Apparently it comes as a surprise to many that medicine was not particularly scientific until the end of the twentieth century (to be honest, it's no surprise to me - we had a GP who used homeopathy in the 90s). Instead it was based on anecdotal guidance - the kind of thing that appeared to work. Evidence-based medicine has since improved the field, trying where possible to base decisions on evidence, ideally based on randomised controlled trials. The first part of Helen Pearson's book covers this well - though I think it's by far the least interesting part of what we discover. Instead what's truly fascinating is the rest of it, looking at a wide range of other fields where evidence was rarely properly used and that are only now starting to dip a toe in the water. These include social policy, policing, conservation, business and education. The main part of the book gives us examples of how bad these areas have been in terms of basing decisions on what's always been ...

Having been captivated by Eva St. John's excellent fantasy  Flint in the Bones  and its sequel, I looked for anything else by St. John and came across her  Quantum Curators  series. I initially assumed these were five separate books, starting with  The Quantum Curators and the Fabergé Egg , but it would be more accurate to describe it as a single five-volume novel. For me, this turned out to be St. John on training wheels before she hit full capability with  Flint in the Bones . Unlike that book, this is science fiction - specifically a many worlds multiverse story, though (initially) there are only two worlds, known by the occupants of one as Alpha and Beta Earths. Ours is Beta, while the other has more advanced technology and has developed a 'quantum stepper' that allows curators to cross into Beta Earth and rescue artefacts that would otherwise be destroyed or lost. The main characters are Neith, an Alpha Earth curator from Egypt (it was a failure to des...

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting.  Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...

A whole generation of astronomy enthusiasts in the UK (me included) were engaged in the subject by Patrick Moore's TV show The Sky at Night . In this 2005 autobiography, Moore concentrates on his career from writing his first book in 1953, skipping over his youth and experiences as a pilot in the Second World War in a handful of pages. It is often fascinating stuff. A starting point that is remarkable is that Moore had no scientific qualifications. (This comes across particularly in his dislike of the metric system.) He missed university due to the war and decided not to take up a place after. Astronomy is arguably the science where more contributions have been made by amateurs than any other, but few amateurs have enjoyed the respect of professionals felt for Moore. His speciality was the Moon in observing terms, but inevitably his most important contribution was in popularising astronomy. A lot of the book is dedicated to the various topics covered by his TV show, but I hadn'...

David Miles is an infectious disease immunologist who spent ten years researching diseases of childhood in Africa and the vaccinations that protect against them. He now tutors on the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine's online MSc course.  David is author of How Vaccines Work and Sneeze: The History and Science of the Common Cold . Why science? I find myself existing in an enormously fascinating and enormously complicated universe. I want to align my understanding of all that complexity with its objective reality, and nobody’s come up with a better way to do that than the scientific method. Why this book? Everybody is familiar with colds and everybody hates them but, after a couple of decades in infectious disease research, I realised I didn’t know much about them. The only people who do are the unsung few who research them. Yet if you mention colds in a bus stop queue, you’ll hear plenty of very firmly held opinions on how to avoid them and how to treat them. I wanted...

As Vivienne Ming makes apparent, there seem largely to be two views of AI's pros and cons, both of which are almost certainly wrong. It's either doom-saying 'It'll destroy life as we know it' or Pollyanna-ish 'It'll do all the boring work and we can all be wonderfully creative and live lives of leisure.' Instead, Ming gives us a clear analysis of the likely trajectory for the workplace, particularly for the IT industry. She describes three 'equally flawed, intellectually lazy strategies' to deal with the impact of AI. The first is substitution and deprofessionalisation, using AI to allow cheaper 'AI-augmented technicians' to replace more expensive professionals, producing more low wage jobs and fewer mid-range. This does save money but leaves a company at risk of being easily outcompeted. The second is what Ming describes as the '"A-Player" Hunger Games', the approach favoured by Silicon Valley. This sees the growing rif...

This is a hugely intriguing piece of science fiction writing. You might think, given that the main setting of this novel is the University of Warwick, that it's a scientific equivalent of Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man , but it's not humour - it's something very different, and much more interesting. Central character Chloe Chan has come from Hong Kong to Warwick expecting to find students excitedly seeking for knowledge, but instead they all seem to spend their time getting drunk and partying while doing hardly any work. In a way, this was the weakest aspect of the book - I don't know Warwick, but have recent experience of Bristol undergraduates, and they weren't at all like this. (Perhaps Chloe chose the wrong university.) Needing a job, she becomes an intern with the mysterious Professor Crannus, who seems more myth than reality. This is the beginning of uncovering an incredible undercover experiment that the bombastic professor heads up, which will have a...

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...