The big question, in the mid-21st century, wasn’t how to transition away from fossil fuels – that process became self-propelling as renewable energy became ever cheaper – but how to get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

In the end, achieving the Great Drawdown, as it became known, required many different approaches, including biological, chemical and technological methods of removal. This dispatch examines two solutions that used the under-appreciated, near-magical power of seaweed: one through robotics and the other through bioengineering. The robot ate vast algal blooms; the genetic engineering approach modified a…

The Impossible Man
Patchen Barss (Atlantic Books (UK, 14 November); Basic Books (US, 12 November))

Many people still believe (and many scientists tell themselves) that genius is a solitary affair, that what they do is so important it merits exemption from everyday life and the obligations of intimate relationships.

As his subtitle suggests, Patchen Barss doesn’t endorse this notion in The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the cost of genius, as he charts the life of one of the most influential physicists of the 20th century. The biography…