I am a science journalist and magazine editor. I feel really lucky to be a bioscience specialist – it really is at the forefront of solving some of the great challenges of our time, from making sustainable fuels and materials, to climate change mitigation, age-related disease, pandemics, food security, habitat restoration…plus there’s an incredible diversity of life on our planet still to be discovered. I always try to relate scientific progress to our everyday lives: it’s not just about creating new knowledge, it is about how that knowledge might improve our health, change our outlook, transform society, or protect the planet.
I wrote...
The Good Virus: The Amazing Story and Forgotten Promise of the Phage
Not all viruses are out to get us - in fact, the viruses that do us harm are vastly outnumbered by viruses that can actually save lives. Countless times per second, 'good' viruses known as phages are infecting and destroying bacteria. They are the most abundant life form on the planet and have an incredible power to heal, rather than harm. So why have most of us never even heard of them?
The Good Virus reveals how personalities, power, and politics have repeatedly crashed together to hinder our understanding of these weird and wonderful life forms. The Good Virus celebrates what phages could do for us and our planet if they are at last given the attention they deserve.
Thanks to this beautiful book, I try to take a moment each day to look up at the sky.
The Cloudspotter’s Guide is so much more than just a guide to the science of how clouds form, or the different types – it’s a reminder to appreciate the unbelievably beautiful and epic natural forms that float above us every day.
Clouds, writes Pretor-Pinney, are ‘the most egalitarian of nature’s displays – we all have a good view of them’. And his guide is as much about how to take pleasure in this daily display as it is about the science of atmospherics, precipitation, and altitude.
I bought this book so long ago its pages are yellowing and falling out. But when I’m busy and stressed, I still daydream of being able to sit in my garden and do nothing but watch the clouds roll by. When I am aboard a plane, I am always amazed that so few others are staring out at the vast fluffy sunlit cloudscapes out the window, as close as you can get to Heaven on Earth.
Now in paperback: the runaway British bestseller that has cloudspotters everywhere looking up.
Where do clouds come from? Why do they look the way they do? And why have they captured the imagination of timeless artists, Romantic poets, and every kid who's ever held a crayon? Veteran journalist and lifelong sky watcher Gavin Pretor-Pinney reveals everything there is to know about clouds, from history and science to art and pop culture. Cumulus, nimbostratus, and the dramatic and surfable Morning Glory cloud are just a few of the varieties explored in this smart, witty, and eclectic tour through the skies.
As a philosopher, scientist, and scuba diver, Peter Godfrey Smith uses the remarkable biology of the octopus to make us think about how other organisms experience the world. Godfrey-Smith is such a capable and powerful writer, the book is almost worth buying just for his recap of how complex life on Earth evolved in the introduction.
Octopuses have such a different kind of nervous system to ours that their limbs can sense and act independently from the central brain, and may even be able to ‘think’ for themselves. By studying such a radically different and surprisingly intelligent life form, Godfrey Smith is able to cast our minds, and our experience of the world, in an amazing new light too.
It’s always good to try and see things from other person’s perspective – but trying to see the world from an octopus’s will really blow your mind.
'Brilliant' Guardian
'Fascinating and often delightful' The Times
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE
What if intelligent life on Earth evolved not once, but twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter?
In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how nature became aware of itself - a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared.
Tracking the mind's fitful development from unruly clumps of seaborne cells to…
Richard Dawkins is sadly now known mostly for his divisive polemics on religion and identity politics, but his early books on biology were unbelievably powerful.
The Blind Watchmaker helped flesh out, clarify, update, and expand Darwin’s theory of evolution for a massive audience, while also elegantly dismantling the common argument that life is so sophisticated that it must have been ‘designed’ by some kind of creator.
As a young biologist, I read The Blind Watchmaker and was wowed by the way Dawkins explained how, under the right conditions, amazingly complex designs can arise from a simple system – without the need for anyone directing it or creating it.
Dawkins not only helps explain how life on Earth has advanced into the myriad forms we see on Earth today, but goes on to suggest that evolutionary systems might be at play in other aspects of our lives, like language and culture. Dawkins was talking about memes before memes were a thing.
