Category Archives: Science and nature books

The big idea: is tourism bad for us?

Posted on by

Wanderlust may be surging once more – but will travel really help us find what we’re looking for?

In 2019, the United Nations World Tourism Organization reported that international travel had increased to a record 1.4 billion tourist arrivals. It predicted a 3% to 4% annual increase in coming years. That didn’t happen, of course. At the end of 2021, international tourist arrivals were 72% below pre-pandemic levels with 1 billion fewer arrivals than two years earlier.

This is despite airlines’ ingenuity. During Australian lockdown, Qantas organised flights to nowhere: one left Sydney for a fly-by tour of Byron Bay and the Gold Coast, the Great Barrier Reef and Uluru; another in May last year took passengers to 43,000ft to see the blood-red supermoon.

Continue reading...

The big idea: is it time to stop talking about ‘nature versus nurture’?

Posted on by

The latest science shows that genes and environment are ​too deeply entwined to pit them against one another

When you hear people conversing in an unfamiliar language, why is it that you can’t even tell where one word ends and the next begins? If you are a native English speaker, why is it so challenging to get your mouth around a French or Hebrew “r”, which originates lower in the throat, or the “r” in Spanish or Italian, which is trilled on the tip of the tongue? Your ability to hear and make sounds, and to understand their meaning as language, is wired into your brain. How you acquire that wiring illuminates an age-old debate about human nature.

In the first few months of your life, your infant brain is bathed in all kinds of information from the world around you, through your senses. This sense data causes changes in your brain as your neurons fire in various patterns. Some collections of neurons fire together frequently, strengthening or tuning their connections and aiding learning. Others are used less and are pruned away, making room for more useful ones to form. This process of tuning and pruning is called plasticity, and it happens throughout your life, but enormously in the first few years.

Continue reading...

The big idea: how can we adapt to life with rising seas?

Posted on by

Traditional defences may fail, and migration won’t be possible for everyone. But we may yet find more creative ways to live


We have passed the point of no return: rising seas will soon directly affect hundreds of millions of people around the planet. They will indirectly affect many millions more as transport connections, water supplies and factories in low-lying areas are lost or have to be relocated. What exactly are we facing? The latest research suggests we are likely to see a rise of a metre by the year 2100. Given how much carbon dioxide is already in the air and oceans, as much as three metres may be baked in over the 200 years or so that follow. And while that might seem like a long way off, coastal groundwater levels will rise much sooner, wrecking infrastructure and causing toxic pollution well before cities such as Miami, New York and San Francisco are permanently inundated.

Where will all those people, warehouses, water treatment plants and rail lines move to, given that the interior of large land masses will have become drier? The forced migration of hundreds of millions of people will undoubtedly lead to serious international conflict over space and basic resources like fresh water. Conflict is another word for war.

Continue reading...

Britain got it wrong on Covid: long lockdown did more harm than good, says scientist

Posted on by

A new book outlines the mistakes and missteps that made UK pandemic worse

There was a distinctive moment, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, that neatly encapsulated the mistakes and confusion of Britain’s early efforts to tackle the disease, says Mark Woolhouse. At a No 10 briefing in March 2020, cabinet minister Michael Gove warned the virus did not discriminate. “Everyone is at risk,” he announced.

And nothing could be further from the truth, argues Professor Woolhouse, an expert on infectious diseases at Edinburgh University. “I am afraid Gove’s statement was simply not true,” he says. “In fact, this is a very discriminatory virus. Some people are much more at risk from it than others. People over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15.”

Continue reading...

Being a Human review – two go mad in the stone age

Posted on by

Charles Foster’s search for the meaning of human life leads him and his son to become hedgehog-eating hunter-gatherers in a Derbyshire wood

Charles Foster’s previous book, Being a Beast, is one of the oddest things I’ve read. In it, the author, a barrister, professor of law, part-time judge and former vet, attempts to live as a series of animals, often in the company of his charming and heavily dyslexic eight-year-old son, Tom. We see Foster eating worms and burrowing into the earth as a badger, swimming naked as an otter, foraging in bins as a fox. Now Foster is back with a follow-up, Being a Human, which acknowledges the charges of eccentricity and even insanity that were levelled at the last book.

