Tag: science

Review – The Immune Mind

Posted February 18, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The Immune Mind

The Immune Mind

by Monty Lyman

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 233
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Delving into the recent discovery of the brain's immune system, Dr Monty Lyman reveals the extraordinary implications for our physical and mental health.

Up until the last ten years, we have misunderstood a fundamental aspect of human health. Although the brain and the body have always been viewed as separate entities – treated in separate hospitals – science now shows that they are intimately linked. Startlingly, we now know that our immune system is in constant communication with our brain and can directly alter our mental health.

This has opened up a new frontier in medicine. Could inflammation cause depression, and arthritis drugs cure it? Can gut microbes shape your behaviour through the vagus nerve? Can something as simple as brushing your teeth properly reduce your risk of dementia? Could childhood infections lie behind neurological and psychiatric disorders such as tics and OCD?

In The Immune Mind, Dr Monty Lyman explores the fascinating connection between the mind, immune system and microbiome, offering practical advice on how to stay healthy. A specialist in the cutting-edge field of immunopsychiatry, Lyman argues that we need to change the way we treat disease and the way we see ourselves. For the first time, we have a new approach to medicine that treats the whole human being.

I adored the majority of Dr Monty Lyman’s The Immune Mind, but the final section lets it down. For most of the book he’s talking about fascinating research, which is pretty well sourced and matches what I can easily fact check (in part because I can always ask my mother’s opinion of What’s Going On With Schizophrenia research, with which she’s been involved for years as a psychiatrist and investigator).

That part was fascinating and exciting: I can report that as recently as right now, infectious diseases and immunology classes are still teaching that the brain is an immune-privileged site where no immune reactions can occur — at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, no less. What he says on that front makes absolute sense, and my knowledge agrees  with what he says as far as my it goes (BSc in natural sciences, near completion of MSc in infectious diseases, general voracious curiosity).

Buuut the chapters about how improving your health felt pasted on, like someone told him that you can’t finish the book on the point that we may understand the mechanisms behind some diseases yet, but you can’t get treated for them because it’s still experimental. It’s basically regurgitating exactly the same advice you find elsewhere, and the authorities he quotes have been… questioned. (See Alexey Guzey’s essay, which at the very least asks some pertinent questions.)

So that was a bit disappointing, because the rest of the book was pretty fresh and exciting.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Sing Like Fish

Posted February 12, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – Sing Like Fish

Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water

by Amorina Kingdon

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 324
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

A captivating exploration of how underwater animals tap into sound to survive, and a clarion call for humans to address the ways we invade these critical soundscapes—from an award-winning science writer

For centuries, humans ignored sound in the “silent world” of the ocean, assuming that what we couldn’t perceive, didn’t exist. But we couldn’t have been more wrong. Marine scientists now have the technology to record and study the complex interplay of the myriad sounds in the sea. Finally, we can trace how sounds travel with the currents, bounce from the seafloor and surface, bend with the temperature and even saltiness; how sounds help marine life survive; and how human noise can transform entire marine ecosystems.

In Sing Like Fish, award-winning science journalist Amorina Kingdon synthesizes historical discoveries with the latest scientific research in a clear and compelling portrait of this sonic undersea world. From plainfin midshipman fish, whose swim-bladder drumming is loud enough to keep houseboat-dwellers awake, to the syntax of whalesong; from the deafening crackle of snapping shrimp, to the seismic resonance of underwater earthquakes and volcanoes; sound plays a vital role in feeding, mating, parenting, navigating, and warning—even in animals that we never suspected of acoustic ability.

Meanwhile, we jump in our motorboats and cruise ships, oblivious to the impact below us. Our lifestyle is fueled by oil in growling tankers and furnished by goods that travel in massive container ships. Our seas echo with human-made sound, but we are just learning of the repercussions of anthropogenic noise on the marine world’s delicate acoustic ecosystems—masking mating calls, chasing animals from their food, and even wounding creatures, from plankton to lobsters.

