spectroscopy

Book review – Explorers of Deep Time: Paleontologists and the History of Life

6-minute read

When I ask you to think of a palaeontologist, what comes to mind? Admit it, you likely thought of someone digging up dinosaur fossils. And that someone was probably a white man. Grounded in the past, and endlessly repeated in the present, this is of course a very narrow picture of what palaeontology is like. In Explorers of Deep Time, Roy Plotnick, a palaeontologist and emeritus professor in earth and environmental sciences, challenges this and other stereotypes. Pardon the excruciating pun, but he leaves no rock unturned in the process of showing the many faces of modern palaeontology.

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Book review – Life in the Cosmos: From Biosignatures to Technosignatures

8-minute read

Are we alone in the universe? For the moment, this question remains unanswered, though there are many ways to tackle it. Just how many was something I did not appreciate until I sunk my teeth into Harvard University Press’s new flagship astronomy title Life in the Cosmos. Written by astrobiologist Manasvi Lingam and theoretical physicist Abraham “Avi” Loeb, this is a book of truly colossal proportions, clocking in at over 1000 pages. It boldly goes where few academic books have gone before by seriously and open-mindedly considering the possibility of extraterrestrial technological intelligence on par with, or far beyond humans. I found myself gravitating towards this book on account of more than just its size.

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Book review – Fossilization: Understanding the Material Nature of Ancient Plants and Animals

6-minute read

Fossils are our prime source of information about life in the past. As I delve deeper into palaeontology and earth sciences, the process of fossilisation increasingly fascinates me. How does dead biological tissue fossilise? What information is lost, what is added, and what is distorted in the process? And, ultimately, how true or filtered a picture of past life does the fossil record provide? The edited book Fossilization brings together scientists from a range of disciplines working on cutting-edge topics. The result is a well-written if somewhat eclectic collection of chapters that addressed some of my queries and also answered questions I did not even know I had.

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Book review – Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths of Space

8-minute read

This is the second of a two-part dive into the story of oceans on Earth and elsewhere, following my review of Ocean Worlds. That book gave a deep history of how our oceans shaped Earth and life on it and briefly dipped its toes into the topic of oceans beyond Earth. Alien Oceans is the logical follow-up. How did we figure out that there are oceans elsewhere? And would such worlds be hospitable to life? Those are the two big questions at the heart of this book. If there is one person fit to answer them, it is Kevin Peter Hand, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and their deputy chief for solar system exploration.

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Book review – Life on Mars: What to Know Before We Go

Our planetary neighbour Mars has long fascinated us, and the idea of there being Martian life holds a strong grip on our collective imagination. NASA and others are becoming serious about sending people to Mars. Before we do so, astronomy professor David Weintraub would like to give you this readable history of our fascination with the Red Planet and the research that tries to answer the question: is there life on Mars? (Admit it, you were crooning that David Bowie song there).

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