I've a huge amount of time for Peter Forbes as a writer. Both his The Gecko's Foot on the science behind some of nature's most remarkable abilities and Dazzled and Deceived on mimicry and camouflage in nature and human endeavour were brilliant. But I'm afraid I found it harder to engage with Thinking Small and Large . There's plenty of good stuff in it, but it didn't grab me in the same way. The topic here is the fundamental importance of microbes to life on Earth. By microbes, he is referring to single-celled organisms including bacteria, archaea, algae, fungi, protists and viruses, though Forbes does also point how much even in multi-celled organisms (like us) the important stuff happens on a microscopic scale. We start off by looking how we naturally incline to what we can see and directly experience - and how the common cultural idea that humans are in control of life on Earth (a concept that was originally down to divine intent, but now is more technologic...

It may be a cliché that many scientists are bad communicators - but that doesn't make it untrue. All too often, scientists either don't want to communicate outside their own circle, or are very bad at it - but the reality is, both from a funding viewpoint and to make sure science has a positive impact (a keyword in Anne Helen Toomey's assessment of how scientists should look at their communication) we need scientists to be better at engagement. The opening of the book leans quite heavily on Star Trek, which might divide audiences a bit - one danger in communication is thinking that everyone else shares your enthusiasms, though as it happens, it works for me. (Incidentally, I don't know how a self-designated Trekker, apparently a 'more distinguished term' than Trekkie, could refer to the 'USS Starship Enterprise', a bit like referring to Dr Doctor Toomey.) There's an element here that's similar to books like How to Talk to a Science Denier , looki...

I'm giving this dive into a dystopian AI-dominated future four stars despite some significant flaws because I enjoyed it. Mark Gomes likens the impact of AI on humanity over the next few years to one of the palaeological mass extinctions, though in this case potentially destroying a single species - us. Set in the present and near future, we see the AI-driven technology of billionaire Nolan Scent (a musky scent, I suspect) beginning to take away the majority of jobs that aren't manual labour, service industry or working on new technology. This is bad enough in itself and certainly has potential parallels in the real world (though Gomes' timescales are wildly over-exaggerated, as you can't, for instance, set up AI-automated factories to do all manufacturing in a couple of years). But Scent also has a chip that, when implanted in the brain, leaves workers contented with their lot - so, for example, people previously doing skilled jobs are happy becoming cleaners. The prot...

Joe Tidy is the BBC’s first Cyber Correspondent and the author of Ctrl+ Alt+ Chaos: How Teenage Hackers Hijack the Internet . Joe has built a reputation for investigating the darker sides of the internet and how technology affects the way people live. He is known for tracking down and speaking directly to hackers and criminals who are responsible for some of the biggest cyber incidents of recent times. His top six BBC News documentaries, including The Teenage Millionaire Hacker and The Russian Hackers, have garnered more than 7 million views. Before joining the BBC, he was a correspondent at Sky News where he regularly reported on technology and began his decade-long obsession with cybercrime after reporting on the infamous 2014 Christmas day Lizard Squad attack. Why this book? This book charts the life of crime of, what I think is, the most hated hacker in history. I interviewed Julius Kivimaki back in 2014 when he was the figurehead for Lizard Squad - a notorious attention-seeking te...

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

At first glance at the title you might assume that this book is another Oppenheimer biography - and of course he features - but it's far more. Frank Close starts with a large pre-bomb section taking us through the development of nuclear physics. Some aspects of this are familiar, such as Rutherford and the nucleus, others less so - it's great, for example, to have story of discovery of the neutron as it has rarely been covered and was a real scientific race, laden with misunderstanding and last minute experiments.  There are a lot of names presented here and it would be easy to turn this into a tedious collection of who did what, but Close is skilful enough to make the telling of the story gripping, and brings in some less familiar characters, such as Majorana and Compton to season the familiar names. Close excels at digging out aspects of the history that were a little different from the way the stories are often told, for example casting doubt on the details of Szilard's ...

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...