New Books in Science Podcast

Making Meaning Episode 21: Throbbing with Life from 2023-02-24T09:00

Science often draws a picture of the world as a giant machine, a meaningless mechanical clock ticking and tocking forever. But religion and poetry offer a different view, one that is teeming with l...

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Dissecting Morality: What do Scientists Have To Say About Ethics? (Part 2) from 2023-01-28T09:00

Linking morality and science can conjure up disturbing histories around social Darwinism, eugenics, and genetically engineered humans. But scientists today are making discoveries that moral agents ...

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Dissecting Morality: What do Scientists Have To Say About Ethics? (Part 1) from 2023-01-27T09:00

Linking morality and science can conjure up disturbing histories around social Darwinism, eugenics, and genetically engineered humans. But scientists today are making discoveries that moral agents ...

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On Einstein's Discoveries from 2022-09-29T08:00

Before Albert Einstein, our understanding of space, time, and gravity hadn’t really shifted from the theories that Sir Isaac Newton developed in the 1700s. But in 1905, Einstein published his theor...

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On Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" from 2022-09-08T08:00

In 1962, American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn was struck by Aristotle’s beliefs about motion. Actually, he thought that those theories...

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On Edwin Hubble’s "The Realm of the Nebulae" from 2022-08-22T08:00

Until the publication of Edwin Hubble’s 1936 book, The Realm of the Nebulae, astronomers believed that the Milky Way was the only galaxy in the universe. Hubble infinitely expanded our understandin...

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On Edwin Hubble’s "The Realm of the Nebulae" from 2022-08-22T08:00

Until the publication of Edwin Hubble’s 1936 book, The Realm of the Nebulae, astronomers believed that the Milky Way was the only galaxy in the universe. Hubble infinitely expanded our understandin...

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Gina Rippon, "Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds" (Vintage, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For decades if not centuries, science has backed up society’s simple dictum that men and women are hardwired differently, that the world is divided by two different kinds of brains—male and female....

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Alec Foege, “The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors Who Make America Great” (Basic Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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Robert Plomin, "Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Have you ever felt, “Oh my God, I’m turning into my mother (or father)!” ? Robert Plomin explains why that happens in Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (MIT Press, 2019). A century of genetic ...

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Michael D. Gordin, “The Pseudo-Science Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“No one in the history of the world has ever self-identified as a pseudoscientist.” From the very first sentence, Michael D. Gordin’s new book introduces readers to the characters, plotlines, and c...

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Valerie Olson, "Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth" (U Minnesota Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What if outer space is not outside the human environment but, rather, defines it? This is the unusual starting point of Valerie Olson’s Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Bey...

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Katy Price, “Loving Faster Than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

You were amused to find you too could fear “The eternal silence of the infinite spaces.” The astronomy love poems of William Empson, from which the preceding quote was taken, were just some of the ...

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Rene Almeling, "GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rene Almeling’s new book GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health (University of California Press, 2020) provides an in-depth look at why we do not talk about men’s reproductiv...

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David Sepkoski, “Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline” (University of Chicago, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline (University of Chicago Press, 1012), David Sepkoski tells a story that explains the many ways that paleontol...

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Scholarly Communication: An Interview with Joerg Heber of PLOS from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Open Access is spelled with a capital O and a capital A at the Public Library of Science (or PLOS, for short), a nonprofit Open Access publisher. Among PLOS's suite of journals, PLOS One is the non...

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Chris Cooper, “Run, Swim, Throw, Cheat: The Science Behind Drugs in Sport” (Oxford University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This past August, the saga of Lance Armstrong came to its inglorious end. The seven-time champion of the Tour de France and Olympic medalist ended his defense against charges that he had engaged in...

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Boel Berner, "Strange Blood: The Rise and Fall of Lamb Blood Transfusion in 19th-Century Medicine and Beyond" (Transcript Verlag, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the mid-1870s, the experimental therapy of lamb blood transfusion spread like an epidemic across Europe and the USA. Doctors tried it as a cure for tuberculosis, pellagra and anemia; proposed it...