Amorina Kingdon’s Sing Like Fish is all about the world of sound underwater. At one point humans dubbed it stuff like “the silent kingdom” and stuff like that because we can’t hear well underwater, but in fact lots of fish, marine invertebrates and marine mammals make noises — a lot of them! Whalesong is well known now, but it isn’t the only thing. There are fish that drum their swim bladder to attract a mate, fish who fart (literally expel air from their anuses) to communicate, and of course, use sound to navigate.

Unsurprisingly, pretty much any purpose for sound you can imagine from our lives is also served in the ocean, perhaps through some slightly different physics.

And of course the sounds we make are impacting the ocean. Sometimes that means our installations in the seabed are actually attracting creatures, and sometimes it means that the sounds are actively snapping the cilia involved in hearing and leading to deafened, unbalanced lobsters whose lives are drastically shortened by their injuries.

Kingdon discusses all of this and how we can ameliorate some of it, highlighting things we need to pay attention to for the health of the planet. Like me, you probably didn’t know that sound can harm plankton, but… yep, it can.

Mostly though it’s full of wonder about this world of sound we don’t always understand or know how to investigate. I found it really interesting.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – What An Owl Knows

Posted February 7, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – What An Owl Knows

What An Owl Knows

by Jennifer Ackerman

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 333
Synopsis:

'And if anyone knows anything about anything...it's Owl who knows something about something.' Winnie-the-Pooh, A. A. Milne

From prehistoric cave paintings to the prints and etchings of Picasso, owls have captivated and inspired us for millennia. Whether they appear as ancient Athenian symbols of wisdom, ghostly harbingers of death, or the cuddly sidekicks of Harry Potter and Winnie the Pooh, these birds have continued to fascinate and disturb us in equal measure.

Through revelatory new behavioural research, Jennifer Ackerman provides an intimate glimpse into these magnificent creatures' lives. From the evolutionary quirks behind their silent flight and rotating heads, to their romantic relationships and parenting styles, What an Owl Knows brings the rich natural history of owls to life. Deftly weaving together science and art, Ackerman journeys into the owl's moonlit world and asks: what is it about these birds that so enthrals us?

What an Owl Knows, by Jennifer Ackerman, is a fun exploration of owls as a species, how they’re adapted for what they do, how they’re adapting to changes made by humans, etc. There’s a certain amount of “oh wow I touched a bird” personal stuff, and canned biographies of people who’ve interacted with owls for various reasons, but also plenty of facts and discussion thereof.

I learned some fascinating things, e.g. the fact that some owl species will adopt the owlets of other pairs, if the owlet gets into their nest or somehow interacts with them demanding food — even if they don’t currently have owlets of their own. And the fact that some screech owls grab blind snakes (they’re tiny) and use them as nest cleaners, resulting in healthier, quicker-growing owlets.

It also contradicts some other stuff I was reading lately about owls being stupid, pointing out that they have small, densely packed neurons, as some other birds do — allowing a high degree of intelligence, even if their kind of intelligence isn’t as readily measured as that of primates or crows.

Overall, enjoyable and informative, if sometimes a bit padded with filler-statements about the majesticness of owls (you can only take it so often, even when it’s true).

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Penguins and Other Sea Birds

Posted January 27, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Penguins and Other Sea Birds

Penguins and Other Sea Birds

by Matt Sewell

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 128
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Description
Did you know...

The GalĂĄpagos Penguin's speckled markings make each of them as unique as a snowflake?
The Emperor Penguin weighs the same as a Labrador retriever?
The Adélie Penguin takes its name from the sweetheart of a Napoleonic naval captain turned explorer?

From tiny fairy penguins to the regal emperor penguin, street artist and ornithologist, Matt Sewell, illustrates one of the world’s favourite birds in this follow-up to Owls, Our Garden Birds, Our Songbirds and Our Woodland Birds.

I think the major reason to pick up Matt Sewell’s Penguins and Other Sea Birds is really for the art: though it does contain facts about each bird, each bird only gets a short paragraph. There is some neat info included, like the fact that certain birds (male crested auklets, if you’re curious) smell uncannily like tangerines — but it’s mostly just titbits.