Foster’s new work continues the project of its predecessor, although this time, rather than seeking to understand the brains and bodies of animals, his question is closer to home: what does it mean to be human? He begins with a contentious argument: far from being a story of progress, the history of humanity is one of disenchantment and loss, one where we have severed our links with other species and the natural world more broadly and in which we live meagre, circumscribed lives. “Few of us have any idea what sort of creatures we are,” he says and embarks on a quest to find out.

Continue reading...

David Eagleman: ‘The working of the brain resembles drug dealers in Albuquerque’

Posted on by

The neuroscientist, broadcaster and author on the evolution of the brain, the mystery of consciousnesss, and why the next generation will be much smarter than us

David Eagleman, 50, is an American neuroscientist, bestselling author and presenter of the BBC series The Brain, as well as co-founder and chief executive officer of Neosensory, which develops devices for sensory substitution. His area of speciality is brain plasticity, and that is the subject of his new book, Livewired, which examines how experience refashions the brain, and shows that it is a much more adaptable organ than previously thought.

For the past half-century or more the brain has been spoken of in terms of a computer. What are the biggest flaws with that particular model?
It’s a very seductive comparison. But in fact, what we’re looking at is three pounds of material in our skulls that is essentially a very alien kind of material to us. It doesn’t write down memories, the way we think of a computer doing it. And it is capable of figuring out its own culture and identity and making leaps into the unknown. I’m here in Silicon Valley. Everything we talk about is hardware and software. But what’s happening in the brain is what I call livewire, where you have 86bn neurons, each with 10,000 connections, and they are constantly reconfiguring every second of your life. Even by the time you get to the end of this paragraph, you’ll be a slightly different person than you were at the beginning.

Continue reading...

Neuroscientist Karl Deisseroth: ‘Coronavirus has changed us all’

Posted on by

The neuroscientist and psychiatrist explains Zoom fatigue - and why the conditions of the pandemic can induce an ‘altered state’

The coronavirus pandemic has been a disorienting kind of emergency. It is a generation-defining cataclysm, but for many of us the day-to-day reality has been lonely, even dull. It is a call to action, but the most useful thing most of us can do is stay at home. Covid-19 is a disease that attacks the lungs, but it has also worsened mental health while causing a drastic reduction in patients seeking care for depression, self-harm, eating disorders and anxiety. Whatever path the pandemic takes from here, says Karl Deisseroth, the pioneering American neuroscientist, psychiatrist, bioengineer and now author, “Coronavirus has affected us all and it has changed us all. There’s no doubt about that.”

Deisseroth, 49, is talking in the lush, squirrel-filled garden of his house in Palo Alto, northern California, where he has spent much of the pandemic looking after his four young children. But he has had much else on his mind. He has been finishing his book, Connections: A Story of Human Feeling, an investigation into the nature of human emotions. He has been meeting with psychiatric patients over Zoom as well as putting in night shifts as an emergency hospital psychiatrist. And he has fitted all of this around his day job, which is using tiny fibre-optic cables to fire lasers into the brains of mice that he has infected with cells from light-sensitive algae and then observing what happens, millisecond by millisecond, when he turns individual neurons on or off.

Continue reading...

Microsoft’s Kate Crawford: ‘AI is neither artificial nor intelligent’

Posted on by

The AI researcher on how natural resources and human labour drive machine learning and the regressive stereotypes that are baked into its algorithms

Kate Crawford studies the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She is a research professor of communication and science and technology studies at the University of Southern California and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research. Her new book, Atlas of AI, looks at what it takes to make AI and what’s at stake as it reshapes our world.

