Magic Universe The Oxford Guide to Modern Science

About this book

Drawing on interviews with more than 200 researchers, from graduate students to Nobel prize-winners, Magic Universe is a scientific tour covering modern science in all its glory, shedding light on the latest ideas in physics, biology, chemistry, medicine, astronomy, and many other fields.

Contents

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the spider's web; OVER 130 ARTICLES, FROM..; ALCOHOL: Genetic revelations of when yeast invented booze; ALTRUISM AND AGGRESSION: Looking for the origins of those human alternatives; ANTIMATTER: Does the coat that Sakharov made really explain its absence?; ARABIDOPSIS: The modest weed that gave plant scientists the big picture; ASTRONAUTICS: Will interstellar pioneers be overtaken by their grandchildren?; BERNAL'S LADDER: Pointers; BIG BANG: The inflationary Universe's sleight-of-hand; BIODIVERSITY: The mathematics of co-existence; BIOLOGICAL CLOCKS: Molecular machinery that governs life's routines; BIOSPHERE FROM SPACE: 'I want to do the whole world'; BITS AND QUBITS: The digital world and its looming quantum shadow; BLACK HOLES: The awesome engines of quasars and active galaxies; BRAIN IMAGES: What do all the vivid movies really mean?; BRAIN RHYTHMS: The mathematics of the beat we think to; BRAIN WIRING: How do all those nerve connections know where to go?; BUCKYBALLS AND NANOTUBES: Doing very much more with very much less; ...TO..; SMALLPOX: The dairymaid's blessing and the general's curse; SOLAR WIND: How it creates the heliosphere in which we live; SPACE WEATHER: Why it is now more troublesome than in the old days; SPARTICLES: A wished-for superworld of exotic matter and forces; SPEECH: A gene that makes us more eloquent than chimpanzees; STARBURSTS: Galactic traffic accidents and stellar baby booms; STARS: Hearing them sing and sizing them up; STEM CELLS: Tissue engineering, natural and medical; SUN'S INTERIOR: How sound waves made our mother star transparent; SUPERATOMS, SUPERFLUIDS AND SUPERCONDUCTORS: The march of the boson armies; SUPERSTRINGS: Retuning the cosmic imagination; TIME MACHINES: The biggest issue in contemporary physics?; TRANSGENIC CROPS: For better or worse, a planetary experiment has begun; TREE OF LIFE: Promiscuous bacteria and the course of evolution; UNIVERSE: 'It must have known we were coming'; VOLCANIC EXPLOSIONS: Where will the next big one be?

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