intertwined audiobook is out

I just discovered that my latest book, Intertwined is already available as an audiobook, from Tantor Media. Last I heard was that the audio rights were sold last summer.

Glad to hear from the sample clip they found a British narrator for this (Mike Cooper) and an actual human, just before AI gobbles up everything. Sounds good to me, even though I'm not sure I would want to have 12 hours worth of my own words read back at me.

Anyways, if you would like to listen to Intertwined, now you can!

There is also an ebook version as expensive as the hardback, but no news yet on a paperback.

intertwined

My new book, exploring how all life on Earth is connected to everything else, is out today:

Intertwined
From Insects to Icebergs
by Michael Gross
Johns Hopkins University Press
15. October 2024
424 pages
ISBN 9781421449975
Hardcover RRP £27.50 / $32.95

It can now be ordered from the publisher's website or from wherever else you get your books (eg from Oxford's very own Blackwells). I understand that an audiobook version is also in the making, slightly scary thought, but as long as I don't have to do the reading out loud, it's all good.

I prepared a magazine feature based on the introduction of the book, which came out yesterday in The Scotsman magazine. Here's a snippet:

I have found and made many connections over the years and have broadened my interests from the physical sciences into ecology and environment issues. Increasingly, I became aware that ecology is all about how in the living world everything is connected to everything else. Beyond the predator-prey relations of the food web, there are multiple ways in which species shape their environment and create opportunities for others. And this web of connections operates across a vast range of different scales from the molecular interactions (related to my background in biochemistry) to global cycles of important chemical elements like nitrogen and carbon. For instance, microscopically small cyanobacteria were responsible for giving our planet an atmosphere rich in oxygen.

Ecology is a relatively young concept, with the term coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866. Many of these crucial connections are only beginning to be explored by science, although human activities have already started to destroy them. For instance, whales, sea birds, migrating fish like salmon, and bears are all part of a global pump that transports nutrients uphill, against the flow direction dictated by gravity and the hydrological cycle. Scientists only discovered this connection within the last few years. By this time, its capacity to cycle nutrients was already severely reduced, not least by the industrialised whaling of the 20th century, which was only stopped just in time to avert extinction of the species targeted. Hydroelectric dams blocking salmon runs and the decimation of big beasts like bears by hunters and habitat loss also helped to disrupt this nutrient pump.

And here's the table of contents:

Introduction: Everything is connected
Chapter 1. Plants and their little helpers
Chapter 2. Fantastic animals
Chapter 3. Insects rule the world
Chapter 4. Looking after our forests
Chapter 5. This time, the asteroid is us
Chapter 6. Save our seas
Chapter 7. Living with animals
Chapter 8. Listen to nature
Chapter 9. Animals shaping the environment
Chapter 10. Life in the times of climate change
Chapter 11. Our shared burden of disease
Chapter 12. The Anthropocene and beyond

a book is born

The publishers told me this week that first copies of my new book have arrived at their offices, and on checking up I see it can now be pre-ordered from their website as well. So here are the full details now:

Intertwined
From Insects to Icebergs
by Michael Gross
Johns Hopkins University Press
15. October 2024
424 pages
ISBN 9781421449975
Hardcover $32.95

Also available as an e-book for the same price, ISBN: 9781421449982

watch this space for excerpts and further horn-tooting ...

ecology book coming soon

New book alert!

Over the last 13 years, as I have been writing a feature for (almost) every issue of Current Biology, the focus of my writing work gravitated towards topics that could be described as ecology in the broadest sense, ranging from microbial interactions to global nutrient cycles and also including the fringes of ecology such as human interference in nature, soundscape ecology, behavioural ecology etc.

True to my ancient motto "Only connect!" I was often attracted to these topics by the satisfaction of uncovering how everything is connected to everything else. Over time, more than 300 features have piled up and grown into a heavily connected and crosslinked body of texts. Even though the vast majority of these (everything older than 12 months) are openly accessible to all, I fear that not many people will click their way through these.

