SciTech Daily Review - science, technology, future developments, innovations, implications

The past 1,000 years have seen science and reason emerge in ascendancy over superstition and ancient 'truths'. Where do we go from here? ... [more]

Chariots for Apollo tells the history of the space race from a different perspective -- exploring the story not of the astronauts, but of the machines and their creators ... [more]

Almost forgotten today, J.C.R. Licklider was computing’s Johnny Appleseed, mentoring the generation that created computing as we know it ... [more]

Oh look, the end of the world is nigh again. Or are the doomsayers on another planet? ... [more]

Albert Einstein -- “genius, political refugee, humanitarian, locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe”-- has been named Time magazine's Person of the Century ... [more]

In The Code Book, Simon Singh carefully elucidates the often mind-boggling mechanics of encryption, while spinning tales of political intrigue and skullduggery, wartime bravery and great mathematical ingenuity ... [more]

What has a big fat bloke with a white beard and a bag full of presents got to do with missiles and the future of online shopping? ... [more]

Video experts in the US warn that flaws in the transmission system for digital TV may interfere with the broadcast of essential information during future civil emergencies ... [more]

A report which claims that the internet brings on the blues has other researchers seeing red ... [more]

How did scientists isolate the elements and unlock the secrets of the atom? Marcus Chown's The Magic Furnace unravels what is perhaps the greatest detective story in the history of science ... [more]

In the Blood explores how the politics of race has effectively marginalised sufferers of sickle-cell anaemia -- and many other illnesses ... [more]

The thesis of Michael Crichton's new novel Timeline -- time travel -- may not be as far-fetched as one might think ... [more]

A computer program that 'sees' beyond three-dimensions may save lives by doing a better job of classifying data ... [more]

Internet innovations may turn out to be the salvation of publishing ... [more]

A privacy breach in email software can be used by spammers to pass personal information to Web sites ... [more]

Silicon Valley is awash in Indian technical geniuses -- a fact which surprises no one who knows where they went to college ... [more]

What's right with scientific writing? ... [more]

Developers of a new website and interface tools want to make the Internet more accessible to people with disabilities ... [more]

Help is at hand for those whose feline companions go pussyfooting across keyboards, crashing programmes and dumping documents into an electronic black hole ... [more]

We humans dream of sharing our thoughts and invent wonderful tools to help us do so. In Speaking into the Air Durham Peters takes a look at communication through the ages (read an excerpt here ) ... [more]

The reason babies are born plump, according to Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection, is in order to be loved -- and thus better their chances of survival ... [more]

Have you phoned your fridge today? We're fast approaching a world where your laptop can chat to your central heating via the Internet ... [more]

From the bombing of Hiroshima to the development of antibiotics, scientific breakthroughs dominated the great news events of the 20th Century, according to a poll of journalists ... [more]

Australia recently cut a birthday cake to celebrate the 50th birthday of a computing dinosaur -- the last of its kind still intact ... [more]

No matter which side you're on in the endless debate about when the new millennium begins, you'll find the history of the Western calendar fascinating ... [more]

The science wars are in part a product of deep and long-lasting clashes of intuition, but mostly they're just media hype. In the end, remarkably little light is shed on actual scientific controversies by either traditionalist triumphalists or postmodernist unmaskers ... [more]

Wendy Kaminer, the author of Sleeping With Extra-Terrestrials, sees a disturbing decline of reason in our public life ... [more]

In his biography of Carl Sagan, William Poundstone cuts through the celebrity hype, revealing a scientist who was all too human ... [more]

Now you can drive and surf at the same time, with hands-free on-board Internet access ... [more]

Medical information is often said to be one of the most retrieved types of information on the web. So where are we headed in the coming millennium of cybermedicine? ... [more]

In The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine, James Le Fanu looks back at 12 "definitive moments" in the development of modern medicine, contending that the era of such advances is past ... [more]

"Global warming" and the "greenhouse effect" have been buzzwords for years now. But how much do you know about these environmental celebrities? ... [more]

A dangerous new type of e-mail virus has emerged, which could wreak havoc on computers after a user simply looks at an e-mail ... [more]

The world we experience is increasingly defined by our interfaces with our machines. How many of us can make it through the day without using all ten? ... [more]

