Author Description

The Evening Discourses from the Royal Institution offer lively discussions of contemporary science for a broad audience. This volume features chapters on the search for extraterrestrial life and on the Martian meteorite at the center of recent speculation about life on Mars. The volume contains essays based on eight of the talks, and other topics include the future of television, the use of spectroscopy to analyze Medieval manuscripts, the construction of machines with molecule-based memories, and the outlook for the leaning tower in Pisa.