Barbara Kiser
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Editor, writer, ex-commissioning ed. of Nature Books and Arts. Still in pursuit of joined-up thinking.
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Articles by Barbara Kiser
Books at budtime: spring reading
Ferdinand Hodler, Cherry Tree in Bloom, 1905 Budding, rising, rooting — the rush hour of life is on with the northern hemisphere’s tilt towards the long day and the light. Meanwhile, either side of the equinox, new leaves on the literary tree have unfurled. One investigates the shadow side of a scientific icon. Two give art history a salutary shakeup.
Books at budtime: spring reading
Ferdinand Hodler, Cherry Tree in Bloom, 1905 Budding, rising, rooting — the rush hour of life is on with the northern hemisphere’s tilt towards the long day and the light. Meanwhile, either side of the equinox, new leaves on the literary tree have unfurled. One investigates the shadow side of a scientific icon. Two give art history a salutary shakeup.
Books in brief
Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week's best science picks. From the Great Wall to the Great Collider: China and the Quest to Uncover the Inner Workings of the Universe Steve Nadis and Shing-Tung Yau. International Press of Boston (2015) 9781571463104 The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Europe's particle-physics lab, CERN, has witnessed game-changing discoveries, not least the Higgs boson in 2012. Now, rival ideas for successors are evolving (see Nature 511, 394–395; 2014).
A view From the Bridge
A view From the Bridge March 3, 2015 | 2:30 pm | Posted by Barbara Kiser | Category: Arts, Medical research Posted on behalf of Andrew Jermy At the age of 12, I was knocked off my bicycle by a car, resulting in a compound fracture to my right leg that required pins and an external cage to enable the bone to reset and the wound to heal. Antibiotic therapy kept the threat of infection at bay.
Books in brief
The Truth in Small Doses: Why We're Losing the War on Cancer — and How to Win It Clifton Leaf Simon & Schuster (2013) The US 'war on cancer' begun in 1971 has been an overall failure, argues journalist and cancer survivor Clifton Leaf. Over the past 40 years, he shows, crude deaths of US citizens from cancer have risen by 14%, although those from stroke and other killer diseases have fallen. The developing-world burden is also rising.
Transformative fictions, moveable feasts
Floris van Dyck, Still-Life, 1610 (oil on oak board; public domain, via Wikimedia Commons). The stretch from winter solstice to vernal equinox is a stop-start time — a limbo, a suspension, up to its ankles in mud. Once, anarchic jamborees broke up the bleakness, from the Saturnalia of ancient Rome and Twelfth Night to the Celtic Imbolc at the start of February, inching us further towards spring with a festival of light, fire and feasting.
A view From the Bridge
A view From the Bridge July 8, 2015 | 2:20 pm | Posted by Barbara Kiser | Category: Arts, Geology Cloud Fire Head, caramel onyx, by Emily Young. The Fine Art Society, London Human culture is bedded in stone — from the 3.3-million-year-old rock tools dug up near Kenya’s Lake Turkana to China’s Great Wall.
A journey through books: 2020
Vincent van Gogh, Piles of French Novels, 1888 (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam). How did they do it? Somehow, in the midst of a pandemic and economic meltdown, book publishers kept up the flow. As a marathon swimmer in the literary ocean, I was impressed. I’d spent a decade helming the Books and Arts section at the science journal Nature, assessing hundreds of science books a year, commissioning and editing 10 to 20 pieces a week and writing a weekly review column. In May I went freelance.
Marine Minds
Barbara Kiser The Wall Street Journal December 1, 2020 Life undersea has a mesmerizing strangeness, from glass sponges—lacy matrices draped with cellular nets—to rococo sea dragons and soft corals like trees in a slow wind.
‘Metazoa’ Review: Marine Minds
Life undersea has a mesmerizing strangeness, from glass sponges—lacy matrices draped with cellular nets—to rococo sea dragons and soft corals like trees in a slow wind. It’s the stuff of a thousand documentaries, but for Peter Godfrey-Smith the spectacle is a curtain-raiser to a profound scientific drama, in which the lives of quite un-human creatures illuminate deep mysteries about the nature of sentience, and what it means to possess a mind.