Therefore, I attempted to remix some of the lessons I have learned in these years into book format. The resulting 400 page doorstopper is now on track to be published on October 15 by Johns Hopkins University Press (who have also published Astrobiology in 3 editions over the last 18 years). So expect more plugs, excerpts, blatant advertising, as the date approches. Here, as a teaser, I'll just share a glimpse of the lovely cover (and thereby also reveal the title):

Cover of
Intertwined
From Insects to Icebergs
by Michael Gross
Johns Hopkins University Press October 2024

astrobiology out now

I was slightly busy with other things and missed the actual publication day (Tue 3rd), but I can confirm that the third edition of

Astrobiology: an introduction

is out now across the habitable parts of the Universe. A lot of things happened since the second edition came out in 2011, so the page count has gone up, and it is no longer called "brief" in the title. Apart from that, the good old structure still stands, just with new findings added.

More details from:

* the publishers, Johns Hopkins University Press

* Blackwells bookshop

I seem to have acquired some grey hairs since the last edition ...

a not so brief introduction

Once upon a time there was a book called Astrobiology - a brief introduction, which came out in 2006, and then in a second fully revised edition in 2011.

Now it's taken a bit longer, and a lot of things have happened out in space and here on Earth, but later this year we will have a third edition. We've spent the whole month of February checking the page proofs and preparing the index, so the book is now "in press" as far as I'm concerned. While the cover kept the basic layout, it now has a fresh new photo, and the other change you may notice is that the word "brief" has disappeared. Must be something to do with the fact that the book including index now has over 400 pages. Not quite so brief now. (Oh, and I am told the hardback will now also benefit from the lovely cover design. In the first two editions, the hardback was produced as a plain black "library edition", but I hear that policy has been dropped now.)

Further details to follow, I just wanted to share the lovely new cover at this stage:

Update 25.3.: details are now on the publisher's website, including:

Publication Date: 3 Aug 2021
Trim Size: 6" x 9"
Page Count: 416 pages
Illustrations: 37 b/w photos, 72 b/w illus.

Paperback: $34.95
ISBN: 9781421441290

Hardcover: $75.00
ISBN: 9781421441283

E-book: $34.95
ISBN: 9781421441306

colourful caterpillars

Author copies of my new book:

Tabakschwärmer, Bücherwürmer und Turbo-Socken:
Chemische Schwärmereien aus 10 Jahren Ausgeforscht
226 Seiten
Springer
ISBN-10: 3662593025
ISBN-13: 978-3662593028

arrived yesterday, and it is definitely available now (Eg from Blackwells, buecher.de, or amazon.de.)

When the copies arrived, I realised that the more recent cartoons (by Roland Wengenmayr) are actually printed in colour - I had no idea. Which makes this my first book with colour illustrations in the text (there were a few colour plates tucked in at the end in Non-Standard Computation).


About the book:

This is the second collection of the sketches I write for the Nachrichten aus der Chemie, the magazine of the German Chemical Society, covering roughly the last decade. The first collection was the nine million bicycles book published in Feb 2011.




The caterpillar in question is the tobacco hornworm / tobacco hawk moth (Manduca sexta), which has a remarkable resistance to nicotine as well as some other chemical tricks up its sleeve which I discussed in one of the sketches included here. I also tend to mention it whenever I write about insect ecology.

I have a strong suspicion that Lewis Carroll had this species in mind when he invented the hookah-smoking caterpillar that confuses Alice with unhelpful answers in Alice's adventures in Wonderland, so I suggested to use an Alice illustration for the cover and got through with the idea.

caterpillar book out now

UPDATE 29.10.: Book definitely available now, even though amazon now cites publication date as November.

I haven't seen a physical copy yet, but apparently my latest book in German is out today (at least that's what amazon thinks). Ask at your bookshop or get it from amazon if you must. It is the second collection of the sketches I write for the Nachrichten aus der Chemie, the magazine of the German Chemical Society, covering roughly the last decade. The first collection was the nine million bicycles book published in Feb 2011.




