Peter Wohlleben takes a very human look at trees, but is it too human?
Tag - Popular Science
Nigel Chaffey
Tamed: Ten Species that Changed our World by Alice Roberts
List books can be good, but there’s a knack to them. Nick Lane’s Life Ascending works because the various features to life he lists come together to build a bigger story. The list is secondary to the story...
Alun Salt
Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine
Extinction should be a sad subject, but one author was also able to point out how absurd it could be too.
Tomorrow’s Table by Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak
Quite a few people have recommended this book to me, but I hadn’t made time to read it. My loss, this is an excellent book. I was told it was a good explanation about the uses of Genetic Engineering in farming. It...
Brachypodium is NOT Arabidopsis(!)
Interactions between plant hormones ethylene and auxin in roots of the monocot Brachypodium distachyon differ to those in roots of the dicot Arabidopsis.
How embargoes happen
I’m working on a press release for a paper. I think it could be big news – and if it’s not then it could well be that I’ve mucked up the explanation. What will probably happen is when the authors...
Alice in the Wonderland of plants…
Military campaigns are sometimes intended to display ‘shock’ and ‘awe’ to overcome the adversary. Well – and rather less militaristically – Yiannis Manetas’ book, Alice in the Land of...
What a Plant Knows by Daniel Chamovitz
If you’re looking to show doubters that plants are fascinating then a good starting point is Daniel Chamovitz‘s What a Plant Knows. I was a bit wary of the book at the title made it sound a bit twee. In fact...
Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen
The Science of Discworld series is one of the more interesting ideas in popular science writing. The first came out in the late 90s when there was a fad for the Science of the X Files or the Physics of Star Trek books...
Bad analogies
I’ve been sent a paper today to see if we can put out a press release for it. It’s fascinating and it touches on a famous philosophical problem. Does red really look red? This paper looks at plants from a...
Life Ascending by Nick Lane
There’s a tendency to look back to at earlier times as some sort of golden age. Even scientists to this despite the fact that “2011 is the most futuristic year there’s ever been” to misquote Paul...
The origin of modern Botany and the Infinite Monkey Cage
Some ideas work and some ideas don’t. Sticking Prof Brian Cox and Robin Ince together for half an hour each week works. The Infinite Monkey Cage is their weekly show on Radio 4 (available worldwide as a podcast)...
