Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.
When chemist Humphry Davy ingested nitrous oxide in 1799, dubbing it laughing gas, he became a scientific hero — as did psychologist William James a century later, for taking drugs to investigate mysticism. In 1949, the positive term ‘psychonaut’ was invented for such rebels, says medical historian Mike Jay. Today, it connotes an unacceptable “renegade”, Jay notes in his provocative, highly readable meditation on drug use by scientists, philosophers, writers and artists.
There might be as many six million species of fungi, “most as yet unknown” — compared with about 2 million animal species and some 400,000 species of plant on land. They exist deep in the ocean, in the radioactive ruins of Chernobyl, Ukraine, and on damp towels in the International Space Station. Infectious fungi are “the most devastating disease agents known on the planet”, Monosson says.A childhood obsession motivates this appealing history of silk and its science by biologist Aarathi Prasad.
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