This post is about a preprint I recently came across on the scientific arXiv: Retaining Earth’s Habitability Beyond the Life of the Sun by Gabriel Harry. It offers several 'mega-engineering' solutions to the problems likely to arise, e.g. from the million year expiry date on the Sun and the difficulty of transporting civilization via interstellar voyages to other solar systems (or roaming around in spaceships indefinitely). The paper identifies 7 main threats and their propos

This post is a short review of the book The Great Archaeologists (2014, 304 pages), edited by Brian Fagan. The book is a collection of biographical portraits of about 70 pioneering archaeologists, written by prominent professionals in the field. Each entry is short (about 3-5 pages) and the book moves along at a clip. It's strength in my opinion is in the breadth of coverage it provides. I have listed some of the categories I enjoyed finding in the book. Usual suspects: The

The book reviewed in this post. This post is a review of the book Chasing (a) Conjecture (2025) by C. B. Khare. Khare, in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Wintenberger, solved a famous outstanding problem in mathematics, known as Serre's conjecture. The book details this quest for the popular reader (largely), but also contains a literary history of the author's personal and professional development as a mathematician. I thought the book was really well written (no ghost writer