The caterpillar in question is the tobacco hornworm / tobacco hawk moth (Manduca sexta), which has a remarkable resistance to nicotine as well as some other chemical tricks up its sleeve which I discussed in one of the sketches included here. I have a strong suspicion that Lewis Carroll had this species in mind when he invented the hookah-smoking caterpillar that confuses Alice with unhelpful answers in Alice's adventures in Wonderland, so I suggested to use an Alice illustration for the cover and got away with it. While it may be a little bit naughty to use another author's popularity this way, I feel that after 26 years at Oxford I can claim Lewis Carroll as my cultural background.

caterpillar book

After books with platypus, gecko, and raccoon as their mascots, the next one will star an insect, namely the tobacco hornworm / tobacco hawk moth (Manduca sexta), which has a remarkable resistance to nicotine. I have a strong suspicion that Lewis Carroll had this species in mind when he invented the hookah-smoking caterpillar that confuses Alice with unhelpful answers in Alice's adventures in Wonderland, so I suggested to use an Alice illustration for the cover, which will now look like this:




The book is the second collection of my regular fun-poking pieces in Nachrichten aus der Chemie covering roughly the second decade of this activity. The first is in the volume: 9 Millionen Fahrräder am Rande des Universums.

I've started building a new page on my website for the new book, where further details will emerge with time. Watch this space.

who let the raccoons out?

My latest book in German is officially released today:

Invasion der Waschbären und andere Expeditionen in die wilde Natur
Wiley-VCH 17. Sept. 2014
pp. 255, ISBN: 978-3527-33668-5,
€ 24.90, £ 22.50

Under a broad theme of "understanding what makes living beings tick", it covers lots of recent developments in ecology and functional biology, including the orientation of ants, the intelligence of corvids, the effectiveness of protected areas, and the ecology of species invasion. The raccoon of the title is an invasive species in Europe, and I love this story in particular as it is a case where a big biological problem can be traced back to a single act of stupidity, the release of a couple of raccoons in Germany, rubber-stamped with the permission of local authorities and meant to "enrich the local fauna". Plus, of course, we need a cute animal for the cover.

Here comes the German blurb, plus some links where you can order it:

Bald leben mehr als eine Million (!) Waschbären in unseren Wäldern und nicht nur da - sie kommen uns auch in den Städten »besuchen«. Die putzigen Kerlchen können nichts dafür, denn wir sind an ihrer Verbreitung Schuld, da wir das ökologische Gleichgewicht der Natur gestört haben. Doch was genau ist eigentlich Ökologie jenseits von Ökostrom und Ökolabel?

HIGHTECH-AMEISEN, HOCHINTELLIGENTE KRÄHEN UND DER URZEIT-GINKGO Alles hängt mit allem zusammen: Gerät ein ökologisches Teilsystem aus dem Gleichgewicht, löst das oft eine Kettenreaktion aus. In dem Teil >Zusammen leben< fragt Michael Groß u. a., ob Schutzgebiete wirklich die bedrohten Arten schützen, erzählt über die Wanderschaft von Pflanzenschädlingen, die sich durch weltweite Handelsnetze auch global verbreiten, oder stellt einen Überlebenden der Dinosaurierzeit vor: den Ginkgo. Warum überlebte er damals das Massensterben der Arten?

Kohlendioxidschwaden, Vibrationen, Magnetismus, Pedometer und noch vieles mehr: All das besitzt z. B. ein sehr kleines Lebewesen - die Ameise. Sie findet mit dieser »Ausstattung« sogar in der Wüste wieder zu ihrem Nest zurück. Im Teil >Aktiv leben< stellt uns Groß diese kleinen tierischen Wunderwerke vor, berichtet aber auch von den hochintelligenten Krähen oder erzählt, wie das Krokodil seine Zähne bekam. Im Abschnitt >Weiter leben< gibt er einen Ausblick auf die »Verschmelzung von Biologie und Technologie«.

Mayersche

Hugendubel

Thalia

amazon.de (hardback and kindle)
amazon.fr (hardback and kindle)
amazon.co.uk (hardback and kindle)
amazon.co.jp (hardback and kindle)
amazon.com (only kindle version so far)

e-book formats available from the publishers

three cute animals

The release of my third cute-animal themed book is only four weeks away - after platypuses and geckos I now have a raccoon serving as a mascot. I've just set up a dedicated web page for the new book, which you'll find here:

Invasion der Waschbären .