You’ve written a book critical of AI but you work for a company that is among the leaders in its deployment. How do you square that circle?
I work in the research wing of Microsoft, which is a distinct organisation, separate from product development. Unusually, over its 30-year history, it has hired social scientists to look critically at how technologies are being built. Being on the inside, we are often able to see downsides early before systems are widely deployed. My book did not go through any pre-publication review – Microsoft Research does not require that – and my lab leaders support asking hard questions, even if the answers involve a critical assessment of current technological practices.

Continue reading...

Branching out: is communication possible between trees and people?

Posted on by

Trees communicate with each other, store memories and respond to attacks. They have a profoundly positive effect on our emotions … but can we know how they feel about us?

Why can’t we communicate with trees the same way we communicate with, say, elephants? Both live in social groups and look after not only their young but also their elders. That famous elephant memory is also found in trees, and both communicate in languages that we didn’t even recognise at first. Trees communicate through their interconnected root systems, and elephants communicate using low-frequency rumbling below the range at which we can hear. We get a feeling of wellbeing when we run our fingers over the rough skin of both creatures, and what we would love above all is to get a reaction from them.

Is such communication possible between people and trees? First we have to take a closer look at what we mean by “communicate”. It is not enough that we consciously or subconsciously eavesdrop, so to speak, on the scents trees use to communicate among themselves. We have a physical reaction when we breathe them in, but for communication to happen, the trees also need to react to our signals.

Continue reading...

Daniel Kahneman: ‘Clearly AI is going to win. How people are going to adjust is a fascinating problem’

Posted on by

The Nobel-winning psychologist on applying his ideas to organisations, why we’re not equipped to grasp the spread of a virus, and the massive disruption that’s just round the corner

Daniel Kahneman, 87, was awarded the Nobel prize in economics in 2002 for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making. His first book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, a worldwide bestseller, set out his revolutionary ideas about human error and bias and how those traits might be recognised and mitigated. A new book, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, written with Olivier Sibony and Cass R Sunstein, applies those ideas to organisations. This interview took place last week by Zoom with Kahneman at his home in New York.

I guess the pandemic is quite a good place to start. In one way it has been the biggest ever hour-by-hour experiment in global political decision-making. Do you think it’s a watershed moment in the understanding that we need to “listen to science”?
Yes and no, because clearly, not listening to science is bad. On the other hand, it took science quite a while to get its act together.

Continue reading...

How to Love Animals by Henry Mance review – the case against modern farming

Posted on by

Turning vegan ... a series of investigations, presented with humour and humility, into our contradictory relationships with pets, livestock and wildlife

While researching this book, Henry Mance worked briefly in an abattoir, or “a disassembly line”, as he aptly terms it. As he watched sheep being stunned, their throats slit and then hung up, still twitching, from metal hooks on a motorised track, Mance asked himself: “How did humans come to this?”

His book is an attempt to answer that question, as well as an exploration of how our attitudes to pets, livestock and wild animals have changed through history: “I wanted to know whether my love for animals was reflected in how I behaved, or whether – like my love for arthouse films – it was mainly theoretical.”

Continue reading...

Secrets of a tree whisperer: ‘They get along, they listen – they’re attuned’

Posted on by

Suzanne Simard revolutionised the way we think about plants and fungi with the discovery of the woodwide web. The ecologist’s new book shares the wisdom of a life of listening to the forest

When Suzanne Simard made her extraordinary discovery – that trees could communicate and cooperate through subterranean networks of fungi – the scientific establishment underreacted. Even though her doctoral research was published in the Nature journal in 1997 – a coup for any scientist – the finding that trees are more altruistic than competitive was dismissed by many as if it were the delusion of an anthropomorphising hippy.

