Science
Powering Up: Unleashing the clean energy supply chain by Alan Finkel
An Intimate History of Evolution: The story of the Huxley family by Alison Bashford
Dark Winter: An insider’s guide to pandemics and biosecurity by Raina MacIntyre
Science, Secrecy and the Smithsonian: The strange history of the Pacific Ocean biological survey by Ed Regis
Taking to the Field: A history of Australian women in science by Jane Carey
How We Live and Why We Die: The secret lives of cells by Lewis Wolpert
This year sees the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his On the Origin of Species. It also sees the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns (1759–96). The media have been full of the Darwin anniversaries, but we have heard rather less about Burns, at least in Australia. Yet Burns is arguably as important as Darwin in our cultural formation.
... (read more)Charles Darwin by Tim M. Berra & Darwin’s Armada by lain McCalman
On 17 July 1990, President George Bush Snr declared the 1990s as the ‘Decade of the Brain’, with the primary aim ‘to enhance public awareness of the benefits to be derived from brain research’. These benefits included better understanding of conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, stroke and psychiatric disorders. In addition, remarkable advances occurred in functional brain imaging. This still-evolving technology reveals which parts of the brain are active while people carry out tasks of varying complexity, ranging from the manipulation of objects or the processing of sensory information, through to the analysis of problem solving, the voluntary control of emotional responses, or the reconstruction of imaginary events. Faced with a wealth of new experimental data, disciplines such as linguistics and philosophy can no longer develop theoretical models that treat the brain as a black box within which structure and function do not matter.
... (read more)