Matter: A Look At A New Way To Read About Science

Posted on November 14, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

Do No Harm, by Anil Ananthaswamy. Published by Matter, $.99. Visit Matter for details about formats, purchasing, and membership.

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

Talk about burying the lead.

Yesterday the Washington Post announced that they were hiring a new editor-in-chief. Reporting for the New York Times, Christine Haughney wrote that the Post made the switch because they were struggling with a steep decline in readership. It's not until deep in the piece that Haughney makes a startling statement:

"The paper also faces fresh competition from online news outlets, like Politico, whose founders include former Washington Post reporters."

Politico certainly didn't bring the Washington Post to its current moment of crisis singlehandedly. But it is striking to me that a web operation started from scratch in 2007 could baloon so fast that it could become a major threat to what was once one of the world's leading newspapers.

My attention was drawn to this buried lead because I've recently been getting to know a new player in the science news business, called Matter. This morning they are launching their web site, and their first piece of long-form journalism. It's way too early to predict whether Matter will become the Politico of the science world. But they definitely are entering the arena with impressive style.

Continue reading “Matter: A Look At A New Way To Read About Science” →

The Most Ingenious Book: How to Rediscover Micrographia

Posted on October 22, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

Micrographia: Or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made With Magnifying Glasses With Observations and Inquiries Thereupon. By Robert Hooke. Originally published 1665. Project Gutenberg (web), Linda Hall Libary (web), Google Books (free), National Library of Medicine (flash web site, Turn the Pages App [free])

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

In January 1665, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary that he stayed up till two in the morning reading a best-selling page-turner, a work that he called “the most ingenious book I read in my life.” It was not a rousing history of English battles or a proto-bodice ripper. It was filled with images: of fleas, of bark, of the edges of razors.

The book was called Micrographia. It provided the reading public with its first look at the world beyond the naked eye. Its author, Robert Hooke, belonged to a brilliant circle of natural philosophers who–among many other things–were the first in England to make serious use of microscopes as scientific instruments. They were great believers in looking at the natural world for themselves rather than relying on what ancient Greek scholars had claimed. Looking under a microscope at the thousands of facets on an insect’s compound eye, they saw things at the nanoscale that Aristotle could not have dreamed of. A razor’s edge became a mountain range. In the chambers of a piece of bark, Hooke saw the first evidence of cells.

Continue reading “The Most Ingenious Book: How to Rediscover Micrographia” →

NASA’s 30 years of Shuttle missions is both dull and compelling

Posted on October 7, 2012 by admin

Celebrating 30 years of the Space Shuttle Program

Designed by Adam Chen, Edited by William Wallack and George Gonzalez.

Available as a PDF or iPad application (free)

Reviewed by John Timmer

It's hard not to have mixed feelings about the Space Shuttle. For over 30 years, it's been the only way the United States has put people into space. During that time, it's built the International Space Station, carried the Hubble to space, and made sure the telescope has stayed operational for decades. At the same time, the Shuttle's never really lived up to its promise to make access to space cheap and common. And, through its longevity, it has left us reliant on 1970s technology long past its sell-by date, and bred a complacency that's cost the lives of two Shuttle crews.

Oddly, I ended up with a similar set of mixed feelings about a new eBook NASA has released to celebrate the retirement of the Shuttle. It's not a good book, either in terms of content or production values. In many ways, the experience was, in the details, a bit like reading a spreadsheet. But somehow I found myself going through to the end, and finding nuggets of enjoyment in the experience.

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The Long Quest to Catch a Poisoner

Posted on September 25, 2012 by admin

The Kalinka Affair: A Father’s Hunt for His Daughter’s Killer, by Joshua Hammer, published by The Atavist for Kindle, iPad, Nook, Google Play, and Kobo.

Reviewed by Deborah Blum

Call it an identity crisis of sorts. But for a career
science writer, I’ve found myself spending an unusual amount of time in the
past few years writing – and devotedly reading – true crime stories.

Call it also a logical consequence. I wrote a book about
poison, murder and the early days of forensic toxicology. I write a blog about
culture and chemistry, one that leads me inevitably into stories of lethal
cocktails and homicidal intent. When I see a tale of murder and mystery, I
usually wonder if there was a toxic weapon involved.

I realize that telling you this may make me sound a little
creepy and it’s not – promise – that I spend my days lurking around hoping for
a homicide. But I do look for
stories that allow me to practice what I occasionally think of as subversive
chemistry writing, narratives in which I can weave some toxicology, sneak a few
chemical formulas or Periodic Table references into the tale.

There’s more at play here, though, than my interest in
narrative story telling techniques.
Forensic toxicology raises some fascinating questions about the role of
scientific detective work. Can good chemistry always solve a murder? Even if we
find a poison in a body, does that always lead us to the killer? And even if we
know the killer, does that always lead us to justice?

Which brings me, of course, to The Atavist’s recent
successful true crime single, The Kalinka
Affair. The story is written
by Joshua Hammer, a former foreign bureau chief for Newsweek, and a man with a long-time fascination with murder himself.
His full-length books include Murder in
Yosemite (the story of a 1999 mass murder in the national park), Sherlock Holmes’ London, and Where Agatha Christie Dreamed Up Murder.

You’ve probably guessed by now that The Kalinka Affair involves poison and murder. That’s my focus more
than the author’s – this is foremost a story of a father’s full-fanatic drive to
find justice in the matter of his daughter’s death. That passionate, guilt-and-love driven parental determination drives the
narrative forward through almost 30 years of twists and turns, international
politics and criminal undertakings, and unforgiving rage. “Bamberski would leave
his job, burn through much of his life savings, and devote thousands of hours
to pursuing his quarry,” Hammer writes.