Books in brief
Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week's best science picks. The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World Andrea Wulf Knopf (2015) 9780385350662 | ISBN: 978-0-3853-5066-2 Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) electrified fellow polymaths such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, discovered climate zones and grasped the impact of industrialization on nature.
Hunger games: food security on stage and screen
A view From the Bridge September 25, 2015 | 4:21 pm | Posted by Barbara Kiser | Category: Agriculture, Business, Development Metta Theatre’s production of Lydia Adetunji’s Bread on the Table juxtaposes food commodity trading and starvation in poorer countries. Richard Davenport A Nigerian farmer feeds her last cow to a man who pays with his life. A biologist in an agribusiness-dominated dictatorship risks death by growing potatoes.
Science of colour: Hue and eye
Barbara Kiser revels in an immersive show revealing the scientific base coat to 700 years of European art. Making Colour The National Gallery, London. Until 7 September 2014. For millennia, artists chased the blues — from Egyptian blue frit to ultramarine, azurite, cobalt blue and indigo.
Data judo, the interconnected self, and the dystopia in Silicon Valley: Books in brief
Dark Data David J. Hand Princeton Univ. Press (2020) We are deluged with billions of bytes of data, yet much crucial information goes unseen and unreported. So reveals statistician David Hand in this penetrating study of missing (‘dark’) data and its impacts on decisions — skewing stats, enabling fraud, embedding inequity and triggering preventable catastrophes.
How to age well, a culinary journey, and why you’re not as gullible as you thought: Books in brief
BOOK REVIEW 08 January 2020 Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks. Not Born Yesterday Hugo Mercier Princeton Univ. Press (2019) We’re a hard species to dupe, argues cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier in this persuasive study on the science of belief. Drawing on research and historical case studies from the French Revolution to the Nazis, Mercier demonstrates that we have powerful cognitive mechanisms that enable us to weigh up a range of cues.
A heliocentric epic, volcanic viniculture, and cartoon chemistry: Books in brief
Heaven on Earth J. S. Fauber Pegasus (2019) Four towering sixteenth-century scientists — Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei — discovered heliocentrism at a time of sociopolitical tumult. As J. S. Fauber drives home in this dynamic science history, their intermeshed stories form a mighty “intergenerational epic” sweeping in the likes of Brahe’s sister Sophie and Galileo’s daughter Virginia.
The truth in Moby-Dick, what makes science trustworthy, and the board game that won a war: Books in brief
Ahab’s Rolling Sea Richard J. King Univ. Chicago Press (2019) Herman Melville’s sprawling masterpiece Moby-Dick (1851) is a fictional feat studded with empirical evidence, reveals maritime historian Richard King in this invigorating study. King traces references to ethology, meteorology, marine microbiota and the oceans to Melville’s sailing experience in the Pacific and wranglings with the works of scientists William Scoresby, Louis Agassiz and others.
Books in brief
Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week's best science picks. Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin. Cambridge University Press (2014) 9781107074064 The poor fit between relativity and the quantum impedes our understanding of the Universe. Now philosopher Roberto Unger and theoretical physicist Lee Smolin propose a new model resting on three assumptions: time is real; mathematics is a limited tool; and there is only one Universe at a time.
Books in brief
Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week's best science picks. Annie Matan and Peter Newman. Island (2016) 9781610917148 For half a century, Danish architect and writer Jan Gehl has been enacting a revolution in people-centred urban design. Like Jane Jacobs (see page 614), Gehl rejects the sterile functionalism of modernism, instead methodically analysing human behaviour in shared spaces — the “life between buildings” — to isolate criteria for holistic planning.
H. G. Wells, Disney’s pioneering women and an oncologist’s memoir: Books in brief
BOOK REVIEW 30 October 2019 Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks. Inventing Tomorrow Sarah Cole Columbia University Press (2019) H. G. Wells was, asserts scholar Sarah Cole, a pioneer adept at “rescaling the cosmos and humanity’s place in it”. He straddled the border between science and literature, but not all his complexities were benign: he both repudiated racism and for some time shamefully ascribed to ideas on eugenics.
