// NATURE NEWS — SPAZIO & SCIENZA
Medicinal plants, lessons from mushrooms and the power of smell: Books in brief
Andrew Robinson is a writer based in London and author of Earthshock (1993), The Story of Measurement (2007) and Einstein in Oxford (2024).
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According to ancient Greek medical authority Hippocrates, “Nature itself is the best physician” — hence the title of writer Margaret Willes’s appealing book. Introduced with a substantial essay on European herbalism from medieval times to the present, it discusses 100 plants with medical properties, from alecost (Tanacetum balsamita, a member of the daisy family) to the yew tree (Taxus baccata). Each is illustrated with an exquisite colour drawing taken from John Gerard’s 1597 The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes.
When motor cars were invented in the late nineteenth century, their emissions were welcome at first, because they replaced the odour of horse dung that had reduced many city streets to “a state of organic olfactory crisis”, notes historian William Tullett. His engrossing history of smell ranges from ancient Christian aromas, through medieval Indian perfume and the scents of eighteenth-century slavery to the status of odour in twentieth-century China. It features “the foul, the fragrant, and everything in between”.
Just before his death, Albert Einstein stated: “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion”. In this compelling, if intellectually demanding, book about the physics of time, physicist and broadcaster Jim Al-Khalili disagrees. He argues that “the irreversible passage of time needs to be incorporated into the laws of physics”. By comparing the concepts of time in quantum mechanics, the general theory of relativity and thermodynamics, he concludes that time’s arrow is real, and makes the Universe tick.
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