Today, at 60, she is professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia and her research of more than three decades as a “forest detective” is recognised worldwide. In her new book, Finding the Mother Tree – a scientific memoir as gripping as any HBO drama series – she wants it understood that her work has been no brief encounter: “I want people to know that what I’ve discovered has been about my whole life.” Her moment has come: research into forest ecosystems and mycorrhizal networks (those built of connections between plants and fungi) is now mainstream and there is a hunger for books related to the subject: Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees and Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life – about the hidden life of fungi – extend her thinking about the “woodwide web”, while the heroine of Richard Powers’s Pulitzer prize-winning 2018 novel The Overstory is said to have been inspired by Simard.

Continue reading...

Richard Dawkins loses ‘humanist of the year’ title over trans comments

Posted on by

American Humanist Association criticises academic for comments about identity using ‘the guise of scientific discourse’, and withdraws its 1996 honour

The American Humanist Association has withdrawn its humanist of the year award from Richard Dawkins, 25 years after he received the honour, criticising the academic and author for “demean[ing] marginalised groups” using “the guise of scientific discourse”.

The AHA honoured Dawkins, whose books include The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion, in 1996 for his “significant contributions” in communicating scientific concepts to the public. On Monday, it announced that it was withdrawing the award, referring to a tweet sent by Dawkins earlier this month, in which he compared trans people to Rachel Dolezal, the civil rights activist who posed as a black woman for years.

Continue reading...

‘It is the question of the century’: will tech solve the climate crisis – or make it worse?

Posted on by

Robots on coral reefs, vast barriers to hold back the glaciers, simulated volcanic eruptions to offset global heating ... Can technology repair the mess we have made? Elizabeth Kolbert is not convinced

Elizabeth Kolbert’s favourite movie is the end-of-the-world comedy Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. For those who need a quick recap, this cold war film features a deranged US air force general who orders a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union using weapons developed by a mad Nazi scientist played by Peter Sellers. A last-minute glitch almost forestalls an apocalyptic war, but a gung-ho B-52 pilot has other ideas. He opens the bomb doors and mounts the H-bomb as if it were a horse, waving his hat and whooping as he rides the missile towards the world’s oblivion. No heroism could be more misguided. No movie could end with a blunter message: how on Earth can we humans trust ourselves with planet-altering technology?

The same absurdly serious question lies at the heart of Kolbert’s new book, Under a White Sky. The Sixth Extinction, her previous book, won a Pulitzer prize for its investigation into how mankind has devastated the natural world. Now she has widened her gaze to whether we can remedy this with ingenious technological fixes – or make things worse. “There was definitely a question left hanging: now we have become such a dominant force on planet Earth, and created so many problems through our intervention, what happens next?”, she says.

Continue reading...

‘The Earth could hear itself think’: how birdsong became the sound of lockdown

Posted on by

When the pandemic hit, the song of birds offered joy and hope. The author of a new book recalls that glittering spring and explains the science behind bird calls and how to identify them

It’s six in the morning and still dark, 24 March 2020. I wake early and, knowing the children will soon be up, decide to steal half an hour’s solitude in the park. From the dense latticework of trees and shrubs that clothe the wooded slope comes a constant scuttling through dead leaves. The darkness is awake and vigilant; there’s the warning tik-tik of an invisible robin from the bushes, and then the next second it appears on the path. Each individual movement of the bird, each wing-flick and pivot, is brisk and definite yet the overall impression is one of nervousness and indecision. It leaps round once more on the spot, then flits back into the darkness.

From close by comes a blast of song from a wren. Its harsh trill is like coarse twine zipping over a flywheel. The air is cool, not cold, and smells deliciously of earth and moss. There’s a sudden disturbance from the deeper shade, and a blackbird comes careering out with a mad clatter and pauses, alert, on the great arm of a beech tree. It’s evidently agitated. It flicks about the bough, dipping then raising its wings, and tilting its head all the while in response to something I can’t sense. After a few seconds of this twitching the bird seems to experience some sort of inner resolution, and, as the first beam of grey light wakes the colours of the tree, it raises its head and lets out a quiet phrase of song. Spring has arrived.

Continue reading...