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Robert Westman, “The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order” (University of California Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This is an extraordinary book written by one of the finest historians of science. Ringing in at nearly seven hundred oversized, double columned pages Robert Westman‘s The Copernican Question: Progn...

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Kat Arney, "Rebel Cell: Cancer, Evolution, and the New Science of Life's Oldest Betrayal" (Benbella Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cancer exists in nearly every animal and has afflicted humans as long as our species has walked the earth. In Rebel Cell: Cancer, Evolution, and the New Science of Life's Oldest Betrayal (Benbella ...

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Anjan Chakravartty, “A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable” (Cambridge UP, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Near the opening of his book A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable (Cambridge University Press, 2007; paperback 2010), Anjan Chakravartty warns readers: snack before readin...

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Jeremy England, "Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things" (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“How did life begin? Most things in the universe aren't alive, and yet if you trace the evolutionary history of plants and animals back far enough, you will find that, at some point, neither were w...

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P. Kyle Stanford, “Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives” (Oxford UP, 2006) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Should we really believe what our best scientific theories tell us about the world, especially about parts of the world that we can’t see? This question informs a long history of debates over scien...

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Frans de Waal, "Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves (W. W. Norton & Company) is a fascinating exploration of the rich emotional lives of animals, beginning with Mama, a chimpanze...

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Hanna Rose Shell, “Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance” (Zone Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Imagine a world wherein the people who wrote history books were artists, the books occasionally read like poetry, and the stories in them ranged from Monty Python skits to the natural history of ch...

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Thom van Dooren, "The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Crows can be found almost everywhere that people are, from tropical islands to deserts and arctic forests, from densely populated cities to suburbs and farms. Across these diverse landscapes, many ...

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Philip Kitcher, “Science in a Democratic Society” (Prometheus Books, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Philip Kitcher‘s Science in a Democratic Society (Prometheus Books, 2011) is an ambitious work that does many things at the same time. It offers a compelling theory of democracy, public knowledge, ...

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Scholarly Communications: An Interview with Helen Pearson of 'Nature' from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nature is the premier weekly journal of science, the journal where specialists go to read and publish primary research in their fields. But Nature is also a science magazine, a combination unusual ...

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D. Graham Burnett, “The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Graham Burnett’s The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2012) s an astounding book. It is an inspiring work, both in the depth of re...

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Dr. Christopher Harris on Teaching Neuroscience from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Christopher Harris (@chrisharris) is a neuroscientist, engineer and educator at the EdTech company Backyard Brains. He is principal investigator on an NIH-funded project to develop brain-based ...

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Paul Thagard, “The Cognitive Science of Science: Explanation, Discovery, and Conceptual Change” (MIT Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’ve all heard about scientific revolutions, such as the change from the Ptolemaic geocentric universe to the Copernican heliocentric one. Such drastic changes are the meat-and-potatoes of histori...

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Zachary Dorner, "Merchants of Medicine: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long 18th Century" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Merchants of Medicine: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century (The University of Chicago Press), medicines embody the hopes of those who prepared, sold, and ing...

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Lawrence Busch, “Standards: Recipes for Reality” (MIT Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As Lawrence Busch reminds us, standards are all around us governing seating arrangements, medicine, experimental objects and subjects and even romance novels. In Standards: Recipes for Reality (MIT...

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Carl Safina, "Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace" (Henry Holt, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Some people insist that culture is strictly a human accomplishment. What are those people afraid of? Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace (Henry Holt ...

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David Edwards, “The Lab: Creativity and Culture” (Harvard University Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

To say that David Edwards‘s The Lab: Creativity and Culture (Harvard University Press, 2010) is inspiring would be a profound understatement. In a series of concise, focused chapters that range fro...

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Nick Chater, "The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Psychologists and neuroscientists struggle with how best to interpret human motivation and decision making. The assumption is that below a mental “surface” of conscious awareness lies a deep and co...

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John Eric Goff, “Gold Medal Physics: The Science of Sports” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The instructor of my freshman physics course fit the stereotype of a physics professor: unkempt white hair, black glasses case in the breast pocket of his short-sleeved shirt, thick German accent, ...

