Category: Science

A review of A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson. @@@@ (4 out of 5). It’s easy to get the impression that science has answered all the big questions and is spending more and more time and money focusing on the little ones. Read Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, and you will quickly be disabused of that illusion. Truth to tell, the human race is still abysmally ignorant of some of the most fundamental matters that determine how, why, and where we live.

A little more than three decades ago, a British-American historian named David Christian introduced a fresh new approach to history. He was teaching then at Macquarie University in Sydney. There, he introduced the concept of Big History. Merging historical study with insights from physics,...

Why was Ivan the Terrible so terrible? Why did Napoleon lose the Battle of Waterloo? What did Queen Victoria have to do with the fall of Russia’s last tsar? These are among the intriguing questions Frederick Cartwright and Michael Biddiss answer in Disease and History. The book, first...

Mozart. Joan of Arc. Einstein. Marie Curie. Steve Jobs. In The Hidden Habits of Genius, Craig Wright plumbs the depths of human capacity in nearly 100 extraordinarily successful individuals through the ages. In them, he finds the characteristics of genius that enable mere human beings to reach...

Ask just about anyone why we live so much longer these days, and the answer will come quickly. It’s the doctors, right? Continuing advances in medical science surely account for those centenarians who keep cropping up on obituary pages. After all, human life expectancy more than doubled over...

On October 10, 2024, a NASA spacecraft dubbed the Europa Clipper is scheduled to launch toward the large Jovian moon of Europa. It’s expected to arrive in April 2030. The Europa Clipper is just the final expression of a long procession of planned missions to Europa and the other Galilean...