Popular Science Archives - Page 2 of 3

The Man Who Wasn’t There

Reveals the mind boggling neuroscience connecting brain, body, mind, and society, by examining a range of brain disorders, in the tradition of Oliver Sacks.

Identifying what makes up the nature of the human mind has long been neuroscience’s greatest challenge – a mystery perhaps never to be fully understood. Award-winning author and master of science journalism Anil Ananthaswamy smartly explores the concept of self by way of several mental conditions that alter patients’ identities, showing how we learn a lot about being human from people with a fragmented or altered sense of self.

He travels the world to meet those who suffer from “maladies of the self” interviewing patients, psychiatrists, philosophers and neuroscientists along the way. He charts how the self is affected by Asperger’s, autism, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, schizophrenia, among many other mental conditions, revealing how the brain constructs our sense of self. Each chapter is anchored with stories of people who experience themselves differently from the norm.

The Man Who Wasn’t There is a magical mystery tour of scientific analysis and philosophical pondering, now utterly transformed by recent advances in cutting-edge neuroscience.

Ingredients

Cheese puffs. Coffee. Sunscreen. Vapes. Hand sanitiser. George Zaidan reveals the weird science behind everyday items that may or may not kill you, depending on whom you ask.

If you want easy answers, this book is not for you. But if you’re curious which health studies to trust, what dense scientific jargon really means, and how to make better choices when it comes to food and health – dive right in!

Zaidan makes chemistry more fun than potions class as he reveals exactly what science can (and can’t) tell us about the packaged ingredients we buy in the supermarket. He demystifies the ingredients of life and death – and explains how we know whether something is good or bad for you – in exquisite, hilarious detail at breakneck speed.

How Not to be a Doctor

The essential book on how not to be a doctor – and how to be a better one.

Drawn from his popular medical columns over the years, John Launer shares fifty of his best-loved essays, covering topics from essentials skills they don’t teach you in medical school to his poignant account of being a patient himself as he received treatment for a life-threatening illness. Taken together, the stories make the case that being a doctor should mean drawing on every aspect of yourself, your interests and your experiences no matter how remote they seem from the medical task at hand.

How Not to Be a Doctor combines humour, candour and the human touch to inform and entertain readers on both ends of the stethoscope.

The Secret Life of Bones

Bone is a marvel, an adaptable and resilient building material developed over 500 million years of evolutionary history. It has manifested itself in wings, sails, horns, armour, and an even greater array of appendages since the time of its origin. In dinosaur fossils, skeletons are biological time capsules that tell us of lives we’ll never see in the flesh. Inherited from a common fishy ancestor, it is the stuff that binds all of us vertebrates together into one great family. Swim, slither, stomp, fly, dig, run – all are expressions of what bones make possible. But that’s hardly all.

In The Secret Life of Bones, Brian Switek frames the history of our species through the importance of bone from instruments and jewellery, to objects of worship and conquest from the origins of religion through the genesis of science and up through this very day. While bone itself can reveal our individual stories, the truth very much depends on who’s telling it. Our skeletons are as embedded in our culture as they are in our bodies. Switek, an enthusiastic osteological raconteur, cuts through biology, history, and culture to understand the meaning of what’s inside us and what our bones tell us about who we are, where we came from and the legacies we leave behind.

Every Breath You Take

A fascinating journey through the atmosphere that will leave you breathless.

With seven million early deaths a year linked to air pollution, air quality is headline news around the world. But how do we measure air pollution and what on earth is an odour panel? Why are property prices higher upwind of cities? Should we buy, hold on to, or avoid a diesel car? And will our grandchildren inherit an atmosphere worth breathing?

From the atmosphere on distant planets to the stuff that gets into your lungs, from holes in the ozone layer to lazy and disappearing gases, air quality specialist and full-time breather Dr Mark Broomfield combines scientific evidence with personal stories and advice on what you can do to improve air quality, giving you the low-down on what’s up high.

One Kiss or Two?

Every encounter begins with a greeting. Be it a quick ‘Hello!’ or the somewhat longer and gracious ‘Sula manchwanta galunga omugobe!’ shaking hands or shaking, well, rather more private parts of our anatomy, we have been doing it many times daily for thousands of years. It should be the most straightforward thing in the world, but this apparently simple act is fraught with complications, leading to awkward misunderstandings and occasionally even outright violence.

In the illuminating and entertaining One Kiss or Two? Andy Scott goes down the rabbit hole to take a closer look at what greetings are all about. In looking at how they have developed, he discovers a kaleidoscopic world of etiquette, body-language, evolution, neuroscience, anthropology and history. Through in-depth research and his personal experiences, and with the help of experts, Scott takes us on a captivating journey through a subject far richer than we might have expected.

A Very Short Tour of the Mind

Leading us through cognitive theory, neuroscience and Darwinian evolution with his trademark wit and wisdom, Michael Corballis explains what we know and don’t know about our minds. How do we know if we’re really the top dogs in brain power? Does our creativity stem solely from the right brain? From language to standing upright, composing music to lying, he uncovers our most common misconceptions and the fascinating habits and abilities that make us human.

Cosmosapiens

A Daily Telegraph and TLS Book of the Year

‘An audacious tour of all that science can teach us’ Edward O. Wilson

Specialist scientific fields are developing at incredibly swift speeds, but what can they really tell us about how the universe began and how humans evolved to play such a dominant role on Earth? John Hands’s extraordinarily ambitious quest brings together our scientific knowledge and evaluates the theories and evidence about the origin and evolution of matter, life, consciousness, and humankind.

Cosmosapiens provides the most comprehensive account yet of current ideas such as cosmic inflation, dark energy, the selfish gene, and neurogenetic determinism. In clear and accessible language, Hands differentiates the firmly established from the speculative and examines the claims of various fields such as string theory to approach a unified theory of everything. In doing so he challenges the orthodox consensus in those branches of cosmology, biology, and neuroscience that have ossified into dogma. His striking analysis reveals underlying patterns of cooperation, complexification, and convergence that lead to the unique emergence in humans of a self-reflective consciousness that enables us to determine our future evolution. This groundbreaking book is destined to become a classic of scientific thinking.

Gravity

How did we come to understand the force that binds the universe together? In Gravity, Brian Clegg offers a succinct history of gravity from the perspectives of great thinkers including Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, Einstein and today’s leading scientists. He explores theories of general relativity, quantum mechanics and our attempts to link the two, as well as time travel, black holes, string theory and why gravity only works at the speed of light.

Gravity is anything but simple, but Brian Clegg has written the most accessible book yet on the subject – the perfect introduction to a complicated theory.

Quantum Enigma

Everyone knows that sub-atomic particles have some very strange qualities. Light sometimes behaves like a particle, sometimes like a wave. Objects separated by vast distances interact faster than the speed of light – what Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance’. Most strangely, the behaviour of objects somehow seems be determined in retrospect, depending on what the observer is looking for. In this ground-breaking work the authors show how these quantum properties are being observed in larger and larger objects. They set out carefully and cautiously exactly what quantum theory might mean for us.

Quantum physics presents an unanswerable challenge to our common sense understanding of the universe, and the final explanation might not come from physics at all, but from the equally strange world of cognitive neuro-science – the mysteries of mind and matter might be one and the same.

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