Psychedelic psychiatry, breast cancer, and a paean to the emperor penguin: Books in brief
BOOKS AND ARTS 09 October 2019 Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks. The Body Bill Bryson Doubleday (2019) From skin to gut, the human body is a realm of wonder, and Bill Bryson’s tome explores it to its thrumming depths. The book bristles with data such as our allotment of cells (37.2 trillion) or daily faeces production (200 grams), but the star turns are Bryson’s wry forays into the histories of neuroscience, genetics, anatomy and immunology.
Fighting for food, penguin sex, and sewers on display: Books in brief
BOOKS AND ARTS 02 October 2019 Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks. Food or War Julian Cribb Cambridge University Press (2019) Hammered by environmental stresses and mismanagement, our food system is inequitable and unstable. As science journalist Julian Cribb argues in this incisive analysis, that can lead to conflict — as it did during the 2007–10 drought in Syria, which devastated crops and helped spark the war.
Einstein in Britain, worlds on the ebb, and a new angle on climate engineering: Books in brief
BOOKS AND ARTS 25 September 2019 Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks. Einstein on the Run Andrew Robinson Yale University Press (2019) Albert Einstein’s life and work in Germany, Switzerland and the United States are exhaustively documented. The physics luminary, however, deeply admired Britain; and it’s this “entanglement” that science writer (and frequent Nature contributor) Andrew Robinson explores in his sparkling study.
Climate and crisis: what survives
Kathleen Jamie at Links of Noltland in Orkney, UK.Credit: Graeme Wilson Surfacing Kathleen Jamie Penguin Press (2019) What are nature and culture on a planet we have exhaustively mapped and immeasurably changed? How are we ourselves altered in that process? In Surfacing, the poet and writer Kathleen Jamie explores this liminal space.
Synthetic meat, racism at the poles, and the long road to the opioid crisis: Books in Brief
Meat Planet Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft University of California Press (2019) In 2013, physiologist Mark Post wowed world media with a lab-grown burger, cultured from bovine muscle cells at a cost of nearly US$300,000. Yet that brave new food is still a fledgling biotechnology. Historian Benjamin Wurgaft explores this “small, strange world” in a thoughtful study mixing science reportage with philosophical meditations.
What makes a dictator, a guide to the apocalypse, and demythologizing language: Books in brief
BOOKS AND ARTS 28 August 2019 Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks. How to Be a Dictator Frank Dikötter Bloomsbury (2019) For this magisterial study on the misuse of power, historian Frank Dikötter analysed the strategies of eight brutal twentieth-century dictators.
Living commodities, fraud in the lab, and a history of nautical navigation: Books in brief
Strange Harvests Edward Posnett Viking (2019) The global journeys of commodities such as salt have largely been told. In this subtle, reflective study, nature writer Edward Posnett follows the wake of seven very different products. Harvested from living plants and animals, they range from tagua (vegetable ivory, the nut of South American palm Phytelephas) to byssus (the ‘sea silk’ exuded by marine molluscs as anchorage).
Environmental racism, the world as it isn’t, and a guided tour of the planets: Books in brief
BOOKS AND ARTS 31 July 2019 Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks. A Terrible Thing to Waste Harriet A. Washington Little, Brown Spark (2019) Exposure to lead, mercury and other toxins poses big risks to public health and neural development. And it disproportionately affects people of colour, notably in the United States, where 68% of African Americans (compared with 56% of white people) live within 48 kilometres of a coal-fired power plant.
A saga of extinction, Tesla in his time, and explorations under the surface of skin: Books in brief
BOOKS AND ARTS 17 July 2019 Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks. The Missing Lynx Ross Barnett Bloomsbury (2019) The story of life on Earth is a saga of extinction, declares palaeontologist Ross Barnett in this fresh and assured natural history of departed megafauna. Arguing that human ‘overkill’ was (with climate change) a major driver long before our population exploded in the Holocene epoch, Barnett uses Britain as a microcosm of the planetary record.
America’s first rocket man, the rise of cryptocurrencies, and artificial intelligence reconsidered: Books in brief
BOOKS AND ARTS 03 July 2019 Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks. Escape from Earth Fraser MacDonald PublicAffairs (2019) In the 1930s, many scientists derided rocketry. That failed to deter aeronautical engineer Frank Malina from developing the first US rocket to achieve extreme altitude: the WAC Corporal.
