"Why we dream and what it means for our health." We're currently in a social climate that doesn't value sleep and rest, and rewards busy-ness and productivity. When the author found out that most people aren't sleeping properly and a lot of people aren't hitting REM sleep, and therefore not dreaming, she became fascinated by …
We all know someone who can read a room, and someone who can't read others at all. We've made friends instantly with someone, or admired someone's social ease, or have read someone's body language from across the room. What is going on when we meet people, when we feel comfortable building a relationship or repulsed …
Continue reading Why We Click: The Emerging Science Of Interpersonal Synchrony by Kate Murphy
Subtitled "15 portals to wonder through science and poetry", The Universe in Verse is a lovely illustrated volume of poetry and science, which explores the sense of wonder in life and our experiences, and how these two different things, literature and scientific discovery, overlap. It features chapters that start with a short essay about a …
The new science of how hormones impact every aspect of our health. A lot has been said about hormones and how they can help and heal our bodies, or cause damage, but into all of this has been thrown a lot of pseudo-science and speculation. In this book, Dr Max Nieuwdorp, a University of Amsterdam …
Continue reading The Power Of Hormones by Max Nieuwdorp, MD PhD.
How good ideas get ignored in an economy built for men. The tagline above and on the cover explains the basic premise of this book. We open on the story of the wheeled suitcase. Anyone who has had to carry heavy bags or luggage will know that your fingers get cut into by the straps …
Jane Goodall is an naturalist and primatologist whose work revolutionised how we understand animal intelligence. From her work with chimpanzees and other animals in Gombe, Tanzania, she came to understand the impact that people had on ecology and so she also became an activist as well. She's now in her 80's and speaks regularly about …
Continue reading The Book Of Hope by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams
The Need by Helen Phillips Molly is a scientist and a mother of two who recently found some strange things on the site where she and her colleagues are digging up plant fossils. The objects seem everyday, but each has a slight impossible difference and none of them should be where they were found. As …
London, 1883, three lives are drawn together. Thaniel, a young man who works for the Home Office as a telegraphist, an eccentric Japanese watchmaker who may have links to a bomb set my Irish revolutionaries, and Grace, a woman at Oxford who longs to be able to work on her science experiments in peace. When …
Continue reading The Watchmaker Of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley
London is often called a green city, because although it's very densely populated and built up, it's also got some truly lovely large parks and gardens. One of the smaller gardens is in Chelsea, and contains the second oldest botanical garden in the UK. Chelsea Physick Garden was established in 1673, and remains to this …
Continue reading A Walk In The Park: London’s Chelsea Physick Garden
I moved to London in 2009, from Australia, and one of the things that immediately struck me was how great it was that most of the museums here are free. It meant that while I was studying at Film School, I could spend my weekends getting inspiration from the old masters, or from history, without …
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