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Jessica Pierce, "Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets" (U Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A life shared with pets brings many emotions. We feel love for our companions, certainly, and happiness at the thought that we’re providing them with a safe, healthy life. But there’s another emoti...

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Mark Stephen Meadows, “We Robot: Skywalker’s Hand, Blade Runners, Iron Man, Slutbots, and How Fiction Became Fact” (Lyons Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If technology is the site of digital culture, then robots are the future platforms of our social projections and interactions. In fact, that future is already here in small but fascinating ways. Ma...

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Katherine Kinzler, "How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do - And What It Says About You" (HMH, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We gravitate toward people like us; it's human nature. Race, class, and gender shape our social identities, and thus who we perceive as "like us" or "not like us". But one overlooked factor can be ...

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Alex Vilenkin, “Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes” (Hill and Wang, 2006) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

[This interview is re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh’s ThoughtCast] Want to know how the world is going to end? Just ask Russian cosmologist Alex Vilenkin. If it’s our own universe you’r...

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David Haig, "From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his book, From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life (MIT Press), evolutionary biologist David Haig explains how a physical world of matter in motion gave ris...

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Ian Sample, “Massive: The Missing Particle that Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science” (Basic Books, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

You’ve probably read about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It’s the largest (17 miles around!), most expensive (9 billion dollars!) scientific instrument in history. What’s it do? It accelerates b...

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David J. Hand, "Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There is no shortage of books on the growing impact of data collection and analysis on our societies, our cultures, and our everyday lives. David Hand's new book Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know ...

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Ann Fabian, “The Skull Collectors: Race, Science and America’s Unburied Dead” (University of Chicago, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What should we study? The eighteenth-century luminary and poet Alexander Pope had this to say on the subject: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man ” (An E...

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Adam Rutherford, "How to Argue With a Racist" (The Experiment, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Racist pseudoscience has become so commonplace that it can be hard to spot. But its toxic effects on society are plain to see—feeding nationalism, fueling hatred, endangering lives, and corroding o...

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James Fleming, “Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control” (Columbia UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the summer of 2008 the Chinese were worried about rain. They were set to host the Summer Olympics that year, and they wanted clear skies. Surely clear skies, they must have thought, would show t...

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György Buzsáki, "The Brain from Inside Out" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Brain from Inside Out (Oxford University Press, 2019), György Buzsáki contrasts what he terms the ‘outside-in’ and ‘inside-out’ perspectives on neuroscientific theory and research methodolog...

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Abigail Foerstner, “James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles” (University of Iowa Press, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This week we feature an interview with Abigail Foerstner about her new book, James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles (University of Iowa Press, 2007). Dr. Foerstner teaches news writing and ...

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Steven Shapin, "The Scientific Revolution" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” With this provocative and apparently paradoxical claim, Steven Shapin begins The Scientific Revolution (Universi...

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David Bressoud, "Calculus Reordered: A History of the Big Ideas" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Calculus Reordered: A History of the Big Ideas (Princeton UP, 2019) takes readers on a remarkable journey through hundreds of years to tell the story of how calculus evolved into the subject we kno...

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Stuart Ritchie, "Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype in Science" (Penguin Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

So much relies on science. But what if science itself can’t be relied on? In Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype in Science (Penguin Books, 2020), Stuart Ritchie, a profess...

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Solomon Goldstein-Rose, "The 100% Solution: A Plan for Solving Climate Change" (Melville House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At age 26, Solomon Goldstein-Rose has already spent more time thinking about climate change than most of us will in our lifetimes. He’s been a climate activist since age 11, studied engineering and...

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Marc Zimmer, "The State of Science" (Prometheus Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

New research and innovations in the field of science are leading to life-changing and world-altering discoveries like never before. What does the horizon of science look like? Who are the scientist...

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David Kaiser, "Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Kaiser is a truly unique scholar: he is simultaneously a physics researcher and a historian of science whose writing beautifully melds the past and future of science. As a historian, he studi...

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Cailin O’Connor, "Games in the Philosophy of Biology" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The branch of mathematics called game theory – the Prisoners Dilemma is a particularly well-known example of a game – is used by philosophers, social scientists, and others to explore many types of...

