Three quarters of the way through Macfarlane’s dazzling book he recounts a conversation with Robert Mulvaney – a palaeoclimatologist and ice-core expert at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge. After handing Macfarlane a phial containing grains of sand, Mulvaney explains that they were extracted from a kilometre deep inside a glacier and they prove that  below the ice there was once a Sahara. “They’re beautiful” says Macfarlane. “ Desert diamonds from the bottom of the world” “I can tell you are not a scientist” replies Mulvaney.  It is an unfair jibe. Scientist or not, Macfarlane serves science brilliantly well in his latest work, Underland - A Deep Time Journey. With every chapter he demonstrates his talent for explaining science and communicating the sheer wonder of the world through scientific goggles. The ambitious scope of his storytelling steps lightly from geology to linguistics to geomorphology onto folklore via nuclear physics and meteorology – all brought into focus with elegant prose and sprinklings of poetry. Like a skilled mixologist he serves up cocktails of scientific knowledge that delight and deliver more than the sum of the factual parts. Read more...

The native bluebell, Hyacinthoides non-scipta, is also known as the common bluebell, the wood bell, the fairy flower and sometimes the wild hyacinth.  It is protected in the U.K. under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981.  In a single (ancient) woodland, millions of bulbs may be found and they give rise to carpets of flowers usually in April or May.  They take advantage of the sunlight before the canopy of leaves fully develops and reduces the incident light at ground level. Read more...

Sound is part and parcel of life.  The nervous system of animals are attuned to it; it serves to inform them of danger, of food, of mates etc.  We do not think of plants are being sensitive to or responsive to sound - though some people are convinced that talking to plants helps them to grow better (this might be due to an enhanced level of carbon dioxide near to the plants).  However, some recent studies by Professor Lilach Hadany (of Tel Aviv University) and her colleagues suggest that some plants can respond to certain sounds that bees produce. Read more...

A small tin can carry vital equipment for emergency use in a survival situation.  I spent £22 with Amazon to get Limitless Equipment's "Survival Kit Mark 1", although you could put one together yourself. The one I bought contains these 10 items: Read more...