Software that allows a computer to receive radio signals could make spying on computers childs' play ... [more]

The lost media are not quite gone. Fabric typewriter ribbons, old printer cartridges, even carbon paper -- all are zealously preserved by the rear guard of the information revolution ... [more]

Simon Singh talks about once and future cryptography ... [more]

Predictions -- a collection of visions of the future from some of the world's greatest thinkers -- paints a dismal picture for the inhabitants of Earth in the next millennium ... [more]

Reading about Silicon Valley online is not hard at all; doing so without spending every waking hour in front of a keyboard is rather more difficult ... [more]

In A Brief History of the Future, John Naughton has written an affectionate history of the internet, presenting it as the curiously beautiful result of the search for solutions to complex problems ... [more]

Despite its glossy colorful illustrations, Pachamama, Our Earth, Our Future, a candid book for and by youth about the global environment , doesn't always paint a pretty picture ... [more]

It's a Halloween tradition to hold Houdini séances. As the air thickens with stories of hauntings, we are invited to follow Houdini's lead and investigate -- sceptically ... [more]

E-commerce -- it's taking us beyond the information revolution ... [more]

Are writers entitled to profit from their novel ideas? Evidently not ... [more]

Tim Berners-Lee's new book, Weaving the Web, chronicles how the Web really happened and where its creator thinks it should go from here ... [more]

Privacy advocates may not have been able to stop Echelon from snooping, but the publicity surrounding their intrusion-jamming efforts may have done some good after all ... [more]

The Caring Economy is not about the economy in general, but about business principles for the digital age. Gerry McGovern argues for new ways of thinking and communicating in Internet business: networking, establishing community, and gaining trust through sharing information ... [more]

Meet Watson, the web-researcher's web-researcher ... [more]

The self, says Antonio Damasio in The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, is an answer to a question that was never posed ... [more]

If you think the internet is in your face already, you haven't smelled anything yet ... [more]

Many people are drowning in environmental myths. How do you measure up on the eco-knowledge scale? ... [more]

Desmond Morris used to dislike human beings. What made him change his mind? ... [more]

Edward Hooper's The River offers an exhaustive history of HIV and AIDS, and a bold new theory about the virus' origins ... [more]

With the advent of internet technology, researchers are crisscrossing states -- even oceans -- to collaborate, without leaving their labs ... [more]

Advice from Neil Postman: to avoid stumbling into the future, look to the past ... [more]

In this year's Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, the Brits really took the biscuit ... [more]

Prepare to meet -- or become -- the wired human ... [more]

This emergency is a test. The threat of biological warfare is all too real, but how can emergency workers learn to treat victims in a scenario that hasn't happened yet? ... [more]

It may be considered the nerd capital of the world, but passions run deep in Silicon Valley ... [more]

Part memoir, part educational venture and part spiritual testimony, Jane Goodall's Reason For Hope: A Spiritual Journey was written to “answer the questions that people ask me, about my religious and spiritual beliefs, about my philosophy on life, about why I have hope for the future.” ... [more]

In his enthusiasm for the genomic sciences, Matt Ridley falls into a trap that awaits many a science writer -- the one full of reductionism, missionary fervour and revolutionary hype ... [more]

Philip Morrison looks at two biographies of Carl Sagan, giving us a glimpse of the celebrated astronomer's life and work ... [more]

In Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects, and Eugenics in China, Frank Dikötter presents a cautionary tale: a history of eugenics, the contemporary relevance of which is all too apparent ... [more]

It's only MP3 but I like it ... [more]

Who's pulling society's strings? Are we being exploited or empowered by the new technologies? Douglas Rushkoff and Andrew Shapiro discuss their contrasting views and their recent books ... [more]

The internet of tomorrow is starting to look a lot like science fiction writer William Gibson's 3-dimensional, total-immersion cyberspace ... [more]

Urban legends are those stories we love to spread around -- the ones that are just too good to be true! Jan Harold Brunvand has a gathered a collossal collection of these strange but false tales ... [more]

If we're inclined to take the couch-potato's view of the millennium, perhaps it's because we are a culture so pushed to accelerate our present day that when too much fuss is made about our future or our past, all it makes us want to do is go sulk in our room. Even so, there are a few books about the "M-word" we might want to take with us ... [more]