Continue reading “The Long Quest to Catch a Poisoner” →

A Medieval Bestiary: When a book breaks your heart

Posted on September 20, 2012 by admin

A Medieval Bestiary. Published by eBook Treasures. iPad. £4.99

Reviewed by Maggie Koerth-Baker

A Medieval Bestiary is just not that into me.

We should have gone so well together. It was a scanned copy of The Royal Bestiary, a 13th century manuscript stored in the British Library, enhanced for the iPad with text and audio interpretation on every page. I was a giant nerd. Clearly, a match made in heaven.

But I don't think it's going to work out.

It's not that the book is terrible. In fact, parts of it are, objectively, pretty damn cool. We are, after all, talking about an opportunity to virtually thumb through the pages of a very old book. And the scans are excellent. You can see stains on the vellum, and the margin lines drawn by the scribe or illustrator to make certain that text and images were put into just the right place on every page. You can zoom in on the beautiful, colored and gilded drawings of bees and eagles, lions and centuars. On every page, there is, indeed, a little tab that you can tap to learn more about the animals you see in the pictures – especially helpful for the book's many imaginary animals, such as the leucrota. Leucrotas, you may be interested to know, happen when a male hyena mates with a female lion. The result of that partnership looks, for some reason, rather like a horse, but with a forked tail and a creepy, Jack Nicholson smile. The Medieval Bestiary assures me that the leucrota's "teeth" are actually a single piece of sharp bone, curved into a U shape. If I tap the "Listen" button, this information will be read to me by a soothing, female, British voice.

In short, A Medieval Bestiary does everything it promised to do. In fact, I'm sure this book could make somebody very happy. (Maybe an art student?) Just not me. That's because, while it does do everything it promised, A Medieval Bestiary does only that. And not a bit more. I, unfortunately, need the bit more.

The truth is that some of this is my fault. I read the description and then set my expectations rather higher than I should have. I can't really blame A Medieval Bestiary for being the book it is (and said it was) rather than the book I want to be. And yet. And yet.

A book like this needs context. I need to know about the genre of bestiaries, in general. Did the authors make up the clearly made-up animals (and the clearly made-up information about real animals)? Or were they writing down longstanding traditions? What was the point of the book? Am I supposed to be studying the natural world, or exploring my own morality? Do books like bestiaries have a role in the development of true taxonomy and biology, the same way that alchemy had a role in the development of chemistry and physics? I have no idea. Because A Medieval Bestiary doesn't tell me. In fact, I had to run a couple Google searches to even figure out the book's real name. This is the full extent of context it offers on itself:

A bestiary is a book of real and imaginary beasts, though its subjects can extend to plants and even rocks. It combines description of the physical nature and habits of animals with elaboration on the moral or spiritual significance of these characteristics.

This amazing book was produced in the first decade of the 13th century, and is one of the earliest bestiaries to feature vivid paintings of animals. They are set on gold grounds and in colourful frames, supplanting the line-drawn renderings that populated earlier bestiaries. These lavish illuminations would have made this a costly book to produce, and so it is likely that it was produced for an aristocratic, or even royal, owner who could read Latin or had a chaplain who could do so.

Even more frustrating was the interpretation within the book. A Medieval Bestiary is in Latin (and written in that sort of fancy medieval font that makes it difficult to read even if you do know Latin). But there is no translation of the actual text. The interpretation merely describes the illustrations. In some cases (but not all) that includes a summary of the text around the image, but even then that's almost worse, because what you get are stunted plot points of a story that probably would have been a lot more interesting to read for itself.

Basically, I look at A Medieval Bestiary and think of all that it could be, but isn't. Particularly with the iPad book format, there's such an opportunity here to add lots of context: History, philosphy, quotes and links to other works. Done right, a reader could come away from this understanding more about medieval society as a whole and the development of science from magical/religious art to rational tool. Instead, A Medieval Bestiary just wants to tell you what's going on in the pictures. There's nothing wrong with that. But I'm too old and too wise to waste much time thinking I can change a book into something it's not.

Besides, in the course of breaking up with it, I discovered that A Medieval Bestiary had been kind of misleading me all along. I paid the equivalent of $8 for this book (I was offered a free review code, but couldn't figure out where to apply it during the ordering process). But, turns out, this isn't exactly unique content. In fact, the whole thing is available as free PDFs on the website of the Royal Library. Some of the scanned pages there even come with the exact same interpretation as is offered in the iPad version. Which just kind of serves to make the shortcomings of the iPad book that much more apparent. I don't mind paying $8 for something really cool. I mind paying $8 for an iPad version of something I can get for free as a PDF. If the publishers – eBook Treasures – were going to convert A Medieval Bestiary to iPad, why not take advantage of that and do some stuff that you couldn't do with PDFs?

Sadly, I think it's time this book and I went our separate ways. Hopefully, we can still be friends. And, who knows, maybe in the future, when A Medieval Bestiary has had some time to grow, we can rekindle the relationship.

The British Library: Books of Beasts in the British Library: the Medieval Bestiary and its context (the book published on iPad as A Medieval Bestiary is listed here as Royal 12 C. xix)

Explore and learn more about medieval bestiaries as a genre at The Medieval Bestiary website (not affiliated with eBook Treasures or the iPad version of The Royal Bestiary)

Image: An illustration from the The Royal Bestiary, depicting a unicorn laying its head on the lap of a lady. Presumably, the illustrator had never seen a unicorn, nor (one suspects) a lady.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net, the science columnist at The New York Times Magazine, and the author of Before the Lights Go Out.