Life’s innovations, the enigma of gravity, and how to feed 8 billion: Books in brief
BOOKS AND ARTS 14 June 2019 Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks. Life Finds a Way Andreas Wagner Basic (2019) From gut microbes to elephants, the embodiments of evolution are marvels of innovation. So writes biologist Andreas Wagner, whose eloquent study finds the “augmented” view of Darwinian evolution echoed in the ‘landscape thinking’ of human creativity — the mental exploration of possibility.
Biophilia in the Anthropocene
A view From the Bridge February 4, 2015 | 6:10 pm | Posted by Barbara Kiser | Category: Conservation science Conservation scientist M. Sanjayan on the African plains. Passion Planet Are we all feeling a bit epochal? The Anthropocene — the brave new era of pervasive human impact on Earth systems — is due for scientific acceptance (or not) in 2016.
A world history of imagination, mapping our cosmic context, and India’s urban forests: Books in brief
Out of Our Minds Felipe Fernandez-Armesto Oneworld (2019) “The history of ideas is patched with crazy paving,” writes historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto in this big, bold homage to the human imagination in all its warped and fiercely inspired glory.
World of addiction, zen cosmology, and the impending aquacalypse: Books in brief
BOOKS AND ARTS 28 May 2019 Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks. The Age of Addiction David T. Courtwright Belknap (2019) Opioids, processed foods, social-media apps: we navigate an addictive environment rife with products that target neural pathways involved in emotion and appetite. In this incisive medical history, David Courtwright traces the evolution of “limbic capitalism” from prehistory.
The future of genetic engineering, a treasure trove of insects, and a love letter to getting lost: Books in brief
BOOKS AND ARTS 14 May 2019 Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks. Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid Luke Fernandez and Susan J. Matt Harvard University Press (2019) Online immersion can distort emotion. However, technologies have been shaping US emotional culture for more than a century, argue computer scientist Luke Fernandez and historian Susan Matt in this original study.
Profits for the people, six millennia of cities, and the roots of sickness and health: Books in brief
BOOKS AND ARTS 01 May 2019 Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks. People, Power, and Profits Joseph E. Stiglitz W. W. Norton (2019) The US economy is in thrall to corporate monopoly, inequality and slow growth — so argues Nobel-prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz in this powerful, grounded analysis. Excoriating supply-side “voodoo economics”, Stiglitz proposes a progressive agenda echoing those of presidents Theodore and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Worldwide wayfaring, the human cost of the big thaw, and marine die-offs: Books in brief
Incredible Journeys David Barrie Hodder and Stoughton (2019) How does the blind Mexican cave fish (Astyanax mexicanus) navigate convoluted pools, or the tiny blackpoll warbler (Setophaga striata) fly non-stop for 2,770 kilometres over open ocean?
The climate revolution that almost was, the science of magic, and sleep disorders examined: Books in brief
BOOKS AND ARTS 03 April 2019 Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks. Making Eden David Beerling Oxford University Press (2019) Some 2 billion years ago, a single-celled organism in Earth’s primeval ocean engulfed a mitochondrion and a cyanobacterium — and, now able to generate energy and photosynthesize, shunted off to change the world. The ancestor of green plants had begun its journey.
Fighting for air, mathematical mayhem, and beguiling bats: Books in brief
BOOKS AND ARTS 27 March 2019 Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks. Choked Beth Gardiner Granta (2019) Take a breath. Chances are, you’ve just inhaled a foul airborne soup — the toxic particulates, nitrogen oxides and more emanating from fossil-fuel combustion. Atmospheric pollution now kills 7 million people a year.
The wild side of discovery, a history of information warfare, and the immune system uncovered: Books in brief
BOOKS AND ARTS 13 March 2019 Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks. Loonshots Safi Bahcall St Martin’s (2019) History is riddled with seemingly crackpot ideas that led to massive breakthroughs. How can we ensure that such “loonshots” are nurtured?
