Category Science and nature books

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Original Sin by Kathryn Paige Harden review – are criminals born or made?

A psychologist delves into the genetics of bad behaviour in a book littered with fascinating scientific findings

In 2021, the psychologist and writer Kathryn Paige Harden co-authored a paper outlining her research into the genetic patterns linked to a higher risk of developing substance abuse problems or engaging in risk-taking behaviour, such as having unprotected sex or committing crime. The paper referred to the genetics of “traits related to self-regulation and addiction”, but Harden thought of herself as studying the genetics of sin.

Harden is a professor at the University of Texas and the author of a previous book, The Genetic Lottery, on how our knowledge of genetics should shape our views on meritocracy. She once received a letter from a man who has been in prison since he was 16 for kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman. “What would drive a boy to do such a thing?” he asked her. Her new book is a heartfelt, subtly argued response to his question, an attempt to outline how our expanding knowledge of what makes people do bad things – the interplay of our inherited tendencies and our life circumstances – should influence how we assign moral responsibility and blame.

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We Know You Can Pay a Million by Anja Shortland review – the terrifying new world of ransomware

Criminals extorting money online have created huge businesses, complete with branding and HR

The birth of ransomware was a stunt that got out of hand. In 1989, an evolutionary biologist called Joseph L Popp Jr was working part time for the World Health Organisation on the Aids epidemic. He was a difficult man. When he was denied a permanent job, he decided to punish his peers while shocking them into acknowledging another kind of infection: the computer virus.

Popp wrote a questionnaire promising to help minimise the risk of contracting HIV, duplicated it on to 20,000 floppy discs, and sent them to researchers in 90 countries. Each disc contained a Trojan virus. Once it was inserted, a malware timebomb eventually made the computer unusable until the user paid a “licence fee” of $189 to a PO box in Panama. Popp’s primitive “Aids Trojan” was quickly identified and he was arrested for blackmail. Intending to make a point rather than a profit, he was mortified to learn that some of his targets had overreacted by wiping their hard drives: one Italian Aids organisation lost a decade’s worth of vital data. Popp experienced a psychological collapse and was deemed unfit to stand trial. The criminals who developed his crude innovation into a global business would not be so scrupulous.

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When the Forest Breathes by Suzanne Simard review – the Indiana Jones of trees returns

The author of Finding the Mother Tree is back with an inspiring call to the next generation of ecologists

It’s 2021, and Suzanne Simard is in a police vehicle, being escorted off a protest site in Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island, where activists are locked in a standoff with the Teal-Jones Group, an industrial logging company. She decides to give the apprehending officer a piece of her mind – in the way only an earnest Canadian forestry ecologist can. “It takes decades for clearcut forests to stop emitting more carbon than they sequester, and centuries more to recover the sink strength of the original stands,” she tells him. “We don’t have decades for these forests to recover from clearcutting. In the hundreds of years it takes for a forest to mature, our planet could warm upwards of five degrees celsius.”

The officer is unmoved. But if you were responsible for one of the nearly 6m views tallied on Simard’s 2016 TED talk, you’ll know it was worth a try: few people can speak about trees with quite as much conviction as Simard. One part Indiana Jones, one part Mister Rogers, she is a Canadian national treasure and global environmental icon. When she’s not getting taken away from protests by the authorities, she’s dodging the flames of forest fires in the Cariboo Mountains of British Columbia, exploring the Haida Gwaii archipelago (“Canada’s Galapagos”), or off learning Indigenous practices in the Amazon. In her TED talk, she describes once sprinting through the forest with a syringe filled with radioactive isotopes in each hand as she is chased by a grizzly bear.

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The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby review – the story of the man who changed the world

A journalist charts the progress of AI pioneer Demis Hassabis from child chess prodigy to Nobel prize winner

It was March 2016, and at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, the world was gathered to watch the culmination of a battle 2,500 years in the making. On one side was the South Korean Lee Se-dol, the second-highest ranking Go player in the world. On the other was AlphaGo – a computer program developed by London-based artificial intelligence research company DeepMind.

“Chess is the greatest game mankind has invented,” game designer Alex Randolph once said. “Go is the greatest game mankind has discovered.” Something about the ancient Chinese duel, where players place stones on a grid, trying to capture territory, feels fundamental – inevitable, even. Chess had fallen to the robots nearly 20 years earlier, when DeepBlue beat Kasparov, but Go, with its vast decision space (there are far more legal board positions than atoms in the observable universe) remained a plucky holdout.

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‘My ideas are a little revolutionary’: ecologist Suzanne Simard on intelligent forests, the climate and her critics

Her research popularised the idea of the wood wide web, but the scientific backlash was brutal. As the author of The Mother Tree returns to the forest in a new book, she discusses her battle to reimagine our relationship with nature

In 2018, the ecologist and writer Suzanne Simard was conducting research in the forested Caribou Mountains of western Canada when a thunderstorm rolled in. She was with her two teenage daughters and her close friend and colleague, Jean Roach. They saw flashes of lightning, heard a loud rumble and then they smelled smoke. They were forced to run the half kilometre back to Simard’s truck as the trees behind them caught alight and the air grew thick. As they ran, animals burst out of the forest: a deer, a rabbit, a grey wolf. They reached the truck with no time to spare, all four of them covered in soot and dirt. Overhead, helicopters began circling the orange-black air, dropping water on the flames below.

