You Matter review: Delia Smith’s unlikely recipe for saving the world
We now know what Delia Smith has been doing since she published her last cookery book in 2009. She has been reading science and philosophy – Teilhard…
The woman who uncovered the secrets of the ‘Wood-Wide Web’
In August 1997, a smart sub-editor on the journal Nature coined the phrase “the wood-wide web” to describe the astounding subterranean fungal networks uncovered by a young…
Control by Adam Rutherford review: a fizzy history of eugenics – and what science still can’t do
Recently, a committee was established to investigate what nefarious links with empire and colonialism might lurk in the past of Imperial College, London (there was already a…
Ben Whishaw interview: Me, perform a caesarean? You must be joking
What would make you want to watch a series whose title sounds like a threat? Why would you choose to settle down to a TV drama that,…
Tiny elephants and Terrible Moon-Rats: how the Earth looked millions of years ago
Earlier books have painted tableaux of life in other epochs, but few ever got the scale right. Thomas Halliday’s visions are monstrous. Halliday is a palaeoecologist. Palaeoecology…
Insulin by Kersten T Hall, review: from jabbing to back-stabbing
A century ago, a group of pioneering scientists first isolated the hormone insulin, in the hope of using it to treat diabetes. They sold their patents on…
New year, new you – can you learn how to concentrate again?
Drop a frog into boiling water, and it will leap from the pot. Drop it into tepid water that is brought slowly to the boil, and the…
The best new science books to buy for Christmas 2021
In July, Richard Branson went up to the edge of space in a rocket plane, just pipping Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, who rose in his penis-shaped spacecraft…
Anti-grav underwear and ‘moon towers’: the strange world of ‘extinct’ objects
Yet the arc lamp was a frightening level of illumination for some humans (and animals) compared with gas-lights, which produced a glow equivalent to 16 candles. Such…