Philip Ball is  is a scientist, writer, boradcaster, and a former editor at Nature. He has won numerous awards, including the Royal Society's Bernal-Wilkins-Medawar Medal for Excellence (2022), and has published more than twenty-five books, most recently The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, From Animals to Aliens, The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination and The Beauty of Chemistry: Art, Wonder, and Science. He writes on science for many magazines and journals including the New York Times, the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and is the contributing editor for Science at the Marginalia Review of Books. Tweets @philipcball