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The Long Bridge: Out of the Gulags by Urszula Muskus

Inflight Science: A guide to the World from your airplane window by Brian Clegg

Scott's Last Expedition by Robert Falcon Scott

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

Anne Frank's Diary

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac by Graham Farmelo

Giants: The Dwarfs of Aushwitz by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev

Orkney by Amy Sackville

Finally, some pictures of Max...

It's such great fun to watch a herd of elephants interacting. Today, at Whipsnade, while George and Scott ( Max's older brothers played a game trying to push each other into the water hole, Max-the youngest addition to the family, kept running around, falling over. The first picture shows Max with his father Emmet.

Latest from Whipsnade

Three weeks ago, at Whipsnade Zoo, a female asian elephant called Karishma gave birth to a calf named Max, weighing in at 129.5kg.

I so wanted to get a photograph of Max today, but sadly, all I really saw was the occasional glimpse of him as he peered out from behind his mother.

I think the picture below of an elephant is Scott his older brother.

Whipsnade in the rain

I do like Whipsnade Zoo, but if there is a failing, it's that apart from the discovery centre, they really have no indoor areas to visit, so when it's raining like today, everyone gets absolutely soaked.

For this reason, the following photographs were all taken today in the thankfully very dry, discovery centre.

Atomised

For me, one of the hardest scientific conclusions to accept is the belief that atoms comprise mostly of empty space. Empty space. Think about that! Imagine being in a huge, empty cathedral and your small and solitary voice echoing off every distant wall in a manner that suggests eternity. That's an atom.

The nucleus of an atom is made up of positively charged protons and electrically neutral neutrons, and apart from the occasional electron whizzing round like an angry bee, that nucleus occupies such a tiny percentage of the atom as a whole, (100,000 times smaller), it has been said that if it were possible to remove all the empty space in every atom, the Earth would be reduced to the size of a grapefruit.

I don't deny that this is true. It has to be. When Rutherford conducted in 1911 his famous experiment where he fired alpha particles from a radium gun at gold foil he found that only one alpha particle in 8,000 would bounce back because it hit something.

What I find especially difficult is, if we are mostly made up of empty space why don't we just fall to the floor if we were to sit on a chair, or for that matter straight through the floor once we've been through the chair? Why conversely does everything feel so reassuringly solid?

I'm reading this particular science book at the moment which refers to a mysterious force that literally drives apart the electrons and nuclei of an atom so fiercely it effectively turns each atom's constituent parts into something resembling 'invisible girders.'

When you contrast that strong, dividing mechanism inside the atom with the strong nuclear force which glues protons and neutrons together in the first place, and thinking about those different component parts being both repelled and attracted at the same time, without us, well...falling through a chair when we sit on it, or life itself tearing our flimsy self to pieces, isn't life truly a miracle? Or is that the greatest understatement ever?

I am the Walrus!

I have mixed feelings about the natural history museum in Tring. On the one hand it fills me with such sadness seeing so many animals staring out of their display cabinets with such lifeless eyes, (all though I don't suppose it's any worse then seeing a stuffed pope in a glass cabinet which I did when I visited the Vatican many years ago), but on the other hand it's one of the few places you can get some idea of what so many animals actually looked liked that are now extinct.

I went there today because I wanted to see what a seal leopard looked like. I'd read about these ferocious predators that attack both seals and humans alike, with their razor sharp teeth in Scott's diary, but since you can only see them in the Antarctic (which I'm hardly ever likely to go to) & they're never going to appear in a zoo (imagine feeding time, with the keepers throwing a baby seal to them! ) this was the only place that could satisfactorily resolve my curiosity...

As you scroll down to look at the pictures, see if you can spot the Dodo's.

I

Butterfly Farm, Stratford upon Avon