Erlebnis Wissenschaft

for more than a decade, from Was Biotronik alles kann (2002) to Invasion der Waschbären (2014), my books in German were published by Wiley-VCH, mostly in their general pop-science series Erlebnis Wissenschaft (not quite translatable, this suggests science is an exciting experience).

Since the publication of the raccoons’ book in 2014, I have had no luck with further proposals, and have been given to understand that the sales of the series weren’t as good as the publisher hoped. Checking up the programme this summer, I realised that the last new title was published in 2016. One that is listed in 2018 is in fact the paperback version of a book previously published in hardback. Coming from the main website, the list doesn’t even have a link, so I had to use search engines to find it here. So, reluctantly, I am having to switch back to hustle mode and try to find a new publisher.

I can accept that on a purely balance-based reckoning, the books may not have been very profitable, but then again, Wiley-VCH is a huge publisher with successful academic titles (the white and blue design inherited from the original Verlag Chemie) as well as the licence for the German version of the hugely successful “For Dummies” series, not to mention a vast array of academic journals. All of which surely could help to fund a bit of an effort to help the public understanding of science with a series of intermediate level popular science books.

Oh well. I may have written critical reviews of one or two of the titles shown below, but I surely will miss the series.




For this photo I rounded up my own titles in the series and a few from other authors. Since taking the photo I keep discovering others that I forgot (eg the biographies of Haber and Lynen and the memoir of Schatz – for the biographies alone it would be worthwhile keeping the series alive).

robot ecology

robots are beginning to take over our planet, so it's time to start worrying what they will do to the existing systems, from ecology to economy. Which was a sufficient excuse for me to write a third robot feature (previous attempts date from 2015 and 2013), which is out now:

How will robots integrate into our world?
Current Biology Volume 27, Issue 6, pR199–R201, 20 March 2017

FREE access to full text and PDF download







The robot exhibition at the Science Museum, London (own photo). I'll also add some of my pics from that exhibition to my flickr photostream.

beyond silicon

Moore's law, the famous (partially self-fulfilling) prophecy that has defined the current technology revolution, turned 50 this spring, and, give or take a few tweaks, it's still holding up ok. However, we are now in sight of some serious physical limits to the further improvements possible with silicon technology. Thus, experts are asking what comes beyond silicon, and in my latest feature in Chemistry & Industry I have rounded up some of the answers, both speculative and real-world ones.

Beyond Silicon

Chemistry & Industry No. 7, pp 42-45

limited access to full text and PDF download.

This all reminds me of the 1990s, when we were also worrying about limits to chip technology, only then it was the wavelength of visible light that limited the optical techniques. Overcoming these limits enabled the boom in nanotechnology and all of today's communication tech. Exotic alternatives such as molecular computation, which I discussed in a chapter in this book:

were already explored back then, but remain in the realm of the less likely paths today.

In the same issue, there's also my review of the book

Low cost emergency water purification technologies by Ray and Jain.

a robot's life for me

there are exciting things going on in the fields of robotics, biomimetics, and biohybrids, but for some reason researchers in these fields tend to communicate their important results via conference proceedings rather than high profile journals. So when I went to the conference Living Machines at London in July, I realised that there are lots of things that hadn't shown up in the pages of Nature and Science. I haven't really looked at these issues since publishing "Biotronik" ten years ago - a book in German which looked at biohybrids and the interface between biology and electronics.

Trying to make up for lost time, I wrote a feature about these things, which is out today in Current Biology:

Towards living machines

Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 18, R821-R823, 23 September 2013 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.09.004

Free access to full text and PDF download.

Vicky Vouloutsi from Barcelona held an intriguing talk about programming social behaviour on the established android system iCub (I could have benefited from such programming in my early life too!), so I took a snap of her and her pet:

plastic electrodes plugged into brain

Among this week's Advanced Materials Early View there is a paper on using polymer electrodes to establish permanent electronic contact with living brain cells. The authors claim the quality of neuronal recording with their device is better than with conventional metal electrodes. This sounds very promising to me, both in terms of restoring function to people with nerve damage, and also with regard to sci-fi style brain-machine interfaces. As I've said before, the boundaries between electronic and biological systems are disappearing.

Reference:

Interfacing Conducting Polymer Nanotubes with the Central Nervous System: Chronic Neural Recording using Poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) Nanotubes
Mohammad Reza Abidian, Kip A. Ludwig, Timothy C. Marzullo, David C. Martin, Daryl R. Kipke
Published Online: Jul 29 2009 9:30AM
DOI: 10.1002/adma.200900887

astrobiology for aliens

Good news for all those aliens who are picking up our electronic communications but haven't dared to get in touch yet. They can now read

Astrobiology: a brief introduction

in Kindle format. Assuming, of course, they have abducted a few Kindle readers or figured out how to build the thing on their own.



My previous experience with electronic formats has been rather mixed. Way back in 2000 or so I was contacted by a company that wanted to publish my nanoworld book as an e-book and got as far as signing a contract before the company went bust in the dotcom crash.

Then there was the curious case of "Was Biotronik alles kann", which had to be pulled from the shops because of a lawsuit against the use of the B-word in the title. While the case was open, the publishers issued the content as an online book (pdf files of chapters to download separately, or institutional licences for the whole thing), with the offending word replaced by Biotronic. The publishers won the case in the end and the k could be restored.

PS: I almost forgot to mention that the current generation of ebook readers uses a display technology, e-ink, which I wrote about when it was first published in 1998. It took less than a decade to move from the lab bench into the shops. One of the rare cases where my optimistic "predictions" have actually come true.

a molecular hub

This almost looked like a breakthrough in molecular computing, but after a lot of thinking I've come to the conclusion that it's probably just a molecular hub, i.e. a device that can distribute an input signal to eight output channels.

But then again, I may be wrong, and this may really be a work of staggering genius :) Judge for yourself.

matters of the heart

Peter Houghton, I learned from his obituary this week, lived 7 1/2 years with an artificial heart, and is thus the longest surviving patient with this device. Love the story of how a thief tried to steal his bag with the battery pack, but got scared off by the alarm (built in to avoid accidental unplugging, not theft!).

They don't mention what he died of, though. Nor which factors limit the survival times.