Chemistry World Book Club

This month, we take a peek behind the curtain with Gemma Milne’s Smoke & Mirrors. In her first book, the technology journalist looks at headline-grabbing science present and past – from cancer treatments to fusion energy and quantum computers. Will the book deliver on its promise to be a guide on how to recognise hype and how to cut through it?

Find out what we thought about the book, and hear from Milne herself as she talks about the human experience of hype – and how it can be used as a tool for good as well as bad.

This month, we’re talking about giraffes, a magic sandwich hole and the question of whether robots will take over the world. All of these things come up in Janelle Shane’s You Look Like a Thing and I Love You, a book about the wonderful and often weird world of artificial intelligence. The title, incidentally, is an AI-generated pickup line, though maybe one of the less successful ones.

Find out what we thought about the book, listen to an extract, and hear from Shane herself as she talks to us about why algorithms are not not as smart as they seem and the perils of following an AI-generated brownie recipe.

This month, we’re delving deep into chemistry’s history as we discuss Peter Wothers' book Antimony, Gold, and Jupiter’s Wolf: How the Elements Were Named. Some chemists may know Wothers’ writing in the form of chemistry textbooks, but this is his first popular science book. As Wothers unearths the stories behind the elements’ names, he also explores our understanding of the nature of matter itself.

In her new book Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time Gaia Vince assembles everything you need to know about the world and how human beings have come to rule over so many aspects of it. If it sounds like a mammoth task...that's because it is! Vince skillfully breaks it down into five distinct sections, looking at everything from how humans have mastered energy expenditure for the benefit of the masses, to the pivotal role language has played in making us a species that stand entirely on our own in a whole host of things.

If there’s one thing we can learn from histroy it’s everything that there is to know. Or at least that’s the promise of machine learning. The master algorithm by Pedro Domingos tells us how machines that learn are starting to transform the world, bringing us driverless cars and perhaps even bloodless wars. Hear an interview with Domingos, a reading from the book, and the thoughts of Royal Society of Chemistry data scientist Colin Batchelor and Chemistry World’s digital content producer, Sam Tracey, who join host Emma Stoye.