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HEADING abroad? Don’t forget The Geek Atlas. It will tell you if you’ll be staying near a slice of Charles Babbage‘s brain (London), a suspended from the upper floors of a skyscraper (Taipei, Taiwan), the best place to buy a robotic toilet seat (Tokyo, Japan), or any of the 125 other places of scientific or technological wonder it features.

Nothing is too small (Alexander Fleming’s penicillin mould) or big (the Galapagos islands). Each entry has a short description, practical visiting information and an explanation of a scientific concept associated with the place. A delightful example is , the road in California where Apple has its headquarters, accompanied by a description of a software bug that is created when two programs get stuck in infinite loops.

My only quibble is that the book is quite UK and US-centric: aren’t there places where science comes alive in, say, Africa?