remarkable and I would have been happy reading a straight lab lit novel of her experiences without the aspect of alien contact that takes over the plot. When I was at school, a young history teacher got in trouble by getting all the class to obtain a copy of the Little Red Book - learning about this period in China is one of the few details I remember from school history. I was also impressed...

I am always a bit suspicious of books that are highly illustrated or claim to cover 'almost everything' - and in one sense this is clearly hyperbole. But I enjoyed Phenomena far more than I thought I would. The idea is to cover 125 topics with infographics. On the internet these tend to be long pages with lots of numbers and supposedly interesting factoids. Thankfully, here the term is used in a more eclectic fashion. Each topic gets a large (circa A4) page (a few get two) with a couple of paragraphs of text and a chunky graphic. Sometimes these do consist of many small parts - for example 'the limits of the human body' features nine graphs - three on sporting achievements, three on biometrics (e.g. height by date of birth) and three rather random items (GNP per person, agricultural yields of various crops and consumption of coal). Others have a single illustration, such as a map of the sewers of Paris. (Because, why wouldn't you want to see that?) Just those two s...

Jason Steffen is associate professor of physics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. A longtime science team member of NASA’s Kepler mission, he has contributed to the discovery and characterisation of thousands of planets that orbit distant stars. His new book is Hidden in the Heavens . Why astronomy? I originally wanted to be an aerospace engineer to design and build airplanes.  My undergraduate institution didn't have aerospace engineering:  I took an astronomy class my first quarter, and decided to major in physics.  My degrees are in physics rather than astronomy, but my research is all on topics related to astronomy in one way or another.  For a period of time after graduate school I did experimental physics research on dark matter and dark energy.  I was working at a national laboratory, a big atom smasher outside of Chicago, called Fermilab.  At the same time that I was doing this work for Fermilab, I also worked for NASA on the Kepler missi...

Having recently looked into the way we use story to inform, influence and manipulate others , I was interested to see how Mara Einstein would take on suggested parallels between the techniques of marketers and those used by cults. Technically this is a business book, but it takes an academic approach to the subject. I found the description of the techniques used by cults to reel in and keep victims, and the parallels with some types of marketing, notably multilevel marketing (MLM) and influencers, was fascinating. For those unfamiliar with the term, MLM refers to what is effectively a pyramid scheme, but one where there is a product involved rather than just finance. Where pyramid schemes are usually illegal, MLMs aren't despite their manipulative nature. It's worth saying that this a very US-centric book. All the examples are from US companies, most of which I'd never heard of. This isn't a negative, though - it gives an impressive insight into US culture. Many of the ...