slime moulds

Book review – Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures

6-minute read

One objection sometimes raised against the search for extraterrestrial life is that our planet is rich with bizarre life forms that we still poorly understand. As a biologist, you are usually so close to the subject that you sometimes forget just how otherwordly our home planet can be. With his beautifully written book Entangled Life, biologist Merlin Sheldrake shook me out of that daze by offering a truly mind-opening book on fungi. Excitingly, he does so without floating off into speculative or esoteric territory.

(more…)

Book review – Superlative: The Biology of Extremes

5-minute read

Extremes fascinate us: the biggest, the fastest, the oldest, the tallest. Books and TV-programmes regularly scratch our itch for records, whether it is feats of engineering or biological extremes, and many sporting events revolve around humans attempting to set new records. One glance at the cover of Matthew D. LaPlante’s book Superlative and you might think that this is yet another book offering lots of gee-whiz factoids. You would also be wrong. Instead, this is an amusing and fascinating book that digs just that much deeper into the biology behind extremes, and why studying them is so worthwhile.

(more…)

Book review – Fungipedia: A Brief Compendium of Mushroom Lore

5-minute read

Fungi have been eaten, worshipped, reviled, and studied for centuries. Neither animal nor plant (though originally classified as such), they occur pretty much everywhere, from the frigid icy wastes of Antarctica to between your toes. And yet I, like many others, know surprisingly little about them. With part of their life happening underground and on a microscopic scale, they easily evade our attention. With Fungipedia, mycologist Lawrence Millman provides a delightful little introduction to the world of fungi.

(more…)