In the process, I also found that Yahoo had shut down my website for the last three weeks, as I forgot to update my payment info (and naively assumed they would just revert to the old trick of displaying ads on my site rather than shutting it off). Apologies to anyone who got frustrated looking for the site it should now be back to normal.

The new book covers ecology and functional biology. Expect more raccoon-related ravings soon.

raccoon invasion

My next book in German, due to come out in September, is a collection of biology stories. Almost no chemistry/biochemistry this time, mainly ecology and organism level biology.

Invasion der Waschbären: und andere Expeditionen in die wilde Natur (Erlebnis Wissenschaft)

Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA; (17. September 2014) 256 Seiten,
ISBN-10: 3527336680, ISBN-13: 978-3527336685
amazon.de

The raccoon on the cover points to a story on invasive species, by the way.

More info soon ...

Astrobiologie für Einsteiger

The official publication date for the German edition of Astrobiology - A brief introduction is today (though amazon.de hasn't updated the page yet). Below the picture is a snippet from the preface.

Auszug aus dem Vorwort:

Auf der Grundlage der umfassenden (wenn auch unvollständigen) wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisse über das Leben auf der Erde stellt die Astrobiologie sich drei fundamentalen Fragen über das Leben im Universum:

• Welche physikalischen Eigenschaften ermöglichen es unserem Universum, Leben hervorzubringen?

• Wie spielte sich die Entstehung und Entwicklung des Lebens auf der Erde ab, und wie verschieden könnte dieser Prozess anderswo abgelaufen sein?

• An welchen anderen Orten im Universum könnte Leben entstanden sein, wie könnte es aussehen, und wie können wir es finden?

Der Wert der Astrobiologie liegt zum Großteil darin, dass diese Fragen vielleicht zu den fundamental wichtigsten Problemen der heutigen Wissenschaft gehören. Sie sprechen grundlegende Bedürfnisse des Menschen an, nämlich, zu wissen, wer wir sind, wo wir herkommen, und ob wir in den Weiten des Weltalls allein sind. Zusätzlicher Nutzen ergibt sich daraus, dass diese Fragen eine ungewöhnlich interdisziplinäre Vorgehensweise erfordern. Die Astrobiologie berührt eine Vielzahl von traditionellen Disziplinen wie Kosmologie, Astrophysik, Astronomie, Geologie, Chemie, Biochemie und natürlich die Biologie. Dieser Umstand verleiht den einzelnen Wissensgebieten einen neuen Grad an Bedeutung, da sie in einem weiter gefassten Kontext eingebettet werden. Andererseits macht die interdisziplinäre Natur der Astrobiologie auch eine reibungslose Kommunikation zwischen weit auseinanderliegenden Disziplinen erforderlich. Es gilt, Astronomie für Biologen verständlich zu machen, und Zellbiologie für Astrophysikerinnen. In diesem Sinne versuchen wir mit diesem Buch, den gegenwärtigen Stand der Astrobiologie einem breiten Spektrum von wissenschaftlich Interessierten, „also Hörerinnen und Hörern aller Fakultäten“ zugänglich zu machen und beschränken uns deshalb auf die notwendigen wissenschaftlichen Einzelheiten.

gecko book out now

My latest book, a collection of recent nanoworld stories in German, is now officially out and in the shops.

Michael Groß:
Von Geckos, Garn und Goldwasser:
Die Nanowelt lässt grüßen.
Wiley-VCH Sept. 2012
pp. 302, ISBN: 978-3527-33272-4,
€ 24.90, £ 22.50

Further information here. The shelf with my collected works now looks like this (there is a copy of everything that has its own ISBN number, hence hardback and paperback editions of the same title side-by-side):

Astrobiologie für Einsteiger

I’ve been quite busy over the last 12 months partly due to having two books to prepare in parallel, both to be published in German later this year. One is a collection of new(ish) nanoworld pieces, called Von Geckos, Garn und Goldwasser: Die Nanowelt lässt grüßen, due out in September.

