Something that struck me very early on when reading this book was the statement 'The evolution of the new media environment, particularly in the United States, has encouraged a shift for consuming news with the goal of becoming better informed to turning to news for enjoyment.' Only a day or two before I had been listening to a discussion between a couple of friends about how they hated the news these days because it was so miserable. Hardly a source of enjoyment. There is, without doubt an age factor here. These were middle-aged people who, like me, would never think of going to TikTok or Instagram for news. Personally, I've abandoned TV news for news websites (partly because you can get the information far quicker than a boring old bulletin). But given that I am neither American nor of the key age group for newsertainment (my word, not Jennifer Hoewe's) reading this book was rather like reading a sociology text about tribespeople from a totally different culture. Whil...

I've always loved the 'introducing X, a graphic guide' series from Icon Books, with titles such as Introducing Infinity: a graphic guide . They're quirky, pocket-sized books with typically one or two page segments each featuring an eye-catching illustration. However, the publisher also has a set of graphic guides that are full-sized books, the latest being The Universe . I was also very impressed with Jillian Scudder's illustrated Astroquizzical  - she knows her stuff and puts the science across well. The same is true here - it's hard to fault the basics of the text. But I found the book a pain to read because of the way it's laid out and illustrated. Frankly, the layout (and cover) make it look more like a self-published book than one that's professionally produced. The text and image layout is haphazard, with random switching of fonts. Headings are few and far between - there is no apparent structure to the book. In a lot of cases, the illustrations go...

It has always seemed a hope that we could help readers to think about science through science fiction, and this latest book in Springer's noble attempt to have crossover titles between science and science fiction (more on the series later) digs into the history of schemes to educate using SF as either bait or a medium of education. Jörg Determann sets out up front that he is not out to tell us how this should be done, but rather to document the attempts. There is a whole range of media here: we begin with university classes on science fiction writing, move onto movies and TV, planetariums, museums, 'The Science of X' books and finally games and the future of the approach. Some sections worked better than others. The movies and TV part was probably most enjoyable, while the planetariums parted seemed somewhat excessive, dedicating a whole chapter to a very niche means of doing science education.  One mixed section was 'The Science of X'. This dealt with the books tha...

The introductory chapter of this book, called 'there is something about chips' encourages a response of 'especially with salt and vinegar', but the reality we are presented with in this analysis of the importance of computer chips to technology and the world economy is more reminiscent of another edible delight: the banana. Bananas are hugely popular, but the world supply is fragile because it is largely dependent on a monoculture. A single cultivar, the Cavendish, makes up over 99 per cent of exports to developed countries. These bananas have very little genetic diversity as they are propogated by cloning. This leaves them open to devastating attack, most likely by a fungal disease, which could wipe out the worldwide supply. Similarly, when it comes to IT, more than 90 per cent of advanced chips are made by a single company, TMSC, based in Taiwan. Not only does this concentration put supply at risk, Taiwan's difficult political position, with the danger of being su...

This is an odd one. Ignore the title that sounds like it describes what goes on in a household repair shop - Gwen Ottinger makes an important point about the way that the attempt to use science to support social justice - such as when a community is blighted by pollution from an oil well - can be both positive and negative. While it's true that science can be used to identify pollutants and risks, scientists' natural tendency to caution may make a risk seem less significant than it is - and there is a danger that only the science viewpoint prevails, where the experience of those living in bad conditions is important too. All too often, scientists can dismiss local knowledge.  My old literary agent's first question when approached with a book idea was always 'is it a book or a magazine article?' I think this would be well applied here. Ottinger's point could have been well-made in a feature-length article, but there was an awful lot of repetition required to stre...

Ever since computers became useful tools, mathematicians have had mixed opinions about using the technology to solve mathematical problems. Obviously this is particularly topical when we look at what AI can (and can't) do - but there are plenty of opportunities for the brute force of computing to deal with a tricky mathematical road block, and that's what Paul Nahin sets out to cover here. I'll say straight up front that I think this book would have been better and would have had a wider audience if it had not made excessive assumptions of what a reader knows. In his introductory chapter, Nahin says 'There is nothing in this book that attentive high school students who have taken an AP-calculus or AP-statistics class will find beyond them. This assumption lets me, for example write (as I do in the first chapter) the symbol X without explanation with the expectation that a reader will instantly recognise it as denoting the binomial coefficient...' (I have written X h...

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...

The premise here is that around 2035 technology that had been developed to understand aspects of the brain and its medical failings accidentally results in the discovery that people with a certain genetic makeup experience an afterlife, the transition to which others can witness. The first part of the book gives us a 2060 where everything has fallen apart because of this breakthrough. Hardly anyone believes in religion anymore. There are social clashes between the few 'ascendants' who can have this transition to afterlife and the 'biomass' rest who don't. The institute behind the technology seems to operate in a quasi-governmental way.  We then take a jump back to the origins of the technology and what's really going on. Finally we return to the 2060ish present for a final reckoning. The middle section is by far the best. There is a genuinely engaging look at a startup looking for funding and how and if it should interface with the state - impressively foreshado...

This book is something of a reboot. It was Neil deGrasse Tyson's first title, dating back to 1997, but was reissued 'fully revised and updated for the 21st century' in 2024. It's mostly a cut and paste book from the Q&A section in a magazine, despite which (or perhaps because of which) it's one of Tyson's better books. The idea is that the questions are answered by Merlin who is 'a visitor from the Andromeda galaxy who is as old as Earth and who has observed all major scientific events of Earth history.' Although some of the questions are from children (and the illustrations look like they were drawn by one) it's intended to appeal to all ages. The book is split into 13 sections, mostly with astronomical topics (such as Earth, Moon, Planets, Black Holes and Quasars), though with a couple of more physics-based sections including Gravity and Light and Telescopes. The questions themselves vary from entertaining thought experiments such as 'What ...

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...