Without Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, neuroscience might exist only as a mapping project. The revolution he began one hundred years ago still continues ... [more]

Remember the buzz about homespun digital films someday taking on Hollywood? That was s-o-ooo 1998. This year, it was a reality ... [more]

In John Horgan's The Undiscovered Mind, he claims that science will most likely never understand the brain. "Inner space is science's final -- and possibly eternal -- frontier." ... [more]

The 'genres of Anxiety' -- science fiction, horror, fantasy and crime stories -- came into existence to address and allay our fear of changing times. Yet we are entering a world of such mutability and stress that we may need new tales to survive the strange nights of tomorrow ... [more]

Cyberpower to the people! Forget demos, "hactivism" is the new political weapon ... [more]

Barbara Ehrenreich questions the testosterone-led theory of war, pointing out that the Man-as-Master-Species assumption is far from accurate ... [more]

Let us hope that a generation from now we will view the Internet as a blessing that provides every person with a trusted cyber-lieutenant, and not as an Orwellian company store to which everyone is bound ... [more]

Why has Nostradamus -- minor poet and self-proclaimed prophet -- remained in favor for more than 450 years, even though his prophecies are worthless? Historically, he received a remarkable running start whose momentum carried him beyond his day ... [more]

Whatever Ben Franklin thought, time isn't really money -- you can swap money for things but not for an extra hour a day. In Faster; The Acceleration of Just About Everything, James Gleick considers life at breakneck speed ... [more]

Thomas Edison called genius "one percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration." Now a Boston company has found a way to package the 99 percent and sell it as software ... [more]

It's a small Web... Fewer than 20 mouse-clicks is all it takes to explore the far reaches of the World Wide Web ... [more]

"If it's not on the Web, it does not exist at all." Web research is so easy that for many students the search for knowledge tends to cease at the boundaries of cyberspace ... [more]

She saw the implications of the Babbage computer and drew plans for flying machines: Ada Lovelace was a woman more for our time than hers ... ... [more]

Market reasearchers have taken to studying our brainwaves, trying to find out what makes us buy. Critics call it brainwashing, but marketers insist it's all for our own good ... [more]

Freeman Dyson on the Tools of Scientific Revolutions: technological changes benefit many, but only at others' expense ... [more]

200 years after its discovery, the Rosetta Stone still has much to teach us ... [more]

M.I.T.'s Laboratory for Computer Science is developing a new infrastructure for information technologies, that promises to realize a vision long held by the lab's director: helping people do more by doing less ... [more]

Toss the tv and forget the Net -- soon artificial worlds will be coming at you from everywhere ... [more]

What makes up the mind? What is intelligence? How should it be assessed? In The Making of Intelligence, Ken Richardson confronts the area that has been most consistently subjected to Darwinist sleight-of-hand ... [more]

On the Origin of Species has been voted the "book of the millennium". Yet, if Darwin were to be brought back to life today, he would most likely start drafting a revised edition. In Darwin's absence, Steve Jones has taken on this ambitious task ... [more]

They beat us at backgammon, Scrabble and chess -- now computers are going cruciverbalistic ... [more]

Computer-generated movie imagery is increasingly impressive -- but the magic still requires the human touch ... [more]

"Reading as journey, reading as palpable accomplishment -- let's not underestimate these. The sensation of depth is secured, in some part at least, by the turning of real pages ..." A foray into the world of e-books leaves Sven Birkerts oddly unsatisfied ... [more]

If you could look at the Web from a satelite, what would you see? ... [more]

The belief that we can make machines our servants is not a product of science but a relic of magic ... [more]

Hugh Miller tells us What the Corpse Revealed ... [more]

We're all born with a head for numbers. Really! ... [more]

The people setting up virtual universities aren't doing it because they are interested in the exploration of new teaching methods. They don't see the web as a revolutionary instrument. But that is just what it is ... [more]

In The Five Ages of the Universe, Greg Laughlin and Fred Adams invite us on the ultimate trip through the physics of eternity ... [more]

Will latte loungers replace their favorite paperback with an electronic alternative any time soon? ... [more]

Contemporary biologists have lessons to teach us, about how to think of ourselves and our relation to the universe ... [more]

