Biocurious

/ a biophysics blog

2006 Aventis Prize longlist

Posted 12 March 2006 by PhilipJ under

Here’s the longlist for the 2006 Aventis Prize (for popular science writing):

Electric Universe – How Electricity Switched on the Modern World, by David Bodanis (Little Brown)

Collapse – How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, by Jared Diamond (Penguin Allen Lane)

The Elements of Murder – A History of Poison, John Emsley (Oxford University Press)

The Gecko’s Foot – Bio-inspiration – Engineering New Materials from Nature, by Peter Forbes (Fourth Estate)

The Silicon Eye – How a Silicon Valley Company Aims to Make All Current Computers, Cameras, and Cell Phones Obsolete, by George Gilder (WW Norton)

Parallel Worlds – The Science of Alternative Universes and our Future in the Cosmos, by Michio Kaku (Penguin)

Power, Sex, Suicide – Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life, by Nick Lane (Oxford University Press)

Venomous Earth – How Arsenic Caused the World’s Worst Mass Poisoning, by Andrew Meharg (Macmillan)

Empire of the Stars – Friendship, Obsession and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes, by Arthur I. Miller (Little Brown)

Seven Deadly Colours – The Genius of Nature’s Palette and how it Eluded Darwin, by Andrew Parker (Simon & Schuster)

The Truth About Hormones – What’s Going on when we’re Tetchy, Spotty, Fearful, Tearful or Just Plain Awful, by Vivienne Parry (Atlantic Books)

Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis – The Quest to Find the Hidden Law of Prime Numbers, by Dan Rockmore (Jonathan Cape)

The Fruits of War – How War and Conflict have Driven Science, by Michael White (Simon & Schuster)

You can see the BBC story about this here, and I unfortunately have to admit that I haven’t read any of these! I suspect Collapse will be very similar to the extremely good Guns, Germs, and Steel, but that’s still no excuse for not having read it. I’m doing things in the wet lab so frequently these days that I also think I’ll pick up Rockmore’s Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis, and get acquainted with math once again.

Anyone have any other recommendations?

  

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