Inspired by Darwin and von Humboldt, ARW travelled to the Amazon Basin and the Malay Archipelago. He published a paper on natural selection in 1858, a year before Darwin's Origin of Species... read more
Freud is the primary focus here, but we also encounter Klimt, Schiele, Herzl, Empress Sisi and many others in this fine account of the new understanding of the mind that arose from Vienna at... read more
A grand tour of the 'big five' wipe-outs in history, with names such as 'the Carnian Pluvial Event' and 'the Great Dying'. These are tough days at the office of nomenclature.
A hotter, drier earth means a dustier earth. Owens frames these microparticles as the insidious biproduct of industrialism, whose immense repercussions will be felt ever more powerfully in ... read more
Biotechnology is becoming big business, the stuff of both dreams and nightmares. Cobb is an eminently reasonable guide to this strange new world: gene-editing, cloning, GMOs, ethics, etc.