Recommended reading
Section outline
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As a biology student, you need to develop your general knowledge of the field. This will help you to understand the more specific topics you learn during your degree and a better general knowledge will help you put the material you learn in context. To help you with this we've put together a list of resources that you can use to keep up to date on what's going on in your chosen field of science.
Books
Click here to go to the recommended general reading list. This is a list of books that we think you ought to read. They are all "popular science" books, written to be accessible to the non-specialist, but that doesn't mean they're not worth reading: on the contrary, a good knowledge of the subjects covered here will be a huge help to you in understanding many of the concepts you'll encounter during your degree.
News
It's a good idea to try to keep up to date with science news: biology is a very fast moving science at the moment and there is lots of exciting stuff happening. Some good sources of information are:
BBC News Science and Environment Page
Check these regularly and you'll keep on top of what's going on. Some of these have RSS feeds so you can keep an eye on them with your favourite news aggregator if you like that sort of thing.
Blogs
Blogs tend to come and go and some of them have a tendency to post too many lolcats or holiday photos, and some others are get a bit too political or otherwise opinionated. Nonetheless, some really important discussions in science in recent years have happened mostly on blogs; one example is the "Arsenical life" controversy (see here, here, and here) and it's worth keeping an eye on what's going on.
General biology
Ecology
Evolution
Carl Zimmer's blog The Loom
Brian Switek's blog Laelaps
Dave Hone's blog at the Guardian, Lost Worlds
Zoology
Genetics and genomics
What You're Doing is Rather Desperate
Podcasts
Quirks and Quarks This is an absolutely superb science radio show from Canada.
Palaeocast If you have any interest in fossils then listen to this.
Heredity podcast from the genetics journal
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