Feature Articles

A 60 years young British anthropologist, father of three, and an "Out of Africa" theory specialist, Chris Stringer has achieved great renown in the field of popular science with his new book Homo Britannicus. His focus for some time has been on "what it means to be human." In 2004 he was questioned about LB1 or ‘Ebu’ (a nickname given a newly discovered smaller skull) and responded by telling the media that it "shows how little we really know about human evolution." His most recent book explores new evidence about a tropical Britain.

Back in the good old days at the turn of the century, the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine went to Eric Kandel. He won the prize for taking the nervous system of a sea slug and showing how synaptic function is central to memory and learning/retaining that information. His new book, In Search of Memory, is just as fascinating: it is about a multitude of different sciences and psychologies that are combining to form a new science. When the individual sciences work together much more effective treatments can be found for patients with cognition problems.

Henry Nicholls is a freelance science journalist, and also the editor of the quarterly History of Science magazine, Endeavor. He has hosted a weekly show on Meridian Radio and has been nominated for his first book, Lonesome George: The Life and Loves of a Conservation Icon, about the last surviving tortoise from Pinta Island. The book is a mix of Darwinian extinction, environmental history and evolutionary biology.

Adam Wishart has a touching story to tell and he tells it well in One in Three. When his father was diagnosed with cancer, Wishart searched for something that would answer his questions, but found nothing available. Finally, he decided to write the book himself. The title comes from the fact that one-third of us will contract cancer in our lifetime. Wishart researched historical information to create a "remarkable meld of medical history, scientific fact, and the human experience of cancer." His website is at: http://www.adamwishart.info/.

A psychologist who earned his Ph.D. in social psychology from Princeton in 1985, Daniel Gilbert is the Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His book, Stumbling on Happiness, compares how we as humans think we make ourselves happy and what really makes us happy. It examines human nature and human satisfaction and how they intertwine from a scientific viewpoint.

Robert Henson has a BA from Rice University and a Masters in Journalism from the University of Oklahoma, where he also did graduate work in meteorology. He has appeared on many segments of the (now cancelled) radio program "The Weather Notebook, produced by New Hampshire’s Mount Washington Observatory." Henson has written two previous books: Television Weathercasting: a History (1990) and The Rough Guide to Weather (2002). His new book is The Rough Guide to Climate Change. He is excited by tornadoes and currently lives in Louisville, CO.