Books written by our members
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Yusra Siddiqui
Mapping genes involved in human hereditary skin disorders - Published by VDM Verlag Dr. Muller, 2010
Hair loss (alopecia) affects men and women of all ages and often significantly affects social and psychologic well-being. Congenital alopecia may occur either alone or in association with ectodermal and other abnormalities. Present study involves genetic mapping in three consanguineous Pakistani families with autosomal recessive alopecia.To establish linkage of these five families to known alopecia loci, microsatellite markers were selected from the candidate regions of each of the five known loci and used to genotype the families.
Website where this book can be bought: http://amzn.to/q7jSKG
Jon Evans
Understand Science - Published by Hodder Education, 2011
Science is a vast subject and our understanding of the way the world works is growing all the time. No book could hope to include everything that science has discovered, but this book includes all of the essential facts about all the really key areas.
Broken down into short, easy-to-digest sections it covers everything from evolution and cell biology to star formation and plate tectonics. Including sections on what technology may allow us to do in the future, and even looking at when science has gone bad, Understand Science will change the way you see the world around you.
Website where this book can be bought: http://amzn.to/lwLHKU
Author's website: http://www.jescience.co.uk/
Christian Jarrett
The Rough Guide to Psychology - Published by Rough Guides/Penguin, 2011
The Rough Guide to Psychology starts with you, your mind and your brain and broadens out to look at your friends and other relationships. Divided into seven sections and covering all subjects from personal relationships, your decisions and emotions, romantic interest, gender differences, psychology at work, shopping, sport psychology and criminal psychology. Finishing up with the difficult and controversial moments when the mind goes wrong; focusing on depression, anxiety, schizophrenia as well as more unusual conditions.
Extracts from forthcoming review by Uta Frith in The Psychologist: “...this book is disarmingly appealing to the deep desire to know ourselves ... [It] presents psychology today ‘in a nutshell’, and it is almost frighteningly up-to-date ... It invites travellers to consider these discoveries not only with due wonder but also healthy scepticism. ... If I had to help a young person choose the subject they should study I would not make any direct suggestions, but if I was convinced they should take up psychology, I would simply recommend this book. The rest would follow.”
Webpage where this book can be bought: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rough-Guide-Psychology-Reference/dp/1848364601
Webpage for the book: http://www.psychologywriter.org.uk/Index/Rough_Guide_to_Psych.html
Author/PR Contacts:
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Ted Nield
Incoming, or why we should stop worrying and learn to love the meteorite - Published by Granta Books
Astonishing new research suggests that 470 million years ago, a stupendous collision in the Asteroid Belt (whose debris is still falling today) bombarded the Earth with meteorites of all sizes. A revolutionary idea is emerging that the resulting ecological disturbance may have been responsible for the single greatest increase in biological diversity since the origin of complex life - the hitherto unexplained Great Ordovician Biodiversity Event.
Ted Nield challenges the orthodox view that meteorite strikes are always bad news for life on Earth. He argues that one of the most widely known scientific theories - that dinosaurs were wiped out by a strike 65 million years ago - isn't the whole picture, and that the causes of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction (of which dinosaurs' demise was a part) were much more complex.
Meteorites have been the stuff of legend throughout human history, interpreted as omens of doom or objects of power. But only in the eighteenth century, when the study of falling space debris became a science, were meteorites used to unlock the mysteries of our universe. Incoming! traces the history of meteorites from the first recorded strike to the video recordings made routinely today, showing how our interpretations have varied according to the age in which they fell, and how meteorite impacts were given fresh urgency with the advent of the atom bomb. Introducing a wealth of fascinating characters alongside extraordinary new research, Ted Nield has written the perfect introduction to the science and history of 'the falling sky'.
Webpage where this book can be bought:- http://www.amazon.co.uk/o/ASIN/1847082416
Webpage for the book: http://grantabooks.com/page/3012/Incoming/725
Publicist - Kelly Pike:
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Philip Ball
The Music Instinct - Published by Bodley Head, 2010
The Music Instinct is a survey of what we know (and an intimation of what we still do not know) about how our brains process music: how we turn raw, complex acoustic signals into a succession of sounds that move and excite us, and which seems almost to be a quasi-language. It covers musical styles ranging from rock and pop to Gregorian chant, gamelan and Indian ragas.
Webpage where this book can be bought http://www.bodleyhead.co.uk/musicinstinct
http://www.philipball.com
PR contacts for this book For publicity, contact: Hannah Ross, Bodley Head, Random House, London.
Richard Elwes
Mathematics 1001 - Published by Quercus, 2010
This unique reference book comprises 1001 mini-essays, arranged thematically into chapters including Numbers, Geometry, and Mathematical physics. These tell the many stories of maths, from the nitty-gritty details of long division and methods for solving quadratic equations, right up to the Poincaré conjecture, the mysteries of the prime numbers, and the latest developments in quantum field theory.
