Books & Arts in 2015

A polished biopic of tech titan Steve Jobs fails to plumb fully his inner contradictions, finds Timo Hannay.

Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week's best science picks.

Stuart Firestein relishes Helga Nowotny's study of uncertainty in science and society.

Laura Spinney extols Robert Doisneau's haunting images of the Paris natural history museum under occupation.

Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week's best science picks.

Andrew Jermy travels with Hugh Pennington on the arc of humanity's long, troubled relationship with microorganisms.

Ali Yetisen's research includes using nanotechnology and biosensors to make environmentally responsive materials for clothes, tattoos, accessories and contact lenses — materials that could be the future of fashion. Here, Yetisen, who works at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital in Cambridge, talks about mimicking the diffraction in butterfly wings, transforming gowns, and what fashion designers and materials scientists can learn from each other.

Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week's best science picks.

Ken Goldberg reviews three books that probe the nexus of people and robots.

Next week, Refuse the Hour, a chamber opera about time, opens at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City. The work is a collaboration between physics historian Peter Galison and South African multimedia artist William Kentridge. Galison talks about the nexus of technology and imperial conquest, the 'twin paradox' associated with Einstein's special theory of relativity and the metaphorical resonance between black holes and mortality.

Ted Nield hails a biography of Alfred Wegener, who proposed the theory preceding plate tectonics.

Elizabeth Gibney relishes Ridley Scott's disco-laced chronicle of survival on the Red Planet.

Oliver Geden welcomes an analysis of the political inertia impeding a global treaty to limit warming.

Ann Finkbeiner assesses a study of DARPA, the agency that readies US technologies for coming conflicts.

Tim Radford is thrilled by an unprecedented exhibition marking the USSR's cold war feats in space.

Philip Ball appraises Nicole Kidman's stage turn as crystallographer Rosalind Franklin.

Peter E. Pormann on the revelations a meshing of technology and humanities can yield.

Clare Pettitt reassesses the legacy of Victorian polymath Richard Francis Burton.

Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week's best science picks.

Cartoonist and former robotics researcher Jorge Cham wowed graduate students with The PhD Movie in 2011. With the follow-up The PhD Movie 2: Still in Grad School — an astute, funny look at more academic tribulations — set to screen at campuses worldwide from the end of September, Cham talks about crowdfunding, the grim scrabble for grants, the under-representation of women in science and coaxing a cameo from a Nobel laureate.