Carbon Chemist

Tag: book review

  • A Body Made of Glass review: A very personal history of hypochondria

    A Body Made of Glass review: A very personal history of hypochondria

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    Drug dependency. A hand reaches into a medicine cabinet in this abstract view of drug addiction. Psychedelic colours and a blurring of the image gives a hallucinogenic effect.

    The distinction between “real” and imagined illness is under debate

    ARTHUR TREES/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

    A Body Made of Glass
    Caroline Crampton (Granta)

    Picture someone with hypochondria. It may be a friend who keeps an inventory of symptoms and ailments, is never without a doctor’s appointment and turns up armed with the latest from Google. Some doctors label such people disparagingly as the “worried well”, those whose demand on medical services is seen to outweigh their need.

    But a new book challenges that derogatory and outdated view of hypochondria – now more commonly known as health…

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  • May Contain Lies review: How to cut to the truth and think smarter

    May Contain Lies review: How to cut to the truth and think smarter

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    New Scientist Default Image

    Facts communicated over social media are often made to fit an existing narrative to go viral

    Carol Yepes/Getty Images

    May Contain Lies
    Alex Edmans (Penguin Business, 25 April (UK); University of California Press, 14 May (US))

    Here is a logic puzzle. You have been given four double-sided cards, each with a number on one side and a letter on the other. You are told to test this: “If a card has a vowel on one side, it has an even number on the other side.” The cards, as dealt, read “E, K, 2, 3”.…

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  • The Immune Mind review: How mental and physical health combine

    The Immune Mind review: How mental and physical health combine

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    Illustration of the human gut microbiota.

    What goes on in the gut microbiome (illustrated) may affect brain health

    THOM LEACH/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

    The Immune Mind
    Monty Lyman (Torva)

    At university, I had two roommates with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a painful condition affecting the digestive system. Both also had anxiety. But there was a key difference between them that stuck with me. While one found IBS treatments attenuated her anxiety, the other found relief through the opposite approach: her stomach pain only eased after seeing a psychiatrist. It was an astonishing lesson for me in the complexity of the relationship…

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  • Everything Must Go review: A fascinating guide to the apocalypse

    Everything Must Go review: A fascinating guide to the apocalypse

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    2A1MK33 OTTAWA, ONTARIO, CANADA - SEPTEMBER 27, 2019: Thousands of people gather and march towards Parliament Hill as part of a global climate strike protest.

    Our fascination with end times might be partly down to one of our many cognitive biases

    Colin Temple/Alamy

    Everything Must Go
    Dorian Lynskey (Picador, UK; Pantheon, US, November 2024)

    To the surprise of almost no one, the big winner at the Academy Awards last month was Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s biopic of the father of the atomic bomb. The film’s success speaks to our age-old obsession with end times. Be it fire, flood or pestilence, humanity has always fantasised about its doom.

    In Everything Must Go: The stories we tell about the end of…

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  • Two brilliant new novels from Adrian Tchaikovsky show his range

    Two brilliant new novels from Adrian Tchaikovsky show his range

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    Astronaut on strange, rocky alien planet.

    In Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay, prisoners live on a hostile alien world

    Gremlin/Getty Images

    Alien Clay
    Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor)

    Service Model
    Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor, out 6 June)

    British writer Adrian Tchaikovsky has not one, but two new novels out in the first half of this year. That may be due to the vagaries of publishing, rather than evidence of exceptional productivity. However, Tchaikovsky is certainly prolific: his backlist is as long as your arm. He is also a huge talent, writing at the peak of his powers.

     

    The first of these…

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  • The Biology of Kindness review: Living well and prospering

    The Biology of Kindness review: Living well and prospering

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    What is the impact of being kind on our bodies and lifespan?

    Kara McWest / Stockimo / Alamy

    The Biology of Kindness

    Immaculata De Vivo and Daniel Lumera, translated by Fabio De Vivo

    MIT Press (first published in Italian in 2020)

    We tend to think about kindness as a quality that helps others, not ourselves. But a new book, The Biology of Kindness: Six daily choices for health, well-being, and longevity, unpicks the impact of being kind on our bodies and lifespan, as well as the effect of four other traits and behaviours – optimism, forgiveness,…

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  • Sound Tracks: A fascinating archaeological history of music

    Sound Tracks: A fascinating archaeological history of music

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    MPTKBG Trumpets and trumpet tube, Bronze Age (Britain), (c2500 BC-c800 BC). Artist: Unknown.