Reason hobbles along. Even those who treasure its glory days treat it like a rickety emeritus, unworthy of mention in one's current work ... ... [more]

Falling in love is a time-consuming, exhausting, ecstatic, painful, transforming business -- but as Sheila Sullivan shows, it's not a very good way to get to know someone ... [more]

The Restless Sea doesn't set out to make waves, but it's more than just a readable narrative of the ascent of oceanography ... [more]

Virtual cruising, surface painting and transmogriphying avatars -- exploring the latest in virtual art and entertainment ... [more]

Hermeneutic hootchy-koo from both the left and right poses problems for philosophers of science -- should they laugh or cry? ... [more]

Margaret Wertheim's The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace invites us to consider the "techno-spiritual dreaming" pervading discussions of the Internet ... [more]

Whether it's old Soviet stockpiles or doomsday cult cultures, biological weapons reveal everyone's vulnerability ... [more]

There are so many trashy books looking to combine dubious archaeology, implausible astronomy and invented anthropology, that it can be hard to recognise a decent attempt when it hits the shelves ... [more]

Learn all about pain from the master (and we don't mean de Sade) ... [more]

Great Feuds in Science and Portraits of Discovery show us a picture of science defrocked, warts and all ... [more]

They fought against tobacco and worried about asbestosis, encouraged low-fat diets and vegetarianism, not to mention holistic medicine and homeopathy. Sounds worthy? Maybe, but, as The Nazi War on Cancer demonstrates, even good science has its problems when mixed up with politics ... [more]

Is this a hand-axe I see before me? Do Stone Age status symbols show we share the same psychology as our ancestors? Maybe not ... [more]

Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon is not only readable, funny, humane, literary, and technically sophisticated, but also engages the reader in debates central to a world in which access to and control of information, data, and messaging is increasingly important. ... [more]

Intelligent-design creationism misrepresents science as an inherently antireligious enterprise, among other faults, argues Robert Pennock in The Tower of Babel ... [more]

"The light is mute in Chongqing nearly all the time in winter," writes Mark Hertsgaard in Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future.. And he asks: Is Chongqing our future? ... [more]

The promises offered by the environmental justice movement are relatively modest, while its perils are potentially significant, according to The Promise and Peril of Environmental Justice ... [more]

Exploring the myth and reality of "the ecological Indian," Shephard Krech III argues that much like present-day Americans - native or not - they were ecologists when it suited their needs and despoilers when it did not. ... [more]

What would our world look like if the wizards of Terry Pratchett's Discworld postulated it as a theoretical model -- strange, very strange -- but what else would you expect from The Science of the Discworld? ... [more]

Steve Jones raises a glass to the unsung country of scientific revolution -- Wales ... [more]

Ever Since Adam and Eve is an unwavering commitment to an Enlightenment ideal of rationalist, scientific pursuit of intellectual understanding as the road to social betterment ... [more]

We’ve received many messages from the distant past, but what are we sending, either purposely or inadvertently, to the future? Gregory Benford in Deep Time takes a look at what we're saying ... [more]

It doesn't matter if our predictions aren't right -- half the fun is in the speculation, according to Freeman Dyson ... [more]

For years aliens have been depicted as either ruthless, tyrannical conquerors or bumbling, ineffectual, "comic relief" creatures. Now they are demanding a more positive media portrayal ... [more]

The end of the world is nigh! Or so John Leslie's Doomsday Argument would have us believe ... [more]

Do twins really share a "book-loving gene"? Noah Efron questions the latest volume to document the eerie similarity of twins ... [more]

Two new works argue whether the mere involvement of women in science is enough to change its ways, or if radical feminism is required to move science into new paradigms? ... [more]

The Matrix reflects our ambivalent connection to the Internet in that it casts the World Wide Web as a seductive monster ... [more]

Evil overlords, struggling heroes and seething masses. No, not another review of The Phantom Menace but a look at the biography (or should that be hagiography) of the Web and Web wars ... [more]

Will the White Death continute to stalk our streets? It's certainly making a comeback in some "civilised" countries ... [more]

Helen Fisher's The First Sex is inevitably political, precisely in its refusal to consider the complexities of gender studies and its author's assertion that it is nothing but a clear-cut collection of data ... [more]

