I finished reading Wool / Omnibus a few days ago. If you want one captivating book (or rather pentalogy) to read by the end of the year, then this is it. The five books grew from a short story, Wool, published electronically. The author, Hugh Howey, continued to publish Wool 2-5, and then compiled all […]
The National Academies Press are offering all their books in PDF format for free. The announcement yesterday created a serious traffic surge on their site. But the books are still there, and are still free. Got to buy that new 5Tb external disk now….
A Planet of Viruses Carl Zimmer The University of Chicago Press 109 pages Interesting things happen when physicists decide to go into biological research. They ask questions that biologists generally won’t. For example, viruses have small genomes, but they also have very small storage space in their capsids. Bacteriophages inject their genetic material into the […]
To say that Thirteen is a futuristic Chandlerian hardboiled-detective-fiction meets Gibson cyberpunk in a Swiftian satire of contemporary USA would be a cumbersomely loaded one-liner describing a no less loaded but sleekly streamlined novel. Saying that would also do injustice to Gibson, Chandler, Swift, the English language and especially Richard Morgan. This book has it […]
Jonathan Eisen started something nice in his blog: a review of children’s science books. So I think I’ll follow suit, especially since my first review will combine two of Jonathan’s faves: Microbiology and Open Access. The book is “Bacteria Galore by Sunday at Four” by Mel Rosenberg, a Professor of Microbiology at Tel-Aviv University who […]
The celebrations of Darwin’s 200th birthday and 150 years for the publication of The Origin of the Species are in full swing. We are apes equipped with 10 digits on our forelimbs, which we use in just about everything we do. We like numbers that are multiples of 10; even better if they are 10 […]