The Blind Watchmaker is the seminal text for understanding evolution today. In the eighteenth century, theologian William Paley developed a famous metaphor for creationism: that of the skilled watchmaker. In The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins crafts an elegant riposte to show that the complex process of Darwinian natural selection is unconscious and automatic. If natural selection can be said to play the role of a watchmaker in nature, it is a blind one-working without foresight or purpose.
In an eloquent, uniquely persuasive account of the theory of natural selection, Dawkins illustrates how simple organisms slowly change over time to create…
I’ve dipped into books about writing, storytelling, and scriptwriting before, and I’ve always found them to be utterly uninspiring, and in fact quite depressing – little more than a set of formulas to ensure your story’s structure is like other stories.
But Will Storr’s excellent book uses insights from evolutionary biology and psychology to help you get to understand why human minds love stories, and what it is about great stories that keeps readers turning the pages. His advice is powerful, simple – primal, even.
I’ve used this excellent book to help improve my writing and ensure my first book was a real page-turner. But The Science of Storytelling has also left a huge mark on me in terms of thinking about how and why we communicate. It’s for our own survival, after all.
'If you want to write a novel or a script, read this book' Sunday Times
'The best book on the craft of storytelling I've ever read' Matt Haig
'Rarely has a book engrossed me more, and forced me to question everything I've ever read, seen or written. A masterpiece' Adam Rutherford
Who would we be without stories?
Stories mould who we are, from our character to our cultural identity. They drive us to act out our dreams and ambitions, and shape our politics and beliefs. We use them to construct our relationships, to keep order in our…
Mark O’Connell’s witty, weird, and worrying book explores the fringe scientific movement known as transhumanism. This disparate group of philosophers, engineers, rogue scientists, and hackers want to augment or merge the human body with technology, largely in order to advance their intellect and escape ageing and death.
While meeting a variety of transhumanists, O’Connell discusses the possible ways that technology could transform us as a species. From freezing ourselves to be re-awoken in the far distant future, to uploading our minds to a computer, there are all sorts of ambitious ideas out there to escape the limitations of nature.
But where this book really sings is O’Connell’s beautiful (and often amusing) reflections on what it would really mean to live forever, or to live as a machine or computer chip rather than in an animal body and brain. It will make you appreciate your ageing animal body and your finite time on Earth, and those of your loved ones, more than ever.
“This gonzo-journalistic exploration of the Silicon Valley techno-utopians’ pursuit of escaping mortality is a breezy romp full of colorful characters.” —New York Times Book Review
Transhumanism is a movement pushing the limits of our biology—of our senses, intelligence, and lifespans—with technology. Its supporters have reached a critical mass and now include some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley and beyond, among them Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Ray Kurzweil.
In this provocative and eye-opening account, journalist Mark O’Connell explores the staggering (and terrifying) possibilities that present themselves when you think of your body as an outmoded device. He visits…
Virologist Dr. Rachel Bisette sees visions of a Kachina and remembers the plane crash that killed her parents and the Dine medicine woman who saved her life. Rachel is investigating a new and lethal hantavirus spreading through the Four Corners, and believes the Kachina is calling her to join the work against the spreading pandemic.
She finds Eva Yellow Horn, a medicine woman with the key to fighting the pandemic. When Eva demonstrates ancient healing powers beyond science, Rachel recognizes her as the medicine woman who saved her life years before. Eva reveals that Rachel’s father was investigating the 1979 nuclear disaster in Church Rock, when his plane crashed, killing her parents. Now, Rachel undertakes a new investigation, but she is not alone.
“Visions of kachinas guide doctor to spiritual healing in pandemic.”
2014 Finalist in the Willa Literary Award
This is a book that once closed and last line read, my mind wandered to explore certain character motivations and potential follow-up responses. I don’t think an author has to answer every possibility, art comes into play best when the reader’s own imagination can wander within the story.
Dr. Rachel Bisette is drawn to the Four Corners to lead the search for a vaccine against a lethal pandemic. One elusive indigenous woman, Eva Yellow Horn, carries the gift of immunity. In her search…
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