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California’s Channel Island Kelp Forests — Are They Recovering?

By Christopher Wills
As my blood thins with age, I tend to SCUBA dive in the tropics. But in July of 2010, loaded with twenty-four pounds of lead weights to overcome the buoyancy of my thick wet suit and the dense salty water of the frigid Japanese Current, I found myself plunging into cold water to investigate an ecological success story off California’s Channel Islands. I wanted to see what happens when a damaged ecosystem recovers. Can it ever return to its former self?

Corporate science: The good, the bad, and those in between

By Roderick D. Buchanan
The corporate corruption of science is a familiar theme to anyone whose reading stretches beyond celebrity tattle-tale. The well-documented venality of Big Tobacco and Big Pharma have become cautionary fairy tales for modern times.

Are We Masters of Our Own Destiny?

On Friday, 20th August, I joined the panel for a Great Debate entitled “Are We Masters Of Our Own Destiny?” at the University of Newcastle, organized as part of the Green Phoenix Festival, 2010. My fellow panelists were science writer Rita Carter, and local philosopher David Large. As we suspected, this pitted two biology-oriented commentators against a more conventional philosopher…

What is Energy?

By Jennifer Coopersmith
Energy is the go of things, the driver of engines, devices and all physical processes. It can come in various forms (electrical, chemical, rest mass, curvature of spacetime, light, heat and so on) and change between these forms, but the total is always conserved.

The End of Discovery

By Russell Stannard
How many of us appreciate just how fortunate we are to be living at a time of scientific discovery? How many realise that the scientific age is but a brief, transitory phase in the evolution and development of humankind? One day it will all come to an end.

What on Earth is The Wind in the Willows?

By Peter Hunt
To judge from a quick poll of friends, acquaintances, students, and the ladies in the village shop, The Wind in the Willows is fondly remembered, even by those who don’t actually remember reading it. It is a children’s book, it is about small animals – and it is somehow quintessentially English: for almost everyone I spoke to, it conjured up endless summer, boating on a quiet river, large hampers of food, a peaceful, unthreatening way of life.

The Edinburgh International Festival

This week the world famous Edinburgh International Festival kicks off, beginning three weeks of the best the arts world has to offer. The Fringe Festival has already begun in earnest with countless alternative, weird, and wacky events happening all over the city. Later in August sees the Edinburgh International Book Festival and there will be several OUP authors giving talks over a fortnight, including David Crystal, Tariq Ramadan, Frank Close, Ian Glynn, and Robin Hanbury-Tenison.

What has become of genius?

By Andrew Robinson
“In the early 21st century, talent appears to be on the increase, genius on the decrease. More scientists, writers, composers, and artists than ever before earn a living from their creative output. During the 20th century, performance standards and records continually improved in all fields—from music and singing to chess and sports. But where is the Darwin or the Einstein, the Mozart or the Beethoven, the Chekhov or the Shaw, the Cézanne or the Picasso or the Cartier-Bresson of today?”

Norman Names

I couldn’t help noticing this story, which states that many of the names still popular in English-speaking countries originate from the Normans, who won control of England in 1066. Meanwhile, names that were popular in England at the time – such as Aethelred, Eadric, and Leofric – have disappeared. With that in mind, I turned to Babies’ Names, by Patrick Hanks and Kate Hardcastle, to find out more about Norman names.

On the Practitioners of Science

“Physics is rather hard to blog, so I’ll write instead about the practitioners of science – what are they like? Are there certain personality types that do science? Does the science from different countries end up being different?”

Philosophy Bites: A Podcast

What does Simon Blackburn have to say about morality? What does A.C. Grayling think about atheism? Alain de Botton about the aesthetics of architecture? Adrian Moore about infinity? Will Kymlicka about minority rights? For the last three years, David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton have challenged some of the world’s leading philosophers to hold forth on their favourite topics for the highly successful Philosophy Bites podcast. Now 25 of these entertaining, personal, and illuminating conversations are presented in print for the first time.

Psychopathy and Beyond

David Canter is Professor of Psychology at the University of Hudderfield. Widely known for developing systemic offender profiling in Britain and creating the emerging field of Investigative Psychology, he also provides evidence to government enquiries and major court cases. His new book is Forensic Psychology: A Very Short Introduction, and in the short excerpt below he looks at what a ‘psychpath’ really is.

What Do Angels Look Like?

Guardians, messengers, protectors… what are angels? In Angels: A History, David Albert Jones, Director of the Centre for Bioethics and Emerging Technologies at St Mary’s University College, explores the enduring power of angels over the human imagination. He argues that they teach us something about our own existence, whether or not we believe in theirs. In this excerpt from the book, Professor Jones talks about what different religious texts tells us about what angels look like.

Walter Lord: Story-teller or Social Historian?

John Welshman is the author of Churchill’s Children: The Evacuee Experience in Wartime Britain. He is currently working on a book provisionally entitled Titanic: The Last Night of a Small Town (forthcoming, 2012). Below he talks about Walter Lord, who wrote the acclaimed book A Night to Remember about the Titantic. You can read his previous OUPblog posts here.

Ethiopia Since Live Aid, Part III: On Africa, aid, and the West

This third and final part of our ‘Ethiopia Since Live Aid’ blog feature is an original post by Peter Gill, in which he discusses the West’s view of aid and Africa. If you missed it, on Tuesday we read an excerpt from the book, and yesterday we ran an exclusive Q&A with Peter.

Which group of islands situated in the Bay of Bengal were occupied by the Japanese during World War II?