Anyone who peers over the edge of a boat, down into the green and fuzzy murk below, and feels that frisson of awe that the sea can suddenly evoke will find fascination in The Restless Sea ... [more]

It looks like Einstein, it sounds like Einstein, it can tell you about Einstein's theories, just don't ask his star sign ... [more]

In Six Days sets out to explain why 50 scientists believe in the Creation, but one Jesuit reviewer found it theologically lame, even if it did discourage him from scoffing at creationists ... [more]

If you want to pull out a good dinner party story, talk about the Very Strange Case of Pavlov's Worms, and other strange bon mots to be found in The Barmaid's Brain ... [more]

Entrepreneurs of the Apocalypse -- coming to a bookstore near you! ... [more]

Black Lung is a cautionary tale, warning of the consequences of allowing economic and political considerations to control public health decisions ... [more]

Do Star Trek's Borg represent a 1990s reworking of the body-snatching commie-pod people aliens of Cold War science fiction or simply the US fear of Japanese techno-orientalism writ large? ... [more]

A close look at the psychology and medical history of Hitler indicates that his destructive madness was more political than psychiatric in origin ... [more]

Consciousness has been comparable to sex in Victorian England: everyone knew it was there, throbbing away, but it was not a fit subject for polite conversation, or candid investigation ... [more]

If there were no book covers to scare off the credulous, it would be easier for adventurous readers to discover the spectrum of SF authors who write with an intense and literate understanding that the only way to grasp 1999 is to treat the thousand futures that interpenetrate us all as material for the forge of art ... [more]

When it comes to scientific publishing, research universities have to have the backbone to prevent industrial demands from prejudicing academic freedom ... [more]

Culture can come to structure scientific theories and practices not as a willful imposition against the evidence, but through the way questions are posed and data interpreted, argues the writer of Has Feminisim Changed Science? ... [more]

Will behavioural genetics loose its historical baggage and reputation for flakiness? Possibly, thanks to to the work of people like Seymour Benzer ... [more]

Watch out for the lean and hungry, but ambitious, geek -- the sort you might find lurking in Neal Stephenson's latest techno-thriller history SF tru- life novel ... [more]

Environmental organizations serve as enthusiastic sources of background information, provide colorful quotes or sound bites, and create breaking news that promotes social controversy, political conflict, and journalistic careers. But do they get things right? ... [more]

Are we in danger of thinking of ourselves as simply machines? ... [more]

Merde, or should that be faecal attraction? ... [more]

Fear, phobia and anxiety collide where physiology and psychology and psychotherapy meet ... [more]

Imagine this group around the dinner table: C.P. Snow, Turing, Schrodinger, J.B.S. Haldane, Wittgenstein, arguing about the possibility of a thinking machine ... [more]

Imagine trying to get a patent on women who have been genetically engineered to produce medicine in their breast milk. It's not a vision of the future but reality now, according to reproductive technology expert Lori Andrews ... [more]

The news began making us dumber when we insisted on having it daily, and now we've lost our ability to discern truly significant news ... [more]

"The science we call ethology, the study of animal behavior, has been influenced as much in its course by the personalities and politics of its purveyors as by their data and the chronology of their development," writes zoologist Peter Klopfer ... [more]

Online journals are changing the nature of scientific publishing, and possibly for the better ... [more]

Woman -- an intimate geography provides an appraisal of human femaleness. Natalie Angier may teach you a thing or two about anatomy, not to mention society ... [more]

Blaming the brain -- or how drugs are not necessarily the answer to all our mental ills ... [more]

Try exploring "religious naturalism", a scientifically based reverence for every aspect of the natural world, including ourselves, espoused by leading cell biologist Ursula Goodenough ... [more]

From babbling to bartering -- most of us make it through the language acquisition phase without tripping over our own tongues and we can blame our parents if we don't ... [more]

Find out what matters -- and what doesn't -- in terms of your impact on the environment. Quit agonising about the disposable coffee cups; they're not important in the scheme of things ... [more]

Lamarckian biology is alive and well and living in Australia and is still, it seems, just as unconvincing ... [more]

Drawing a fine line between artistic representation and anatomical dissection ... [more]

Exposing the emotional insecurity of the creation "scientists" ... [more]