The second, of which I’ve just finished processing the page proofs, is a German translation of Astrobiology: a brief introduction (based on the 2nd English edition which came out last year). This should be out in December, and you can already pre-order it on amazon.de and amazon.co.uk. And it will look like this:

And I just had a brilliant idea for a new project, so I’m off to write a new proposal …

PS: Astrobiologie für Einsteiger is one of the first two titles in a new series of short textbooks. The other one is: Chemie für Einsteiger und Durchsteiger by Thomas Wurm, out on the same day.

gecko alert

I have recently submitted both the book manuscripts that have kept me very busy since September, so I can now begin to reveal what they are about. The first one is a collection of nanoworld-related pieces from the last six years or so, written in German. It is organised similarly to my very first book, Expeditionen in den Nanokosmos(1995), which later appeared in English as Travels to the Nanoworld, although the field has grown and changed a lot since then.

Back in 1995, travels to the world of the invisibly small were the reserve of a very small number of well-equipped and adventurous pioneers. Now there are “nano” labelled institutes and companies everywhere, there are nanosized structures in every computer you can buy in the shops, and there are nanoparticles in most sun lotions.

The field has become so huge that I wouldn’t be able to give a representative account of it. Thus, the idea this time was to present my compilation of nano articles as a collection of “postcards from the nanoworld” without claiming much logic or completeness. These glimpses at the vastness of the small world would be flanked by an introduction and an outlook chapter as they were in my very first book.

This concept worked out very well for the content of the book, but didn’t quite make it onto the cover. The publishers preferred to pick specific ideas from the collection, so we’ve ended up with a gecko-themed book called "Von Geckos, Garn und Goldwasser: Die Nanoweltwelt lässt grüßen" which in a way fits in nicely with my previous platypus collection .

The book is due to come out in September this year and will look like this:



It is already listed at amazon.de. Further details and a dedicated gecko-website to follow soon.

book projects

It turns out that I have two new books to complete by the end of January, so there won't be much time left for random blog entries until then. For the first time in nearly 12 years of self-exploitation, I've had to make a weekly timetable to allocate ringfenced time slots to both projects. Will keep plugging my feature articles though (one coming up tomorrow, in fact) and gradually reveal more about the upcoming books.

Meanwhile, the completely revised and updated second edition of Astrobiology: a brief introduction is available around the world now, so get your copy to find out everything you always wanted to know about Life and the Universe. (Note that the hardback is made for library use and therefore doesn't have a dustjacket, so it's just plain black and you don't get the lovely cover design.)

kissing platypuses

Pleased to report that the German paperback edition of my collection of crazy sexy and cool science stories, The birds, the bees, and the platypuses, will appear on February 23rd and can be pre-ordered from Amazon.de. It has kept the lovely cover design of the original hardback:




This is published on the same day as my really new book, 9 Millionen Fahrräder am Rande des Universums. Two new books in a day, I like the sound of that. Plus there is a third one scheduled for later this year, watch this space.

nine megabikes at the edge of the Universe

I just found out that my next book is going to come out earlier than I expected, on Feb 23rd. So now I have to get going building a web page for it (under construction here) and spreading the word ...

The book is in German, and it is a collection of my humour and opinion pieces from the last ten years, mostly published in Nachrichten aus der Chemie or Spektrum der Wissenschaft. Some previously unpublished gems are included as well.

The title of the book, 9 Millionen Fahrräder am Rande des Universums (9 million bicycles at the edge of the Universe) comes from a piece I wrote about Simon Singh's objections to the lyrics of Katie Melua's song 9 million bicycles back in 2005. The gist of it is obvious from my letter to the Guardian, which is online here.

The book will look like this:



I love the cover a lot. Never mind the text, buy it for the cover! Oh, and there are 14 cartoons by Roland Wengenmayr inside as well.



PS (4.3.) It's now listed at amazon.co.uk with the correct title!

book reviews collection out now

It's taken me a while to sort out the tedious bits (I had forgotten the copyright page and had to re-publish), but now my book reviews collection

The noughties brought to book

has arrived at Amazon.com, and can be ordered here. Update: As of 1.7.2010, it is now also available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.de.

One can also order it directly from Lulu.com, but that may end up being more expensive, as they don't normally do free shipping.