Biologically modern humans have roamed the Earth for some 300,000 years. Yet what we refer to as history dwells on the past 5,000 years or so, since writing was invented in ancient Sumer. Prehistory—what took place before then—was largely the subject of speculation until recently. But advances in...
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Women did not begin to gain any measure of equality with men until sometime in the 20th century. So it is always inspiring to read about women whose accomplishments were so outstanding that even under the most egregious pressure of misogyny they made their mark on history. One exceptional woman,...
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Here’s a story that only a gifted writer could successfully pull off. The key figures could hardly figure as principals in anyone else’s novels. The rootless young men in a depressed small town who’ve formed a would-be right-wing militia. Four Russian biological warfare...
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A review of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, by David Quammen. Tales of the often-heroic scientists, physicians, and veterinarians who worked directly with deadly emergent diseases such as AIDS, Ebola, Marburg, and H5N1, occasionally at the cost of their own lives.
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If you’re fond of reading medical thrillers, you’ve probably come across the names of the leading practitioners of the craft. Tess Gerritsen, for example, author of The Surgeon. Michael Crichton (The Andromeda Strain). Patricia Cornwell, author of the Kay Scarpetta series....
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You’ve probably never heard her name before. But if you fly frequently she may have saved your life. Her name was Roxie Laybourne, and she was of all unlikely things the world’s first forensic ornithologist. In 1960, when Eastern Air Lines Flight 375 crashed on takeoff from Logan...
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Chances are slim that you can read or understand spoken Russian, Swedish, or Hindi. But, believe it or not, English is related to all three languages—and more than 400 others. They’re all descendants of a single ancient language linguists call Proto-Indo-European. “Proto” was the...
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Chances are, you’d never come across the term “artificial intelligence” as recently as a decade ago. And even if you had, it was probably either in reading science fiction or working in the tech industry. For the rest of us, AI was far off the radar screen. Yet today, you...
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A review of Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, by Mary Roach. @@@@ (4 out of 5). Mary Roach is a very funny person. There may be no other writer on the planet, including Woody Allen, who could delve so deeply into the mechanics, the chemistry, and the psychology of sex while managing to unleash laughter out loud on just about every other page.
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For decades, as climate change has wreaked havoc ever more visibly, scientists and engineers have advanced a plethora of technological fixes. Not just switching to renewables such as solar and wind power but direct interventions into the climate through geoengineering. Examples range from the...
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On October 17, 2017, Canadian astronomer and physicist Robert Weryk at Haleakalā Observatory in Hawaii discovered a comet he named ‘Oumuamua. For a time the cigar-shaped object sparked wild theories in the popular press that it was an alien spaceship headed for Earth. Strangely, nearly a decade...
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When Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, appeared in 2000, it led to something like the viral impact about which Gladwell wrote in the book. The Tipping Point spent eight years on The New York Times Bestseller List and to date has sold...
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A quarter-century ago two widely read books by computer scientist Ray Kurzweil helped ignite a debate about humanity’s future. The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) and The Singularity Is Near (2005) envisioned a world then a half-century in the future in which homo sapiens would merge with...
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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Measuring the World was a bestseller on its original publication in Germany, where it sold 2.3 million copies. And that was in a country with a population one-quarter the size of America’s. Though they’re unfamiliar to many English-speaking readers,...
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Estimated reading time: 9 minutes Over the past fifteen years, I’ve reviewed more than 600 nonfiction books. Out of those I’ve selected ten that significantly changed my mind with new information and new insight—plus thirteen more that did so a little less. They cover a wide swath of territory,...
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As Scott Shapiro points out in the opening pages of his history of hackers and hacking, “there are at least 15 billion computers for only 8 billion people.” And most of us eight billion seem to live in constant fear that some malicious 15-year-old kid in Belarus is going to wipe out...
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Nowadays news reports and conspiracy channels are full of terrifying stories about artificial intelligence. But for decades advances in genetic engineering have generated similar horror stories. “Frankenfood.” Designer babies. GMO crops run wild. Toxic fungi. And about the time the...
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Genentech launched in 1976 to commercialize recombinant DNA technology. Ever since then, biotech has played an increasingly prominent role in the US healthcare industry. A flood of startups has explored every nook and cranny of the possibilities. Venture capitalists and medical researchers...
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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.
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The surprises start on page three. “If one of our distant ancestors hadn’t been infected by a virus hundreds of millions of years ago,” Jonathan Kennedy writes, “humans would reproduce by laying eggs.” In Pathogenesis, Professor Kennedy sketches the often-decisive...
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Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review,
with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review,
with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.