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Eric Holthaus, "The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming" (HarperOne, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We sit at the beginning of what could be “both a truly terrifying and a golden era in humanity.” In The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming (HarperOne, 2020), l...

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Lee McIntyre, "The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What can explain the success of science as an endeavor for getting closer to truth? Does science simply represent a successful methodology, or is it something more? In The Scientific Attitude: Defe...

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Henry M. Cowles, "The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The idea of a single scientific method, shared across specialties and teachable to ten-year-olds, is just over a hundred years old. For centuries prior, science had meant a kind of knowledge, made ...

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Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, a...

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Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of schola...

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Wade Roush, "Extraterrestrials" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Everything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant evidence of extraterrestrial activity?but we d...

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Wenfei Tong, "Bird Love: The Family Life of Birds" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Wenfei Tong's Bird Love: The Family Life of Birds (Princeton University Press, 2020) looks at the extraordinary range of mating systems in the avian world, exploring all the stages from courtship a...

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Ray Dorsey, "Ending Parkinson's Disease: A Prescription for Action" (Public Affairs, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brain diseases are now the world's leading source of disability. The fastest growing of these is Parkinson's: the number of impacted patients has doubled to more than six million over the last twen...

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Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like ra...

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Adrian Currie, "Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The “historical sciences”—geology, paleontology, and archaeology—have made extraordinary progress in advancing our understanding of the deep past. How has this been possible, given that the evidenc...

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Andrew Leigh, "Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Are Changing Our World" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From the unending quest to turn metal into gold to the major discoveries that reveal how the universe works, experiments have always been a critical part of the hard sciences. In recent decades soc...

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Kareem Khalifa, "Understanding, Explanation and Scientific Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the relation between understanding and knowledge in science? Can we understand a scientific theory if it is false? Do we understand a scientific proposition we can’t elaborate or do anythin...

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Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McM...

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Amy Shira Teitel, "Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA" (Bloomsbury, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amy Shira Teitel talks about Apollo and the community of people who are deeply attached to space history. Teitel is a spaceflight historian and the creator of the YouTube Channel, Vintage Space. Sh...

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Alistair Sponsel, "Darwin’s Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Alistair Sponsel talks about Darwin’s experiences on HMS Beagle and his early career as a naturalist. His close reading of Darwin’s journals and letters reveals insights about the man that woul...

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Travis Dumsday, "Dispositionalism and the Metaphysics of Science" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dispositionalism is the view that there are irreducible causal powers in nature that explain why objects behave as they do. To say salt is soluble in water, for example, is to say that salt has the...

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Gil Eyal, "The Crisis of Expertise" (Polity, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In recent political debates there has been a significant change in the valence of the word “experts” from a superlative to a near pejorative, typically accompanied by a recitation of experts’ many ...

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Michael F. Robinson, "The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2006) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Radio host Kevin Fox interviews Michael F. Robinson about the history of American Arctic exploration, the subject of his book, The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (Univers...

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David Adger, "Language Unlimited: The Science Behind Our Most Creative Power" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Adger is Professor of Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London, where he is Head of the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film. He has served as President of the Linguistics Associat...

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K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years work...

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Brian Clegg, "Conundrum: Crack the Ultimate Cipher Challenge" (Icon Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The book we are discussing is by Brian Clegg, a well-known author of books on math and science -- but this is not exactly a book on math or science, although these subjects play a significant role....

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Neil Maher, "Apollo in the Age of Aquarius" (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Neil Maher talks about the social forces that shaped NASA in the 1960s and 70s, connecting the space race with the radical upheavals of the counterculture. Maher is a professor of history at the Ne...

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Daniel Kennefick, "No Shadow of Doubt: The 1919 Eclipse that Confirmed Einstein’s Theory of Relativity" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel Kennefick talks about resistance to relativity theory in the early twentieth century and the huge challenges that faced British astronomers who wanted to test the theory during the solar ecl...

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James Schwartz, "The Ethics of Space Exploration" (Springer, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Ethics of Space Exploration (Springer, 2016), edited by James S. J. Schwartz and Tony Milligan, aims to contribute significantly to the understanding of issues of value (including the ultimate ...

