Skulls

One of my favorite writers of non-fiction is Simon Winchester, the author of The Professor and the Madman (about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary), A Crack in the Edge of the World (about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake), and Krakatoa (about the 1883 volcanic explosion). His latest book is Skulls.

Skulls is an iPad app that explores, in great detail, the various skulls in Alan Dudley’s house. Dudley’s collection, one of the finest in private hands, ranges from the hippopotamus (largest) to the smooth newt (smallest) and also includes such oddities as a two-headed cow. Winchester’s supplementary text explains how Dudley, an Englishman who makes his living by creating fine wooden interiors for luxury cars, collected each specimen. Occasional digressions in the book, such as a brief essay about skull images in Renaissance art and an examination of the skull iconography associated with the Mexican Day of the Dead, provide breaks from zoology.

You can view the skulls in 3-D, zoom in on their features, and rotate them 360 degrees. Links lead you to additional information, such as photographs of the animal and zoological details such as average species size and life span. In addition to a number of video and audio interviews with Dudley, a switch turns on Winchester’s text narration so that the app becomes an audio book.

Skulls is a gorgeous app, one well worth $3.99, so check it out.

Wonders of the Universe

An iPad app well worth your time (and easily worth its $5.99 price) is Wonders of the Universe, hosted by physicist Brian Cox. I spent many hours happily scrolling through the app and learning about basic physics, from the particles of the quantum world to the monstrous black holes that destroy entire stars.

The app, which combines the text of the book with dozens of video and animated clips from the BBC television series, is gorgeous and extremely informative. Divided into eight episodes, from “Subatomic” to “Universe,” with each episode then further subdivided into chapters such as “Gravity,” the app is organized so that you can tour the universe systematically or simply dive in and out. The graphics are particularly beautiful and really pop out on the iPad’s Retina screen. Most importantly, I think, the text is clearly written for the general reader.

The host, a professor of physics who used to play in a rock band that had some hit songs, has an extremely engaging and enthusiastic personality, which has made him one of the most popular science presenters in England. He’s currently affiliated with the University of Manchester and conducts research into particles at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland.

So if you’re interested in how the universe came to exist, or if you want to know how it’s going to end, check out Wonders of the Universe.