Review of Dynamics of Dinosaurs (Paperback)

A lot of things about dinosaurs (and other extinct large animals) we will never know. And a lot of questions are out there. Questions like "Could Tyrannosaurus rex run?", "What was their top speed?", "Did sauropods hold their neck horizontally or vertically?" or "Could large quadrupedal dinosaurs rear up on their hind legs?"

This book treats the animals that these questions are about as "nothing more" than engineering projects, similar to large buildings, bridges or mechanical machines.

Using realistic values for things like compressability and tensile stress properties of substances like bones, cartilage, tendons, etc. and using laws of physics and formulas from structural engineering Alexander tries to answer some of these questions.

The results are very interesting. If you're interesting in dinosaurs and how they really could have been in real life, this is a book you should not miss.



Click Here to see more reviews about: Dynamics of Dinosaurs (Paperback)

Review of The River That Flows Uphill: A Journey from the Big Bang to the Big Brain (Paperback)

Yet surprisingly easy read.Covers a technical topic in everyday language.Provide insight on our evolutional development.



Click Here to see more reviews about: The River That Flows Uphill: A Journey from the Big Bang to the Big Brain (Paperback)

Review of What Bugged the Dinosaurs?: Insects, Disease, and Death in the Cretaceous (Hardcover)

Most dinosaur lovers will find this an interesting read, although a few of the reconstructions are not for the squeamish.In considering the heyday of the dinosaurs, books don't often mention that just like modern animals, they were tormented by the biting flies, mosquitoes and midges we find in amber today, weakened by parasites and fungus, and infected by lethal diseases carried by ticks, fleas and nematodes, some of which could have whittled down individual dinosaur populations beyond the point of recovery.Most people know that dragonflies and cockroaches have been around since before the dinosaurs, but the fact that the modern world's two deadliest infectious diseases, malaria and Leishmaniasis, were also around and may have killed off whole dinosaur herds was new to me.The Poinars don't carry their thesis quite to the point of claiming that parasites and disease were what ended the Age of the Dinosaurs, but they certainly present an alternate candidate worth thinking about.



Click Here to see more reviews about: What Bugged the Dinosaurs?: Insects, Disease, and Death in the Cretaceous (Hardcover)

Review of The Biology of Doom: America's Secret Germ Warfare Project (Paperback)

I was fascinated from this book from the moment I picked it up: Ed Regis has the knack of being able to immerse his reader so deeply in the moment that it is a wrench to put it down.I am a practising microbiologist with a morbid fascination with biological weaponry and nasty zoonoses; this book certainly informed me perhaps better than I needed to be about things I had only previously read about at third- or fourth-hand, or heard as apocryphal anecdotes.

The only things I could fault in this book are that a) it is too short; b) it does not cover some of the more interesting recent biowar developments, such as Iraq's and South Africa's ventures into the field (but see a).

Apart from this, it is a fascinating, detailed and scholarly account of one of the darker areas of recent scientific history.It sits happily on my shelf next to his "Virus Ground Zero : Stalking the Killer Viruses With the Center for Disease Control", which I consider a masterwork (but then, I love Ebola...).



Click Here to see more reviews about: The Biology of Doom: America's Secret Germ Warfare Project (Paperback)