    Trumpets and a trumpet tube from between 4500 and 2800 years ago

    Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology/Heritage Images/Alamy

    Sound Tracks
    Graeme Lawson (Bodley Head)

    DIGGING around for old instruments and the sounds of the past is a natural obsession of music lovers. It conjures up those countless hours spent happily scouring record stores or digital archives for treasures, building up a vinyl collection or rooting out rare gems for a playlist.

    For archaeologist, multi-instrumentalist and historian Graeme Lawson, it takes on a more literal meaning as well as an impressively ambitious scope. The publicity for his new…

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  • Space Oddities review: A lively insider account of particle physics

    Space Oddities review: A lively insider account of particle physics

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    CDF particle detector at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) near Chicago, USA. The CDF (Collider Detector Facility) records subatomic particles created in high-energy proton-antiproton collisions in the Tevatron coll- ider. It co-discovered the top quark in 1994. Here the detector is partly disassembled between operation runs. The black segments (left) are part of the outer muon chambers. The red areas are part of the magnet which bends charged particles travelling out from the collision point. The blue segments (right) are part of the hadron calorimeter. When in use these parts are closed tightly together. Photographed in 1998. The physicist is ROB ROSER.

    The Collider Detector at Fermilab in Illinois, setting up for more discoveries

    DAVID PARKER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

    Space Oddities
    Harry Cliff (Picador)

    A BALLOON the size of a football stadium hovering over an Antarctic ice sheet. A Zoom screen of researchers awaiting a big reveal. A lone researcher caught up in covid-19 restrictions, holding a slip of folded paper up to a webcam…

    The vivid opening sequences of Space Oddities: The mysterious anomalies challenging our understanding of the universe give glimpses into what proves to be a cracking tale of particle physics and cosmology. The…

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  • Nuclear War, A scenario review: What if the US faces a first strike?

    Nuclear War, A scenario review: What if the US faces a first strike?

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    J27FKX Washington, DC, USA. 25th Apr, 2017. A military aide carries the "nuclear football" on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, on April 25, 2017. Credit: Olivier Douliery/Pool via CNP - NO WIRE SERVICE- Photo: Olivier Douliery/Consolidated News Photos/Olivier Douliery - Pool via CNP/dpa/Alamy Live News

    A suitcase, nicknamed the “football”, contains the launch codes for a US nuclear strike

    Olivier Douliery/Pool via CNP/dpa/Alamy

    Nuclear War: A scenario
    Annie Jacobsen (Torva)

    IN 1985, US President Ronald Reagan and USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev declared in a joint statement that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought”. A year later, the number of atomic weapons globally began to fall from a peak of nearly 70,000. By 1989, the cold war was ending, and the world rejoiced at being less likely to die in a flash of light at 100…

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  • Sunken Lands review: Heeding the flood warnings of history

    Sunken Lands review: Heeding the flood warnings of history

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    TEWKESBURY, UNITED KINGDOM - JANUARY 05: Flood water surrounds Tewkesbury Abbey and surrounding streets because of widespread flooding after the Rivers Swilgate and Avon burst their banks on January 5, 2024 in Gloucestershire, England. Storm Henk brought strong winds and heavy rain across much of the country this week which lashed large parts of the country, hitting travel and cutting power. While across the UK numerous flood warnings were still in place after weeks of heavy rainfall, the UK's Environment Agency has warned people to expect flooding to become more frequent because of climate change. (Photo by Anna Barclay/Getty Images)

    Tewkesbury Abbey, Gloucestershire, UK, flooded in January.

    Anna Barclay/Getty Images

    Sunken Lands
    Gareth E. Rees (Elliott and Thompson)

    FOR many people, the most famous story of a great flood is that of Noah and his ark filled with animals, two by two. But it isn’t the only one. There are more than 2000 myths about flooding in cultures around the world, from tales about the lost city of Atlantis to the epic Mahabharata from India and the legend of the submerged kingdom of Cantre’r Gwaelod in west Wales.

    “Floods linger deep in our cultural memory,” writes Gareth E. Rees…

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