Photo of Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Terence Eden’s Blog

Book Review: How to Speak Whale - A Voyage Into the Future of Animal Communication by Tom Mustill

By · · 300 words

Book Cover for How To Speak Whale.

This is an excellent pop-science book. It gently weaves a personal tale (nearly getting crushed by a whale) into the current cutting-edge research of animal communication. It takes in along the way philosophy, geopolitics, and the crushing inevitability of death. At its heart is this question - if modern AI is brilliant at extracting semantic […]

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Book Review: Consider the Platypus - Maggie Ryan Sandford

By · · 250 words

Book cover featuring a Platypus.

This is a fluffy and breezy wander through some of the oddities thrown up be evolution. It's also well illustrated and, luckily, most of the picture suit eInk very well. Of great interest to me were the tantalising asides - for example, a formerly enslaved man taught Darwin the art of taxidermy although very little […]

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Book Review: Our Biggest Experiment - A History of the Climate Crisis by Alice Bell

By · · 1 comment · 450 words · read ~104 times.

Book cover featuring electricity pylons receding into the sunset.

Maybe it's the weirdness of the weather. Maybe it's another way to pour scorn on politicians. Maybe the steady stream of headlines about fires, floods and droughts is finally starting to get to us. Whatever it is, for more and more of us, climate change is shifting from a shadowy fear in the backs of […]

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Book Review: Handmade - A Scientist’s Search for Meaning through Making by Anna Ploszajski

By · · 2 comments · 450 words · read ~154 times.

A handmade book cover.

From atomic structures to theories about magnetic forces, scientific progress has given us a good grasp on the properties of many different materials. However, most scientists cannot measure the temperature of steel just by looking at it, or sculpt stone into all kinds of shapes, or know how it feels to blow up a balloon […]

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Book Review - Bad Blood

By · · 300 words

Bad Blood book cover.

The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end, despite pressure from its charismatic CEO and threats by her lawyers.

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Book Review - Longitude

By · · 150 words

A book cover.

The dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest: the search for the solution of how to calculate longitude and the unlikely triumph of an English genius.

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Lessons From FameLab

By · · 1,050 words · read ~332 times.

A couple of weeks ago, I was a finalist at FameLab Oxford. I won the "Audience Choice" award - and was placed in the "Wildcard" category for a place at the National Final :-) Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentOMG! Just won the audience vote at the #FameLab final. Thanks guys ☺#ScienceFTW pic.x.com/bwwqgk7unc❤️ 5💬 2🔁 020:48 […]

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In The Abstract Podcast

By · · 100 words

Four cartoon scientists talking to each other.

Last week I was on In The Abstract - a science podcast - along with the very funny Francesca Day , the mediumly funny Tara Clarke, and the just-funny-enough Steve Pritchard. During the talk, I completely forget the name of the Rosetta Disc and made several legally doubtful slurs against Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. […]

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7 Management Myths That Need To Be Busted

By · · 15 comments · 1,800 words · read ~5,633 times.

Diagram showing a pyramid with a hierarchy of needs.

There are many aspects of modern business management which bother me. More than anything though, is the relentless invasion of idiotic myths which seems to pass for "inspirational leadership". I've sat in many classrooms - with many different employers - and I keep seeing the same lies being told to students. HR and training teams […]

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