Volume 94 | Number 4 | July-August 2006
Martin Davis
A review of The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer, by David Leavitt. Turing's troubled but productive life is ably recounted by novelist David Leavitt, who shines in his empathy for Turing's situation
Richard Greenberg
A review of The Rock from Mars: A Detective Story on Two Planets, by Kathy Sawyer. Sawyer offers a riveting account of the furious controversy over whether a meteorite found in Antarctica in 1984 contains evidence of past life on Mars
Lauren Kassel
A review of The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young, the Anonymous Polymath Who Proved Newton Wrong, Explained How We See, Cured the Sick, and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone, Among Other Feats of Genius, by Andrew Robinson. A life that sheds light on what it means to be a genius
W. Tecumseh Fitch
A review of Origins of Language: Constraints on Hypotheses, by Sverker Johansson. Johansson offers a useful overview of some of the debates regarding how language emerged
Jürgen Schmidhuber
A review of Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos, by Seth Lloyd. Is the universe the ultimate quantum computer?
Richard Twitchett
A review of Extinction: How Life on Earth Nearly Ended 250 Million Years Ago, by Douglas H. Erwin. A paleontologic detective describes his patient search for the perpetrators of the end-Permian mass extinction
Rudolf Raff
A review of Coming to Life: How Genes Drive Development, by Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard. Nobel laureate Nüsslein-Volhard provides an engaging introduction to what developmental biologists now understand about how embryos work
Michael Coe
A review of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann. An impressive synthesis of recent research on Pre-Columbian cultures
George Poinar, Jr.
A review of Evolution of the Insects, by David Grimaldi and Michael S. Engel and History of Insects, edited by Alexandr P. Rasnitsyn and Donald L. J. Quicke. Because fossil insects are so diverse and are sometimes fragmentary or of doubtful age, opinions still vary as to what begat what
Total Records : 13