Get tantric at meal times to enjoy what you eat

Catherine de Lange, contributor

BARB STUCKEY has some interesting advice: next lunch break, turn your mind to tantric sex, then apply the same principles to your sandwich.

In Taste What You're Missing, Stuckey argues that our lives move so fast that we devour meals fit for a king without even looking away from our computer screens. A more tantric approach - taking the time to understand and appreciate food as it plays on the senses - could transform the most simple of lunches into something altogether more rewarding.

She draws on extensive research as well as on her experience as a food developer to explain the psychology and physiology of taste. At times the science is beautifully simple, revealing the reasons for many culinary truisms. Red wine isn't actually bitter, it is astringent - producing a sensation that feels like dryness in the mouth. This explains why wine marries so well with the slick fattiness of a steak, which counters that dryness.

But too often Stuckey skips over the science, opting instead for clumsy, inappropriate metaphors and condescending explanations. Frustratingly, she raises interesting questions - such as why we don't crave salt in the way we thirst for water, even though both are vital for survival - and then leaves them unanswered.

Nonetheless, with sensory exercises at the end of each chapter, this book does deliver on its promise to reconnect you with your palate, and even make you a better cook. If only Stuckey's delivery didn't so often leave a bad taste in your mouth.

Book Information
Taste What You're Missing
by Barb Stuckey
Published by: Free Press>$26

Humanity and the history of computing

Niall Firth, technology news editor

THE science of computing touches every aspect of our lives, but how many of us really know how it works - or how we got to where we are today?

It's quite a story. In Digitized, computer scientist Peter J. Bentley has to zip through decades to cram it all into just 240 pages. He looks at the way computing has grown from its early theoretical basis in mathematics to now encompass many things we take for granted, covering the giant vacuum-tube machines of the 1950s, the birth of the internet and beyond along the way.

But Digitized is as much about the people behind the breakthroughs - the bright, inquisitive minds who saw something that their peers did not and used the tools of their era to push forward human understanding. Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon and Douglas Engelbart flit in and out of the narrative as we learn about the birth of rudimentary coding and transistors. While Bentley delivers the technical detail in an easy-to-understand manner, it is the tales of these pioneers which give the book its heart and colour.

The first part of Digitized shows innovators struggling to shine a light on the future, but it is when that future begins to reveal itself that we see the scope of what they set in motion. Stock market monitoring, biologically inspired software "agents" and multicore processors seem to come from a different planet to the one inhabited by those early computer scientists.

Even so, attempts to build a synthetic brain and the many false dawns of artificial intelligence show how today's computer scientists wrestle with the same question their predecessors did: what does computing teach us about what it means to be human?

Book Information
Digitized
by Peter J. Bentley
Published by: Oxford University Press
?16.99/$29.95

Beware skeletons, for they mislead

Colin Barras, biomedical and environment news editor

EIGHTEENTH-century taxonomist Carl Linnaeus defined over 10,000 species during his career. Few gave him as little trouble as our own. Homo, nosce te ipsum - Man, know thyself - he wrote in 1735, presumably suggesting that no one could seriously confuse our species with another. Around a century after he penned this definition-cum-decree, the first Neanderthal fossils turned up. It was an early sign that human taxonomy was a lot more complicated than Linnaeus suspected.

In a sense, then, Ian Tattersall's new book, Masters of the Planet, could be seen as a guide for the perplexed student of human origins. Tattersall, an emeritus curator of anthropology at New York's Museum of Natural History, guides the reader through roughly 7 million years of our prehistory, carefully explaining how each of the few dozen species of hominin we have identified so far fit into our current picture of human evolution.

The walkthrough begins, appropriately enough, with walking - our distinctive upright stance was probably the earliest important hominin innovation - and ends with a beginning: the origin of language.

Along the way, Tattersall weaves a history of palaeoanthropology into the text, showing that though fossils may provide the bulk of the evidence for human origins, few of the details are set in stone. Even after 200 years of study, new finds can still yield surprising revelations. For example, a long-standing belief that new hominin species are a catalyst for technological innovation has been thoroughly debunked by fossil finds. The first stone tools are associated with small-brained australopiths that had lived in Africa for tens of thousands of years - they did not suddenly appear when the big-brained Homo genus arrived on the scene.

Of course, there is a downside to building a narrative on these ever-shifting sands. Tattersall's book is a snapshot of our family tree as it looked around a year ago, and even in the brief interval since then the picture has changed in some dramatic ways. Most obviously, the 2-million-year-old Australopithecus sediba skeletons (pictured), found in South Africa in 2008, have been fully analysed. Now seen by some as a pivotal species that connects the two major hominin groups - the ape-like australopiths and the genus Homo - Tattersall banishes it to a small side branch in our evolutionary tree and makes only a fleeting mention in his text.

Some theories do stand the test of time, though. Recent genetic evidence shows Homo sapiens interbred both with Neanderthals and the enigmatic Denisovans of Siberia, blurring the boundaries between our species and some of its nearest relations.

But these sexual revelations should not distract from a deeper truth. The physical differences may be small, but Tattersall says that culturally and intellectually there is no contest: nearly 280 years on from Linnaeus, our species remains as distinct from all others as suggested by his curious taxonomic definition.

Book Information
Masters of the Planet
by Ian Tattersall
Published by: Palgrave Macmillan ?16.99/$26

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