Prose and Passion

When I started out writing about science, 20 years ago, I tended to end my articles on an optimistic note, along the lines of: now the mole...

German publications in November and December cover foaming proteins, dance your PhD, chemical elements you can by from Holland & Barrett...

Highly sophisticated societies have collapsed (i.e. lost a lot of of their complexity very quickly) in the past, and there is no reason why ...

The shortlisted titles for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books this year are: Bird Sense by Tim Birkhead The Particle at the ...

If you work with proteins in a lab, one thing is for sure: you do not want your protein solution to foam. When it does foam, you can probabl...

Consciousness is a field that I've avoided until now, as I thought it was hardly accessible to scientific method, and even if scientists...

Stradivarius by Toby Faber Macmillan 2004 / Pan 2005 (US title: Stradivari’s genius) The man we now know as the most famous luthier* of al...

We're in the middle of a global disaster for biodiversity, but here's a tiny speck of good news: a few dozen species of mammals and ...

On September 2nd, I changed my “about” text to indicate that my tumblr blog would henceforth be focused on book-related things: “I blog a...

I've avoided the topic of shale gas for a while, seeing that the stupidity of digging up fossil fuels that we can't afford to burn s...

review of Lucky break by Esther Freud Lucky break charts episodes from the interlinked lives of a bunch of aspiring actors who meet at dr...

The monthly roundup of things published in German magazines yields algal biofuels, mind-altering drugs and mysterious mechanisms: Forschun...