The art is cute, though sometimes I think he does choose to emphasise odd features of the animals, probably to give the images more character. So it’s not a great resource for recognising the birds that you might be likely to be able to spot for yourself in the wild.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Selfish Genes to Social Beings

Posted January 23, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment

Review – Selfish Genes to Social Beings

Selfish Genes to Social Beings: A Cooperative History of Life

by Jonathan Silvertown

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 256
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

For all the "selfishness" of genes, they team up to survive. Is the history of life in fact a story of cooperation?

Amid the violence and brutality that dominates the news, it's hard to think of ourselves as team players. But cooperation, Jonathan Silvertown argues, is a fundamental part of our make-up, and deeply woven into the whole four-billion-year history of life. Starting with human society, Silvertown digs deeper, to show how cooperation is key to the cells forming our organs, to symbiosis between organisms, to genes that band together, to the dawn of life itself. Cooperation has enabled life to thrive and become complex. Without it, life would never have begun.

I wasn’t a big fan of Jonathan Silvertown’s Selfish Genes to Social Beings. Ultimately, it’s as the subtitle (“A Cooperative History of Life”) suggests, rather than focusing on the question of how cooperation arises from “selfish” genes, or trying to dissect the evolution of altruism. It’s probably best read keeping that in mind.

Even so, I found it slow, and sometimes strangely organised. It works back through time… more or less. Sometimes it’s more like it’s working back through scale, finding fresh simulated surprise as smaller and smaller living things turn out to cooperate (a fact which should not be a surprise, since we know our own individual genes must cooperate). Sometimes the examples didn’t really contribute to a narrative, and I found the pop-culture references (like references to songs) cringey, like Silvertown was trying to add readability through pasting in some song lyrics.

Whiiiich is the other problem: I couldn’t put my finger on why, exactly, but I constantly found my attention wandering before the end of a paragraph — or sometimes, the end of a sentence. It’s not that I can’t focus on this kind of thing, because I love reading non-fiction. It’s also not that I know it all already (though I did), because I can happily read popular science about my pet subjects even when it contains absolutely nothing new. What’s required is usually just enthusiasm and a will to put across one’s own point of view.

I did find some of his later chapters more interesting, since his discussion of the RNA World hypothesis went deeper into it than my previous reading, but I still found this a very slow read and, ultimately, not for me. The stuff about kin selection has been discussed ad nauseam in many other books, and I didn’t feel that anything particularly fresh was added to the discussion.

Rating: 2/5

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Review – Space Rover

Posted January 9, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Space Rover

Space Rover

by Stewart Lawrence Sinclair

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 160
Series: Object Lessons
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

In 1971, the first lunar rover arrived on the moon. The design became an icon of American ingenuity and the adventurous spirit many equated with the space race. The lunar roving vehicles (LRVs) would be the first and last manned rovers to date, but they provided a vision of humanity's space-faring future: astronauts roaming the moon like space cowboys.

Fifty years later, that vision feels like a nostalgic fantasy, but the LRV's legacy would pave the way for Mars rovers like Sojourner, Curiosity and Perseverance, who afforded humanity an intimate portrait of our most tantalizingly (potentially) colonizable neighbor. Other rovers have made accessible the world's deepest caves and most remote tundra, extending our exploratory range without risking lives. Still others have been utilized for search and rescue missions or in clean up operations after disasters such as Chernobyl.

For all these achievements, rovers embody not just our potential, but our limits. Examining rovers as they wander our terrestrial and celestial boundaries, we might better comprehend our place, and fate, in this universe.

The Object Lessons series hasn’t always lived up to my hopes, with books that seem more like autobiographies than examinations of a type of object. Stewart Lawrence Sinclair’s Space Rover blends the two: there are definitely highly personal chapters, talking about the people who influenced him, and surprising connections to the space program and the space rovers, but he does also discuss the process of creating the rovers, the pitfalls, and the work they’ve done.

He also tries to ask — though not really at very much depth — why we create these rovers, what they do for us, and what they mean to us. I think the answers are complicated and he just touches on a few, rather than being exhaustive. In a way, he only briefly touches on how personally involved we get with the rovers, except that the book itself as a whole is a symptom of that fascination.

