Philip Ball

"Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works-the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular machines, of cells as entities with fixed identities, and more-have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong. In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far...

"The Elements is a stunning visual history of how the chemical elements were discovered. By piecing together the Periodic Table, science writer Philip Ball explores not only how we came to understand what everything is made of but also how chemistry developed into a modern science. He groups the elements into chronological eras of discovery, covering three millennia from the first known to the last named. As he moves deliberately from classical antiquity...