Books & Arts

Earth's climate and biosphere have always shaped one another. James F. Kasting approves of an attempt to reveal the planet's future by reading its past.

John A. Goldsmith is intrigued by the life of a linguistics giant who felt himself to be a failure.

Simon Lewis gets to grips with a climate scientist's account of a conflict that began with a graph.

Anthony King savours a surreally varied show on food, from glowing sushi to 1,001 uses for a pig carcass.

Barry Mazur, a mathematician at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has explored the literary side of mathematics. With the publication this month of Circles Disturbed, a collection of essays on mathematics and narrative that he edited with writer Apostolos Doxiadis, he talks about the overlapping realms of mathematics and the imagination.

Computer scientist Erik Demaine uses origami to advance computational geometry and create art. His paper sculptures, made with his father, artist Martin Demaine, are now on show at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, California; from August, the exhibition will tour the United States. He explains the challenges of folding together mathematics and art.

Francis Halzen is exhilarated by a trek through stories of research and exploration in Antarctica.

Robert Stickgold revels in a lively account of a quest to quantify consciousness.

A chronicle of events preceding the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has a thriller-like edge, finds Amanda Mascarelli.

Stefan Michalowski and Georgia Smith thrill to artist Berenice Abbott's 'portraits' of physical forces.

Vijay Iyer is a New York jazz pianist who has academic roots in physics and music cognition. As he releases Accelerando — a follow-up to his 2009 world number one jazz album Historicity — he talks about the bodily origins of rhythm, the science of improvisation and the social function of music.

Daniel Cressey reflects on a play that uses astronomy and medicine to probe what it means to see.

Jo Marchant uncovers a mixed hoard in a history of Tutankhamun and the discovery of his tomb.

Thomas Misa ponders a history of computing that focuses firmly on John von Neumann and the 'Princeton crowd'.

Giovanni Frazzetto explores how theatre exerts its psychological effects on the emotions.