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates; The New Climate War by Michael E Mann – review

Posted on by

Two eminent voices on the climate crisis present clear strategies for tackling emissions, deniers and doomsayers

President Joe Biden has promised a new era of American leadership on global climate action, after four years of unscientific denial and misinformation under Donald Trump. Two important new books by prominent American authors, both written before the result of the presidential election was known, should help to capitalise on the new spirit of cautious optimism by laying out bold but well-argued plans for accelerating action against climate change.

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates presents a compelling explanation of how the world can stop global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions effectively to zero. Gates and his wife, Melinda, are well known for their foundation’s tremendous work on improving health and tackling disease around the world, particularly in poor countries. It is this concern for the most vulnerable people on the planet that has meant Gates has occasionally appeared equivocal about climate and energy policies that he thought could undermine the fight against poverty and illness. However, this book lays out forcefully his understanding that the impact of climate change poses a far bigger threat to lives and livelihoods in developing countries – it is thwarting efforts to raise living standards because poor people, in every country, are the most at risk from droughts, floods and heatwaves.

Continue reading...

Camilla Pang: ‘You have to acknowledge the hilarity of what it is to be human’

Posted on by

Prize-winning author Camilla Pang talks about her autism and ADHD diagnoses and her desire to challenge myths about neurodiversity

This month Camilla Pang won the Royal Society book prize for her debut, Explaining Humans: What Science Can Teach Us about Life, Love and Relationships. She has a PhD in bioinformatics from UCL and works as a postdoctoral researcher. Dr Pang was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at the age of eight and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder at 26.

Why did you decide to write this book?
I inadvertently wrote the book in my PhD thesis on bioinformatics, and my supervisor, bless her, said this is great, but it doesn’t belong here. One of the things people on the autistic spectrum do is organise our world in a way that makes sense to us using objects and sequences. For me, those sequences involved looking at the fundamentals of matter, and what that meant in terms of science. Even if I was just kicking a pile of leaves, I would do it repetitively in order to find the laws about how things react, and how they can be predicted. So from kicking leaves to Post-it notes to eventually reading about science, I constructed a map to navigate the world. Over time, it became bigger and notebooks piled up, so I ended up with a piece of work that I thought might be useful to someone else. And that’s the ultimate goal, isn’t it? You want to connect with people.

Continue reading...

Thirty books to help us understand the world in 2020

Posted on by

The climate crisis, gender, populism, big tech, pandemics, race… our experts recommend titles to illuminate the issues of the day

A distinguished climatologist and geophysicist, Michael Mann is director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of more than 200 peer-reviewed and edited publications tagias well as four books, including 2012’s The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars and his forthcoming The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet, due out in January 2021 (Public Affairs Books).

Continue reading...

Yuval Noah Harari: ‘Will coronavirus change our attitudes to death? Quite the opposite’

Posted on by

Will the coronavirus pandemic return us to more traditional and accepting, attitudes towards dying – or reinforce our attempts to prolong life?

The modern world has been shaped by the belief that humans can outsmart and defeat death. That was a revolutionary new attitude. For most of history, humans meekly submitted to death. Up to the late modern age, most religions and ideologies saw death not only as our inevitable fate, but as the main source of meaning in life. The most important events of human existence happened after you exhaled your last breath. Only then did you come to learn the true secrets of life. Only then did you gain eternal salvation, or suffer everlasting damnation. In a world without death – and therefore without heaven, hell or reincarnation – religions such as Christianity, Islam and Hinduism would have made no sense. For most of history the best human minds were busy giving meaning to death, not trying to defeat it.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the Bible, the Qur’an, the Vedas, and countless other sacred books and tales patiently explained to distressed humans that we die because God decreed it, or the Cosmos, or Mother Nature, and we had better accept that destiny with humility and grace. Perhaps someday God would abolish death through a grand metaphysical gesture such as Christ’s second coming. But orchestrating such cataclysms was clearly above the pay grade of flesh-and-blood humans.

Continue reading...