Reluctantly, I have to admit this is an interesting and worthwhile book. My starting position was a sceptic of the claims for the metaverse, but I tried to approach it with an open mind. I'm still sceptical about many aspects, but Matthew Ball convincingly puts across a bigger picture that encompasses far more that the demos we've seen so far. My initial scepticism was based on experience with Second Life, the 3D virtual environment started in 2003. In its early days, lots of people over-hyped this - big companies set up a presence in it, we were told we would be attending lectures, concerts a ..read more

There's some interesting material in You've Been Played , waiting to be discovered - but it could have been a lot better if Adrian Hon had gone with a co-author: unfortunately, as a book it's no great shakes. Let's do the interesting thing first. Hon is talking about gamification - the (clumsily named) idea of using game-like elements outside of games, where they are supposed to encourage us, for example, to exercise more, to work more efficiently, or to follow some government edict. The idea is to provide some game-like rewards (or punishments) for certain behaviours, and as a result to eithe ..read more

Don Norman is, without doubt, one of the most influential figures in design - and particularly in making designs fit for human use. In his definitive The Design of Everyday Things he identified designs that 'probably won a prize' but that totally fail to make clear to the user how to use them. He pointed out that something as simple as a door, for example, had opportunities for design failure. Whether it was glass doors that couldn't be distinguished from windows, or doors you had to push that were fitted with a pull handle, he showed how a focus on appearance over usability could make for ter ..read more

Despite beginning and ending his book with a tale of a Victorian moonshot, Iwan Rhys Morus is not writing steam punk fiction here, but rather exploring the nature of the Victorian scientific and engineering mentality, particularly in the UK, and how that made a huge transformation possible and has continued to influence the way we do some things, up to and including the Apollo programme. Rhys Morus goes on give us stories of the development of everything from steam railways to the telegraph, from the transformation of electricity into the power source of the world to powered flight. Many of th ..read more

Geography is a strange subject. Parts of it - physical geography - are definitely scientific in nature. The rest - political and social geography is far more removed from anything that could be described as hard science. What Tim Marshall, an expert in foreign affairs, covers here is a strange hybrid - it's all about the political side, but because Marshall is here not considering geopolitics but astropolitics, it has a science and technology aspect. The Future of Geography ( Astropolitics in the US) is about the politics that applies in space, and space inevitably comes with plenty of STEM ba ..read more

In a wide-ranging book, Scott Shapiro uses five historical uses of computer worms, viruses and phishing to illustrate the processes involved in cybercrime at both the technological and human level. We start inevitably with the ARPANET worm of 1988, with its ironic creator (his Dad worked for the NSA), that crippled many Sun and VAX computers on the proto-internet, even though it wasn't intended to do harm. This was well-documented two years later in Clifford Stoll's book The Cuckoo's Egg , but where Stoll gives a dramatic description from the point of view of a system administrator who faced t ..read more

Surely there must be publishers kicking themselves that they didn’t republish Arthur C. Clarke’s vision of the future from 33 years earlier when 2019 came around. Of course, plenty of SF authors (and futurologists) have tried to imagine the future, but arguably Clarke was doubly qualified. Firstly, he had a big success in predicting geostationary satellites before they existed. And secondly his  2001, A Space Odyssey proved entertainingly far from the real world of the first year of the new millennium. Would an attempt at futurology rather than SF have the clarity of his satellite idea or ..read more

Nuclear fusion should, in principle, be the perfect addition to renewables as we move away from greenhouse gas generating energy sources. Yet, more than 60 years after it was first suggested, we still don't have a single working nuclear fusion power station. (If, as the subtitle suggests, this has been a race, it has been a walking backwards three-legged race.) Sharon Ann Holgate provides a compact introduction to what nuclear fusion is, the various steps along the road that have been made so far, and why it has taken so long. Starting with fusion as the power source of the stars, we discover ..read more

Nuclear fusion, as this book reminds us, has been on the cards as a potential safe, clean, green energy source for around 60 years - but still isn't a practical solution. Even so, we're a lot closer now to making it a reality, so it's helpful to have a technical backgrounder on what has happened so far and how far we have to go. This book sits on the borderline between popular science and textbook lite. So, for example, although it has no maths in it, in the first section on plasma physics we are plunged into fairly sophisticated detail. Page 5, for example, features a graph showing the 'Compa ..read more