Wildfires have become an ever bigger problem in Canada. The 2018 wildfires were the biggest in British Columbia’s history, but this record was broken in 2021, and then again in 2023, when fires consumed an area three times the size of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia and the smoke travelled as far as New York City. The cause is not only global heating, which has brought hotter, dryer summers, but also the changing makeup of the forest. When logging companies clear forest, they replant it with fast-growing conifer species, but these trees are much more flammable than Canada’s diverse, native forest.

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Do Not Go Gentle by Kathleen Stock review – the case against euthanasia

The philosopher offers a measured and reasonable argument against assisted dying

In this admirably clear and cogent book, the philosopher Kathleen Stock sets out the case against state-sanctioned assisted dying. Her immediate objection is to the end of life bill currently before the House of Lords, but her opposition extends to the principle in general. This is a polemic, but a polite one. Stock says she hopes that by the end of it we will share her objection to the ‘‘institutionalisation of death”.

It is not a popular place to start. Polls over the past few years consistently show that around three-quarters of Britons are in favour of assisted dying for terminally ill people. But Stock has never been afraid of swimming upstream. In 2021, she resigned from the University of Sussex following protests by some staff and students over her views, set out in the book Material Girls, that sex is binary and immutable and that this, rather than gender identity, should be the basis of laws to protect women.

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Ancient by Luke Barley review – the secret history of Britain’s woodlands

A former ranger tells the story of how the UK’s forests intimately shaped – and were shaped by – its people

It may not sit well with the politicians who now seek to govern it, but Britain has always been a land of immigrants – our “native” fauna and flora among them. More than 10,000 years ago, in the wake of retreating ice sheets, trees from the warmer south began to re-colonise this chilly north-western fringe of Europe: first birch, then hazel, elm, oak and alder. By the time rising sea levels submerged the marshy lowlands connecting it to the rest of the continent, the new British mainland was covered in a luxuriant tangle of forest. In this primeval wildwood, a squirrel could leap tree-to-tree from north coast to south, east coast to west.

Or so one story goes. In Ancient, woodland expert Luke Barley sets out to tell a more complex and fascinating tale of our forests and the people that have lived with and made use of them. His title points back to the post-ice age woodland and its forerunners in sweltering or wintry deep prehistory, but it also holds a more specific meaning. Under classifications drawn up in the 1970s, a UK wood is considered “ancient” if it was already in existence by 1600 (in Scotland, by 1750), as shown on the earliest accurate maps. These are our last links to the wildwood, places where the undisturbed soil still supports a rich and intricate ecosystem that no human ingenuity can recreate.

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A World Appears by Michael Pollan review – a kaleidoscopic exploration of consciousness

The journalist and polymath probes the mysteries of the mind in this unsettling yet life-affirming investigation

The brain, wrote Charles Scott Sherrington, is an “enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern”. The British neuroscientist created this striking image more than 80 years ago, a time when mechanised looms, not computers, embodied the idea of technology. Even so, the symbolism feels relevant. We struggle to talk of our brains or minds without recourse to the machine metaphor: once it was clocks, then looms, and now computers. We say that our brains are hardwired; we talk of our ability to process information.

The quote appears as merely a footnote in Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears, a fabulous and mind-expanding exploration of consciousness: how and why we are self-aware. But the whole thing can be read as a lucid and impassioned riposte to Sherrington’s conception of the mind as a machine. In Pollan’s view, we have become imprisoned by such narratives, which have obscured the richness and complexity of human and non-human consciousness. Bridging both science and the humanities, Pollan mines neuroscientific research, philosophy, literature and his own mind, searching for different ways to think about being, and what it feels like.

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‘I’m the psychedelic confessor’: the man who turned a generation on to hallucinogens returns with a head-spinning book about consciousness

With the Omnivore’s Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan transformed our understanding of food and drugs. Can he do the same for our sense of self?

Several years ago, Michael Pollan had a disturbing encounter. The relentlessly curious journalist and author was at a conference on plant behaviour in Vancouver. There, he’d learned that when plants are damaged, they produce an anaesthetising chemical, ethylene. Was this a form of self-soothing, like the release of endorphins after an injury in humans? He asked František Baluška, a cell biologist, if it meant that plants might feel pain. Baluška paused, before answering: “Yes, they should feel pain. If you don’t feel pain, you ignore danger and you don’t survive.”

I imagine that Pollan gulped at that point. I certainly did when I read his account of the meeting in his latest book, A World Appears. Where does it leave our efforts at ethical consumption, if literally everybody hurts – including vegetables?

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Off the Scales by Aimee Donnellan review – inside the Ozempic revolution

A fascinating deep dive into the discovery, use and implications of a revolutionary new treatment

Few aspects of being human have generated more judgment, scorn and condemnation than a person’s size, shape and weight – particularly if you happen to be female. As late as 2022, the Times’s columnist Matthew Parris published a column headlined “Fat shaming is the only way to beat the obesity crisis” in which he attributed Britain’s “losing battle with fat” to society’s failure to goad and stigmatise the overweight into finally, shamefacedly, eating less. The tendency to equate excess weight with poor character (and thinness with grit and self-control) treats obesity as a moral as well as physical failing – less a disease than a lifestyle choice.

One of the great strengths of Reuters journalist Aimee Donnellan’s first book is its insistence on framing the discovery of the new weight-loss drugs within the fraught social and cultural context of beauty norms, body image and health. For those who need them, weekly injections of Ozempic, Wegovy or Mounjaro can be revolutionary. Yet for every person with diabetes or obesity taking the drugs to improve their health, others – neither obese nor diabetic – are obtaining them to get “beach-body” ready, fit into smaller dresses, or attain the slender aesthetic social media demands of them. Small wonder some commentators have likened the injections to “an eating disorder in a pen”.

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