Our guest this week is Christopher Potter. A former mathematician, he went on to commission and edit some of the most popular science books of the past few decades, including Dava Sobel's Longitude and Fermat's Last Theorem by our own columnist Simon Singh. He has also worked on fiction by celebrated novelists Annie Proulx and Carol Shields.
His latest book – this one penned by himself – is called You Are Here – A Portable History of The Universe. Alok Jha asks him why he decided to embark on this cosmically ambitious writing project.
In the Newsjam we discuss how big business suddenly seems to be getting concerned about the environment and why Nasa is feeling headless, and Alok describes how he became a botanical Indiana Jones for two days when he joined a Kew Gardens expedition hunting for some very rare seeds. Check out our gallery of extraordinary, alien seed and pollen images that are part of Kew's 250th anniversary celebrations.
Finally, Ian Sample looks at the words that have crossed over from science fiction into real life. "Robotics" and "zero-g" were all in print before they were used by scientists, and the team suggest a few more words that could make the leap.
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