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Angelina Callahan, "NASA in the World: Fifty Years of International Collaboration in Space" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Angelina Callahan talks about the Naval Research Laboratory’s Vanguard Project. While the launch of Vanguard 1 in 1958 was part of the Cold War “Space Race,” it also represented something more: a s...

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Phoebe Moore, "The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What Counts" (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Humans are accustomed to being tool bearers, but what happens when machines become tool bearers, calculating human labour via the use of big data and people analytics by metrics? Phoebe Moore's The...

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Steve Fuller, "The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Steve Fuller and Veronika Lipinska's The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) debates the concept of transforming human nature, including such thorny t...

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David Spiegelhalter, "The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data" (Basic, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today's guest is distinguished researcher and statistician, Sir David Spiegelhalter. A fellow of the Royal Society, he is currently Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at...

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E. Jones-Imhotep and T. Adcock, "Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History" (UBC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Science and technology have shaped not only economic empires and industrial landscapes, but also the identities, anxieties, and understandings of people living in modern times. The book I’m looking...

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Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous?and easier to sh...

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Julian Havil, "Curves for the Mathematically Curious" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I talked to Julian Havil about his latest book Curves for the Mathematically Curious: An Anthology of the Unpredictable, Historical, Beautiful, and Romantic (Princeton University Press, 2019)...

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Michael E. Mann, "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars : Dispatches from the Front Lines" (2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We talk with Michael E. Mann, a Nobel Prize winner and Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State, about his journey through the climate wars over the past two decades and the rol...

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John Gribbin, "Six Impossible Things: The ‘Quanta of Solace’ and the Mysteries of the Subatomic World" (Icon Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today's podcast is on the book Six Impossible Things: The ‘Quanta of Solace’ and the Mysteries of the Subatomic World (Icon Book, 2019) by the noted author John Gribbin. Although there have been a ...

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Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might...

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J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not nec...

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Theodore Dalrymple, "False Positive: A Year of Error, Omission, and Political Correctness in the New England Journal of Medicine" (Encounter Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Theodore Dalrymple is a retired physician in Great Britain, who has written an account of his year’s-worth of reading the New England Journal of Medicine. In his new book False Positive: A Year of ...

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David Lindsay Roberts, "Republic of Numbers: Unexpected Stories of Mathematical Americans through History" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The institutional history of mathematics in the United States comprises several entangled traditions—military, civil, academic, industrial—each of which merits its own treatment. David Lindsay Robe...

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Oren Harman, "Evolutions: Fifteen Myths That Explain Our World" (FSG, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“There are only two ways to live your life,” said Albert Einstein, “One is as though nothing is a miracle; the other is as though everything is a miracle.” Oren Harman clearly agrees with Einstein’...

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Thomas Hager, "Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine" (Abrams Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Behind every landmark drug is a story. It could be a researcher’s genius insight, a catalyzing moment in geopolitical history, a new breakthrough technology, or an unexpected but welcome side effec...

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Justin Garson, "What Biological Functions are and Why They Matter" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why do zebras have stripes? One way to answer that question is ask what function stripes play in the lives of zebras – for example, to deter disease-carrying flies from biting them. This notion of ...

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David Sinclair, "LifeSpan: Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To" (Simon and Schuster, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today's guest is David Sinclair, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Paul Glenn Center Biological Mechanisms of Aging. He is widely considered on the world's fore...

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E. H. Ecklund and D. R. Johnson, "Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think of Religion" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is common to see science and religion portrayed as mutually exclusive and warring ways of viewing the world, but is that how actual scientists see it? For that matter, which cultural factors sha...

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Emily Lakdawalla, "The Design and Engineering of Curiosity: How the Mars Rover Performs Its Job" (Springer, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emily Lakdawalla talks about the design and construction of Curiosity, formally known as the Mars Science Laboratory, one of the most sophisticated machines ever built. Curiosity landed on Mars in ...

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Michael Kodas, "Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the 1980s, fires burned an average of two million acres per year. Today the average is eight million acres and growing. Scientists believe that we could see years with twenty million acres burne...