Webpage where this book can be bought:
www.whsmith.co.uk/CatalogAndSearch/ProductDetails.aspx?productID=9781848660632
http://www.richardelwes.co.uk
John Emsley
A Healthy, Wealthy, Sustainable World - published by RSC Publishing, 2010
The world stands at a crossroads. What route to the future should we take? The road to a sustainable future beckons, but what effect will this have on chemistry, which appears so dependent on fossil resources? Its products are part of everyday living, and without them we could regress to the world of earlier generations when lives were blighted by disease, famines, dirt, and pain. In fact the industries based on chemistry – the chemical, agrochemical, and pharmaceutical industries – could be sustainable and not only benefit those in the developed world but could be shared by everyone on this planet and for generations to come. This book shows how it might be achieved.
John Emsley is a popular science writer whose first book, The Consumer's Good Chemical Guide, won the 1995 Science Book Prize and has been translated into 12 other languages. Then came Molecules at an Exhibition, Vanity, Vitality & Virility, and Better Looking, Better Living, Better Loving, all devoted to the benefits of chemistry.
A Healthy, Wealthy, Sustainable World will deal with the things we regard as essential to a developed lifestyle and which depend on chemistry, namely food, water, fuel, healing drugs and plastics, as well as other areas where its role is less obvious, such as city living and sport.
Webpage where this book can be bought http://bit.ly/bJHpDI
http://bit.ly/9H2DrT
PR contacts for this book: Rebecca Jeeves, Marketing Executive - Books Specialist, Tel +44 (0)1223 432117, www.rsc.org/publishing
Jon Turney
The Rough Guide to the Future - Published by Rough Guides/Penguin, 2010
The past, present... and future of visions of what is to come, for humanity and the universe.
Webpage where this book can be bought: http://amzn.to/bvdjKU
http://www.unreliablefutures.wordpress.com
Contact
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Rebecca Mileham
Global Pollution - published by Tick Tock Books, 2010
http://rebecca.mileham.net/news/new-book-global-polution
Aimed at a young teenage school audience, this full-colour book takes high-profile news stories like Hurricane Katrina, the Bhopal leak, the ozone-layer hole and whale strandings, and uses them to introduce the science behind pollution of the air, land, water and climate. Each chapter also includes interviews with scientists working to understand and combat pollution, plus profiles of pollution-busting projects such as using llama droppings to treat contaminated water in Bolivia, or investigating whether the plastics used in trainers might be causing genetic abnormalities.
Jo Marchant
Decoding the Heavens - published by Windmill Books
In 1900 a group of sponge divers blown off course in the Mediterranean discovered an Ancient Greek shipwreck dating from around 70 BC.
Lying unnoticed for months amongst their hard-won haul was what appeared to be a formless lump of corroded rock. It turned out to be the most stunning scientific artefact we have from antiquity. For more than a century this 'Antikythera mechanism' puzzled academics. It was ancient clockwork, unmatched in complexity for 1000 years - but who could have made it, and what was it for? Now, more than 2000 years after the device was lost at sea, scientists have pieced together its intricate workings and revealed its secrets.
In Decoding the Heavens, Jo Marchant tells the full story of the 100-year quest to understand this ancient computer. Along the way she unearths a diverse cast of remarkable characters – ranging from Archimedes to Jacques Cousteau – and explores the deep roots of modern technology not only in ancient Greece but in the Islamic world and medieval Europe too. At heart an epic adventure story, this is a book that challenges our assumptions about technology transfer over the ages while giving us fresh insights into history itself.
The book was shortlisted for the Royal Society Prize for Science Books in 2009.
Webpage where this book can be bought http://amzn.to/aEtyV2
http://www.decodingtheheavens.com
Email Jo Marchant at
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, or contact Amelia Harvell at Windmill Books (
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; 020 7840 8773)
Henry Nicholls
The Way of the Panda: The Curiouis History of China's Political Animal - published by Profile Books.
Book can be bought at:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Way-Panda-Curious-History-Political/dp/1846683688?&camp=2486&linkCode=wey&tag=henrynicholls-21&creative=8882
http://www.henrynicholls.com
Paul Sutherland
Where Did Pluto Go? Ivy Press/Reader's Digest. 2009
Angela Saini
Geek Nation: Journey Through a Revolution. Hodder & Stoughton. 2011.
A journey through India to meet the inventors, engineers and young scientists behind this nation built not on conquest, oil or minerals, but on the scientific ingenuity of its people. Angela weaves the story of how ancient science is giving way to the new, and how the technology of the wealthy passes to the poor. Delving inside the psyche of India’s science hungry citizens, she explores the reason why the government of the most religious country on earth has put its faith in science and technology.
Through witty firsthand reportage and penetrative analysis, Geek Nation explains what this means for the rest of the world, and how a spiritual nation squares its soul with hard rationality. Full of curious, colourful characters and gripping stories, it describes India through its people – a nation of geeks.
Author's webpage: http://www.angelasaini.co.uk/books.htm
Web page where this book can be bought:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Geek-Nation-Indian-Science-Taking/dp/1444710141
Contact: PR contact: Jaime Frost at Hodder (
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)
Insulin Murders. Routledge (formerly RSM Press), 2007.
Caroline Richmond
Sharon Ann Holgate
Understanding Solid State Physics, CRC Press (Taylor & Francis Group). 2009
Georgina Ferry
Max Perutz and the Secret of Life. Pimlico. 2008. First paperback.
