Movement of crops by humans is “a key driving force in history”, notes this global academic study by an anthropologist and three historians in Europe, India and the United States. In the 1830s, British merchants smuggled tea plants from China to set up plantations in India — but then replaced them in the 1870s with indigenous bushes. Indian competition prompted the Chinese industry to reorient to other markets.
Proposed by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930, detected by Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines in 1956 and dubbed the “nothing-particle” by Isaac Asimov in 1966, neutrinos — first created in the Big Bang — are still highly mysterious, despite endless experimental investigation. Hence their current nickname of ‘ghost particle’ — the title of physicist Alan Chodos and journalist James Riordan’s enjoyable, non-mathematical portrait.