How research erases women, the prehistory of Polynesia, and everything you wanted to know about beer: Books in brief
BOOKS AND ARTS 06 March 2019 Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks. Invisible Women Caroline Criado Perez Chatto & Windus (2019) We live in a vast welter of data — and it is riddled with gender bias. So argues journalist Caroline Criado Perez in this pointed analysis, revealing how using men as the default in research has serious real-world impacts on women.
Adventures of a bathynaut, art goes algorithmic, and CRISPR encapsulated: Books in brief
Hacking the Code of Life Nessa Carey Icon (2019) Phenomenal promise, implicit peril: CRISPR has come loaded with both from the start. Here, biotech veteran Nessa Carey explicates the gene-editing technique and its dizzying implications. She traces its evolution from 1970s pioneers of artificial gene transfer Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer, through the work of Francisco Mojica in the 1990s, to CRISPR dynamos Jennifer Doudna, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Feng Zhang.
The shadow side of sport, cosmic cataclysms, and human culture underground: Books in brief
BOOKS AND ARTS 13 February 2019 Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks. The Uninhabitable Earth David Wallace-Wells Tim Duggan (2019) Out of fear, faith in technology or lack of interest, millions of us tell ourselves decontextualized fictions about climate change. So declares journalist David Wallace-Wells in this powerfully argued polemic, drawing on research into current and near-future impacts.
The history of distant worlds, a clear eye on renewables and environmental lessons from a tiger’s tale: Books in brief
BOOKS AND ARTS 06 February 2019 Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks. Renewable Energy Bruce Usher Columbia University Press (2019) Public understanding of the energy transition from fossil fuels is woefully patchy — an artefact, in part, of political misinformation. So notes business expert Bruce Usher in this superb corrective, which reveals wind and solar to be the fastest-growing new power sources globally.
The paradox of human nature, our obsession with the skies, and the realities of transplant surgery: Books in brief
BOOKS AND ARTS 16 January 2019 Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks. The Goodness Paradox Richard Wrangham Profile (2019) Homo sapiens see-saws endlessly between tolerance and aggression. To parse our paradoxical nature, primatologist Richard Wrangham marshals gripping research in genetics, neuroscience, history and beyond.
The Sun’s pull on the body, the global flow of people, and the robots that reach other worlds: Books in brief
Borrowed Time Sue Armstrong Bloomsbury (2019) Is death genetically programmed? Is ageing a disease? Engrossing questions throng science writer Sue Armstrong’s round-up of research on the biology of ageing.
The Wright brothers’ real story, cosmic chronology, and what happened to the megafauna: Books in brief
Wright Brothers, Wrong Story William Hazelgrove Prometheus (2018) In December 1903, the first 12 seconds of controlled, human-powered flight took place near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. That triumph is engraved in history; less so, the story of Wilbur and Orville Wright, the uber-geeks behind it. In this gripping dual biography, William Hazelgrove argues that theirs was no partnership of equals, as Orville claimed: it was Wilbur who rewrote the science of aeronautics.
Big oil in the dock, the influenza trail, and insects as icons: Books in brief
The Invisible Killer Gary Fuller Melville House (2018) More than 90% of humanity is exposed to air-pollution concentrations exceeding World Health Organization guidelines. For this compelling exploration of an insidious crisis, air-quality researcher Gary Fuller travelled deep into our fume-ridden past.
Loop quantum gravity redux, ancient automatons, and the weirdness of tropical flora: Books in brief
Quantum Space Jim Baggott Oxford Univ. Press (2018) Prolific physics writer Jim Baggott is back with a terrific page-turner on loop quantum gravity (LQG) — the theory posited as a solution to that chasm in physics between quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity.
Ethics at the cutting edge, beastly movers and shakers, and teeth as time machines: Books in brief.
Can Science Make Sense of Life? Sheila Jasanoff Polity (2018) From gene drives to synthetic organoids, every rapid advance in the life sciences opens up a hot-button issue. This incisive study by sociologist of science Sheila Jasanoff examines ethics at that cutting edge. She argues that the view of the human genome as a ‘book of life’, read primarily by biologists, is partial; alongside it belong fields such as ecology, which explore what life is, rather than what it is for.
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