BOOK REVIEWED-The Open Laboratory 2007: the Best Science Writing on Blogs

by Reed Cartwright

Lulu.com: 2008.

The editor of this second anthology of the best scientific communiqu's from the blogosphere thinks blogs offer new ways to discuss science. The Open Laboratory 2007: the Best Science Writing on Blogs (Lulu.com, 2008) takes the curious approach of using dead tree format to highlight the diversity of scientific ideas, opinions and voices flowing across the Internet. Every year a different guest editor — here Reed Cartwright, a blogger and genetics and bioinformatics postdoc from North Carolina State University — picks the best posts to coincide with the Science Blogging Conference (in North Carolina on 19 January). First-hand accounts bring to life the stresses of a graduate student, a mother returning to the bench and an archaeologist's joy at unearthing mammoth fossils. Topics tackled are as varied as the writers, from Viagra and tapeworms to trepanning. Explanations are often offered with a personal twist, such as a father's tale of his child's Asperger's syndrome. The measured voices of trustworthy academics make medical research easy to swallow. If you are overwhelmed by the surge in science-related blogging and don't know where to start, then this compilation may help you steer a course through the sea of perspectives on offer — or inspire you to start a blog yourself.

BOOK REVIEWED-Things the Grandchildren Should Know

by Mark Oliver Everett

Little, Brown: 2008

Mark Oliver Everett sought to understand the world through music, not science. The lead singer of US rock group Eels made sense of his troubled family history first via song-writing and now in an autobiography — Things the Grandchildren Should Know (Little, Brown, 2008). His late father, the physicist Hugh Everett III, suggested the radical idea of parallel worlds in quantum theory — every time a certainty is measured, the universe splits in two parallel strands, each with a different outcome. The breadth of his father's ideas are not lost on Mark, who poignantly links them to his sister's suicide: in one world she may be dead, yet in another alive. It is an intriguing personal perspective on an influential scientist's life from his family and to note the impact his science made on a young man with a powerful messenger, the guitar.

J.B.