Earthly

It is an iron law of art history that any critic who has a book or two in them will sooner or later wind up writing about the Renaissance. Moody, hard-living Jackson Pollock is all very well, and let’s hear it for the formidable Tracey Emin. But at art’s palace of varieties, it’s Leonardo and Michelangelo that the people come to see. If you only know Jonathan Jones from these pages, it may surprise you to find him tripping down this primrose path with his own book on the era, almost as big as a Domino’s box. Do the…

One of Earth’s toughest microbes could survive on Mars, lying dormant beneath the surface, for 280 million years, new research has shown. The findings increase the probability that microbial life could still exist on the Red Planet. Deinococcus radiodurans, nicknamed “Conan the Bacterium,” is one of the world’s toughest microbes, capable of surviving in radiation strong enough to kill any other known life-form. Experiments have now shown that if Conan the Bacterium or a similar microbe existed on Mars, it could survive…

Saleem Ali – whose Twitter bio begins “Mercurial Professor” – is not trying to be the new Stephen Hawking.“People buy all these theoretical physics books in droves because they think having them on the shelves will make them look smart,” opines the distinguished professor of energy and the environment at the University of Delaware. “A Brief History of Time is a very difficult book to read.”Ali believes his own, anecdote-filled book is far more accessible. Earthly Order: How Natural Laws Define Human Life is an ambitious…