Personally, I think that one reason we identify so much with the rovers is that they can be our eyes and hands in a place we could not survive. It’s easy to identify with being the eye behind the camera: more than an astronaut can (having a personality, politics, opinions, needs), a rover can get out of its own way and personify all of us.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Lunar

Posted January 1, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Lunar

Lunar: A History of the Moon in Myths, Maps and Matter

by Matthew Shindell

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 256
Rating: five-stars
Synopsis:

A beautiful showcase of hand-drawn geological charts of the Moon, combined with a retelling of the symbolic and mythical associations of Earth’s satellite.

President Kennedy’s rousing ‘We will go to the Moon’ speech on 25 May 1961 set Project Apollo in motion and spurred on scientists at the US Geological Survey in their efforts to carry out geologic mapping of the Moon. Over the next 11 years a team of 22 created 44 superb charts – one for each named quadrangle on the Earthside of the Moon.

In Lunar, for the first time, you can see every beautifully hand-drawn and coloured chart accompanied by expert analysis and interpretation by Smithsonian science curator Matthew Shindell. Long a source of wonder, fascination and symbolic significance, the Moon was crucial to prehistoric man in their creation of a calendar; it played a key role in ancient creator myths and astrology; and if has often been associated with madness. Every mythical and cultural association of the Moon throughout history is explored in this sumptuous volume, culminating in the 1969 Moon landing, which heralded the beginning of a whole new scientific journey.

Lunar, edited by Matthew Shindell, is a heck of a chunky book that I was lucky enough to borrow (and immediately decided my mother, a lunar nerd, needed to have). It’s full of geological charts of the moon, with commentary on each quadrant, punctuated by short essays on a range of lunar topics — the moon in silent film, the moon in fiction, women and the space programme, ancient Egypt and their understanding of the moon, and so on. There are various images included of relevant stuff like posters for movies about the moon, artefacts, etc.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t absorb half of it, and I’ll have to get another look at it at some point, especially because I’m very slow to parse visual information and I’m positive I missed things.

I suspect it’s most of interest to the real space nerds, given the expense, but if you get a chance to look through it, you should take a look just to wonder at what we’ve achieved.

Rating: 5/5

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Review – The Secret Life of the Owl

Posted November 15, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The Secret Life of the Owl

The Secret Life of the Owl

by John Lewis-Stempel

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 88
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

‘Dusk is filling the valley. It is the time of the gloaming, the owl-light.
Out in the wood, the resident tawny has started calling, Hoo-hoo-hoo-h-o-o-o.’

There is something about owls. They feature in every major culture from the Stone Age onwards. They are creatures of the night, and thus of magic. They are the birds of ill-tidings, the avian messengers from the Other Side. But owls – with the sapient flatness of their faces, their big, round eyes, their paternal expressions – are also reassuringly familiar. We see them as wise, like Athena’s owl, and loyal, like Harry Potter's Hedwig. Human-like, in other words. No other species has so captivated us.

In The Secret Life of the Owl, John Lewis-Stempel explores the legends and history of the owl. And in vivid, lyrical prose, he celebrates all the realities of this magnificent creature, whose natural powers are as fantastic as any myth.

John Lewis-Stempel’s The Secret Life of the Owl is a bit of a miscellany covering all things owl, mostly focused on owls in the UK. It’s a quick read, less than 90 pages, and includes profiles of the owls that live in or visit the UK, and a bit of an examination of how owls fit into our landscape — both how we react to them, and how other British birds react to them. As such, there are a few poems quoted throughout, in and amongst the facts and figures, and a couple of black-and-white illustrations.

It did feel a little disorganised to me, like Lewis-Stempel was just pouring out anything he could think of about owls. The enthusiasm is endearing, as is the description of his personal fascination with owls, and his interactions with them. Even though it felt a bit badly organised, it was in the way that information can be disorganised when someone is passionately telling you about a pet topic, which I didn’t really mind.

I don’t feel like I knew a lot about owls before reading, other than some vague bits that filter through popular culture, plus a lifetime of living with intelligent people who watch and discuss documentaries and read this kind of book. I learned a few new things from this book, though I don’t know how much I’ll retain — either way, it was fun.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Overleaf

Posted November 12, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Overleaf

Overleaf: An Album of British Trees

by Susan Ogilvy, Richard Ogilvy

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 176
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Leaves live a thankless life. They go unnoticed while providing shade and cleaning the air, and are often the subject of our groans and grumbles in the fall while being raked away. Outside of brief odes to colorful autumn foliage, their quiet, everyday beauty is usually unsung.

