Technology of the past 100 years has one big obsession, namely using fossil fuels – whether it makes sense or not. Electric vehicles and trains were around at the beginning of the 20th century, but most were replaced by petrol and diesel engines. Earlier technologies like sail ships and windmills were confined to the heritage sector.
The author of this volume, Tom Ireland, is a widely published freelance science journalist and currently editor of The Biologist magazine. This work has the prime purpose of convincing us that not all viruses are harmful, and that the vast majority are actually beneficial.
The author of this work, James Costa, is currently Professor of biology and Executive Director of the Highlands Biological Station at Western Carolina University, US. An enduring fascination for the origins of the theory of evolution has resulted in his publication of several scholarly books on the subject, including Wallace, Darwin, and the Origin of Species.
The research findings reported in this book are conveyed in the form of 14 chapters, all of which have more than one author, making an overall number of 37 contributing authors. Each chapter adopts the formal style of an academic paper with a predilection for specialised terminology and copious references.
We have to ask ourselves: What on Earth went wrong? In his book, economist Gary Smith lines up the three suspects he blames for the growing distrust in science: disinformation, data torturing and data mining. In a sad irony, all three are the product of the science and technology advances they are now putting at risk.
The trouble with climate change used to be short-termism. The catastrophe was predicted for a future that lay further away than the next election, so most politicians feared the issue as a potential vote loser. They didn’t dare to ask anybody to make sacrifices or incur costs for the benefits of future generations.
The alternating periods of light and darkness we experience as the Earth rotates about its axis have changed considerably over time. A gradual slowing of our planet’s rate of rotation has resulted in the average duration of a 24-hour day increasing by some 1.8 milliseconds every century. Read the book review.
James Hamilton-Patterson describes our dilemma with the metaphor of the stuck monkey. Hunters allegedly used a banana in an immobilised glass jar as a trap to catch monkeys – once the monkey has grasped the banana inside the jar, it can’t pull out its hand and remains stuck. We, as a global civilisation, can’t let go of the juicy rewards of our economic development, so we are stuck very much the same way as that monkey.
This book delves into the realm of carbon-based nanomaterials with a focus on the rather exotic species known as carbon quantum dots (CQDots).
Until the mid-1970s, chemists and biologists studying complex biological systems were largely preoccupied with deconstructing the systems into their component parts, in futile attempts to discover how the parts interacted to make the whole system work. The major change came when biological research shifted its focus toward accessing individual cells for the purpose of manipulating their DNA and modifying the functioning of genes.