Where the Wild Things Are, or rather, were can tell us about the early days of the early Britons ... [more]

Whoever requests the use of technology to have a child in old age needs to be reminded by society that making orphans is not good public policy. ... [more]

"It is my thesis that the spirit of wonder which led Blake to Christian mysticism, Keats to Arcadian myth and Yeats to Fenians and fairies, is the very same spirit that moves great scientists." Not only spirit of wonder, but some wonderful -- if acerbic -- spirit, it seems ... [more]

Give yourself a chance to really know what you are talking about next time someone asks you what you think of the weather ... [more]

So you're at a party and someone asks you "what does an organic chemist do anyway?" What are you going to say? ... [more]

Wow! A bird book that is much more than just pretty pictures. Come fly with Scott Weidensaul ... [more]

It coulda been a contender, but who thinks of Xerox when you think of personal computers?? Read Dealers of Lightning and find out how they lost the plot ... [more]

What does the place of the fictional woman scientist in contemporary literature have to say about their place in the real world of science? ... [more]

Like tool-using and communication, an attraction to the same sex is not solely a human trait ... [more]

Are you just a means for meme propagation? ... [more]

Archaeological mysteries of the fictional kind have a distinguished history ... [more]

Mathematics is more interesting than most people think, and here's a set of books to look at ... [more]

It is mere coincidence that the 1950s rash of movies about big-brained aliens coincided with a postwar backlash against ``experts'' and intellectuals, asks David Skal in Mad Science and Modern Culture ... [more]

Twins are Rorschach tests -- we read into them whatever we want to and pronounce that it is so ... [more]

We need a theory and an ethics of information if we are not to drown in the post-modern flood of data, argues Allbert Borgmann ... [more]

It somehow seems appropriate that a tale of superstrings should involve making connections ... [more]

Wander through the wilds of New Guinea with Tim Flannery as he encounters pythons and possums, cannibals and cave rats on the track for unknown mammals ... [more]

Michael Crichton argues that scientists are focusing on the wrong things when they criticise their image in the movies -- get real, guys! ... [more]

Fancy missing sex out in a survey of the fully computerised future! ... [more]

Delving into how the mind of Steven Pinker works ... [more]

If we're lucky, we live in a society where bioethics are taken for granted, but that wasn't always the way ... [more]

Parents are off the hook -- blame the peers! (Or at least learn what your children get up to with their peer group) ... [more]

Cures can come out of chaos, when medicine advances by sheer fluke, rather than through evidence-based investigation ... [more]

No attempt, however well meaning, to bring poetry under science's wing will ever affect its ultimate, essential independence, despite what Richard Dawkins asserts ... [more]

This is a True Story, it happened to a friend of a friend, honest ... [more]

If Glenn Hoddle had read this book on reincarnation, he might still have his job ... [more]

Space junk and thruster gas, not to mention unmentionable astronaut byproducts, provide great footage for UFO fans ... [more]

What do you get when Microsoft and development psychologists team up to take over the toy market? A computerized Barney that responds to cues from television. Oh brave new world ... [more]

Egg big, sperm little -- makes me Tarzan, you Jane ... [more]

"I once again revert to my covenant with Mystery, and respond to the emergence of Life not with a search for its Design or Purpose, but instead with outrageous celebration that it occurred at all," writes cell biologist Ursula Goodenough ... [more]

Sex and gender, male and female, how to choose and who should choose? Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex asks the questions ... [more]

Environmentalism will not succeed...if it does not deliver economic well-being as well as ecosystem salvation, argues Mark Hertsgaard in his book Earth Odyssey ... [more]

Air Apparent or how weather forecasting on television has risen from terse reports to full-fleged computer-enhanced drama ... [more]

Why were so many intelligent and respectable Victorians -- like Dickens and Conan Doyle -- mesmerized by the antics of mesmerism? ... [more]

Good Will Hunting may have led to a boost in the amount of crank mail mathematicians get from people claiming to have solved Fermat's Last Theorum, but there is alwasy the very faint possibility that the crank is right ... [more]

Pseudo-documentaries mix fact and fiction, creating a media-driven UFOlogy that has little to do with science or a search for the truth, as The Secret KGB UFO Files all too clearly demonstrates ... [more]