Overleaf is an extraordinary celebration of that most obvious and overlooked part of a tree. It features over seventy brilliantly rendered studies of the leaves of thirty-seven tree species found across North America and Europe. Susan Ogilvy's paintings are lovely and uncluttered, resembling real-life pressings captured between the pages. The artwork is accompanied by Richard Ogilvy's thought-provoking text, which provides a vignette for each tree that explores its particular relationship with the environment, its style of growth, the history and mythology surrounding it, and the uses that birds, insects, and humans make of it. He reflects on the detailed complexity of our woodlands and forests and thoughtfully explores our place among them. Just as individual leaves create a cohesive shade, the range of these portraits provides a compelling vision of our relationship with trees. Overleaf is a thoughtful collection that will have readers taking a second look at the world above.

Overleaf is a fascinating collaboration between Susan Ogilvy, a botanical painter, and her brother-in-law, a forester. Each tree is illustrated by its leaf, showing the top side of the leaf on one page and then on the reverse side, the back of the leaf. They seem to be roughly to scale, and beautifully detailed; they aren’t the platonic ideal of each leaf, either, but a realistic one, probably based on a specific leaf, showing details of blight, galls and insect companions.

Richard’s contribution is the text, which for each tree is a handful of paragraphs talking about where the trees are found, their functions in the landscape, and some of the uses we’ve made of them and stories we’ve built around them. He explains some of the features in the images, pointing out the galls and associated other creatures, which ties the images and text together.

It’s a fascinating endeavour; it can’t really be used to identify the trees, since it contains only their leaves, but it’s an interesting compendium of detail and folklore.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Plants: From Roots to Riches

Posted November 7, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Plants: From Roots to Riches

Plants: From Roots to Riches

by Kathy Willis, Carolyn Fry

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 368
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Our obsession with plants and gardening goes back a long way and Plants: From Roots to Riches takes us to where it all began. Taking a journey through the scientific life of a uniquely British institution across 25 vivid chapters, this book explores how the last 250 years have transformed our relationship with plants for good.

Based on Radio 4’s landmark series, Kathy Willis, Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and Carolyn Fry, the acclaimed science writer, will take us from the birth of modern botany right through to the modern day. Delving into Kew’s archive and its world-class collections – including the Herbarium with over 7.5 million preserved plant specimens – they start with Carl Linnaeus and his invention of a universal language to name plants, through Joseph Banks’ exotic discoveries and how Charles Darwin’s fascination with orchids helped convince doubters about evolution. And as the British Empire painted the atlas red, explorers, adventurers and scientists risked their lives to bring the most interesting plant specimens and information back to London, and to Kew. From the lucrative races to control rubber, quinine and coffee to understanding the causes of the potato famine, the science of plants has taught us fascinating and enormously valuable lessons.

Full of amazing images from the archives, (some never reproduced before) and packed with history, science, memorable tales of adventure and discovery, politics and conflict, changing economic and social preoccupations, each chapter tells a unique and fascinating story, but, gathered together, a great picture unfolds, of the development of a most remarkable science, the magic and beauty of plants and ultimately our dependency on them.

Plants: From Roots to Riches is based on a series that was on Radio 4, written by Kathy Willis and Carolyn Fry. I never caught the radio version, but the book version is well-organised into a bunch of pretty bitesize chapters, following the development of botany as a modern science through the lens of Kew Gardens. It has some illustrations, though the colour plates seem quite muted and faded (not sure if this was always so or whether it was the age of the book — it’s a library book).

I don’t think it goes into enormous depth, so if this is your pet topic then likely there isn’t much new for you here, but it was an enjoyable read for me. The focus on Kew and the part Kew has played in the development of botany helped to focus things, and because of the various characters that have been historically involved with Kew, added a bit of human interest too (though none of them seem totally eccentric, alas).

It was a surprisingly fast read, I think because it is basically skimming the surface in a radio-friendly way. I learned some things, but nothing that terribly surprised me.

Rating: 3/5

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