Publish or perish, scientists are told, but publishers are perishing as the costs of sceintific publishing spiral up, competition increases, and library budgets fall ... [more]

A worm's eye view of art where entomology and aesthetics interact ... [more]

Why does the camel have a long nose? Why don't a duck's feet freeze on the ice? Questions from the life of a peripatetic physiologist who has never stopped asking questions, and the answers that have taken him from the Arctic to Australia ... [more]

In his book Techgnosis Erik Davis draws parallels between the sects of today and classical mystery cults, gives an account of Middle-Ages fantasy from the Renaissance to the roleplay games of Dungeons & Dragons, and draws equivalences between Aristotle's memory palaces, Foucault's analysis of the Victorian prison panopticon and a recent German VR simulation of planet Earth called T-Vision. Whew! ... [more]

Interactive camp-out planned world wide for the return of Stars Wars. What's an uncomfortable night or two when you've waited 20 years ... [more]

"Our descendants will..witness by perfected kinemato-graphs the weddings of any of their friends at the antipodes, the battles being fought on the other side of the world, and the races of horses, yachts and boats in every land." Not bad for a women's magazine 100 years ago ... [more]

Neuroscience and meditation meet in Zen and the Brain, and they both are better for it ... [more]

"What's the right portal for you? There's My Yahoo! and My Look, and - my word! - there's even a quieter, more intelligent voice ... [more]

If you've got any involvement in animal welfare and experimentation, here's a surprisingly practical, balanced and civil look at the issues involved ... [more]

The trouble with the Scopes trial, which pitted evolution against religion, is that everyone thinks they know what happened. Read the Summer of the Gods to find out what did happen backin the 20s and why it's still important today ... [more]

Gorgeous prose and a love of the sea catapults Thomas Farber's The Face of the Deep from science writing into the realms of literature ... [more]

Geological and emotional landscapes are explored in natural history writer Rick Bass's first novel Where the Sea Used to Be, described as a small masterpiece, broad in scope ... [more]

Cyberpunk writers like Neal Stephenson have helped shape visions of the future today ... [more]

Cancer cure found! The headlines are rarely accurate, but it's worth reading this absorbing story of a successful discovery process ... [more]

We need to reread Frankenstein to remember that maybe not all knowledge is good knowledge, argues Jon Turney in looking at genetics and popular culture ... [more]

So many things to do, thinks Sir John Maddox in looking at what remains to be discovered ... [more]

In Once Upon a Number John Allen Paulos encourages us to look for the hidden mathematical logic in stories, from O.J.'s trial to the Asian monetary crisis ... [more]

The Martians are coming! Surely the War of the Worlds panic couldn't happen again, or could it? ... [more]

Will books survive to the next millennium? H.G. Wells didn't think so, but John Carey is more optimistic ... [more]

Contemporary masculinity, or how to save our sons from being real boys (or sensitive New Age males) without unnecessary ideological guilt ... [more]

Memories of the future can be found in the pages of science fiction ... [more]

The post-modernist trasher is trashed as Alan Sokal's writing is put under the spotlight and found wanting ... [more]

Selfish genes provide no excuse, says Richard Dawkins in his latest book Unweaving the Rainbow ... [more]

There's more to Egyptian tombs than just Tutankhamen's ... [more]

Crocodilian dinosaurs ravage the Arctic! ... [more]

Science, Star Trek, and astrology can each induce a tingle in the spine, says Richard Dawkins. But some tingles are better than others ... [more]

The Ascent of Science -- dazzling, irrational, weird and wonderful ... [more]

The Wrong Stuff, or how the Mir space station is a modern-day version of Scott's journey to the Pole, where politics and science make a dangerous mix ... [more]

Gory tales where medicine and morality meet in Douglas Starr's new book, Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce ... [more]

The right to die debate has a strong cultural context argues writer Peter Filene ... [more]

Headmistress and moral philosopher Mary Warnock has a lot to say in her Intelligent Person's Guide to Ethics ... [more]

A message for Dr Andrew Weil, Inc. There's no such thing as alternative medicine. There's only medicine that works, and medicine that doesn't ... [more]

Charles Darwin's most accessible book presents closely observed pets, anecdotes from missionaries and pigeon fanciers, photos of frenzied Victorian ladies ... [more]