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David Philip Miller, "The Life and Legend of James Watt" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For all of his fame as one of the seminal figures of the Industrial Revolution, James Watt is a person around whom many misconceptions congregate. In The Life and Legend of James Watt: Collaboratio...

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Shai Lavi, "Bioethics and Biopolitics in Israel: Socio-legal, Political and Empirical Analysis" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Once upon a time, or so we’ve been told, medical ethics were confined to the patient-doctor relationship. As long as doctors were true to their Hippocratic oaths, as long as they acted with compass...

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Samir Okasha, "Agents and Goals in Evolution" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Evolutionary biologists standardly treat organisms as agents: they have goals and purposes and preferences, and their behaviors and adaptive traits contribute to the achievement of their goals. Thi...

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Violet Moller, "The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found" (Doubleday, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Violet Moller has written a narrative history of the transmission of books from the ancient world to the modern. In The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost an...

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David R. Montgomery, "Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life" (W. W. Norton, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life (W. W. Norton & Co., 2018), Dr. David R. Montgomery portrays hope amidst the backdrop that for centuries, agricultural practices have eroded ...

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Vanessa Heggie, "Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Vanessa Heggie talks about the history of biomedical research in extreme environments. Heggie is a Fellow of the Institute for Global Innovation at the University of Birmingham. She is the author o...

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John D. Hawks, "Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story" (National Geographic, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John D. Hawks talks about new developments in paleoanthropology – the discovery of a new hominid species Homo Naledi in South Africa, the Neanderthal ancestry of many human populations, and the cha...

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Paul Sutter, "Your Place in the Universe: Understanding Our Big, Messy Existence" (Prometheus, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Your Place in the Universe: Understanding Our Big, Messy Existence (Prometheus, 2018), Paul Sutter presents an in-depth yet accessible tour of the universe for lay readers, while conveying the e...

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Robin Scheffler, “A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Could cancer be a contagious disease? Although this possibility might seem surprising to many of us, it has a long history. In fact, efforts to develop a cancer vaccine drew more money than the Hum...

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Philip W. Clements, "Science in an Extreme Environment: The American Mount Everest Expedition" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historian of Science Philip W. Clements discusses the 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition. His book, Science in an Extreme Environment: The American Mount Everest Expedition, is now out with Uni...

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David Munns, "Engineering the Environment: Phytotrons and the Quest for Climate Control in the Cold War" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Phytotron” is such a great name for something that is, when you look at it, a high-tech greenhouse. But don’t sell it short! The phytotron was not only at the center of post-war plant science, but...

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Nicholas Shea, "Representation in Cognitive Science" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In order to explain thought in natural physical systems, mainstream cognitive science posits representations, or internal states that carry information about the world and that are used by the syst...

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Stephan Bullard, "A Day-by-Day Chronicle of the 2013-2016 Ebola Outbreak" (Springer, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why did Ebola, a virus so deadly that it killed or immobilized its victims within days, have time to become a full-blown epidemic? That’s what happened in 2013 in when the virus, already well-known...

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Eric Topol, "Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again" (Basic Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Medicine has lost its humanity. Doctors no longer have the time to make personal connections with their patients. In his new book Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Huma...

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Jessica Pierce, "Unleashing Your Dog: A Field Guide to Giving Your Canine Companion the Best Life Possible" (New World Library, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

No matter how cushy their lives, dogs live on our terms. They compromise their freedom and instinctual pleasure, as well as their innate strategies for coping with stress and anxiety, in exchange f...

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Chris Bernhardt, "Quantum Computing for Everyone" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I talked with Chris Bernhardt about his book Quantum Computing for Everyone (MIT Press, 2019). This is a book that involves a lot of mathematics, but most of it is accessible to anyone who su...

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Kate Brown, "Manuel for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We cannot learn from disasters we do not yet understand. That conviction motivated historian Kate Brown to conduct groundbreaking research into nuclear energy’s most infamous chapter and write Manu...

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Christopher Preston, "The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World (MIT Press, 2018), Dr. Christopher Preston argues that what is most startling about the Anthropocene ...

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Emily Dawson, "Equity, Exclusion and Everyday Science Learning: The Experiences of Minoritised Groups" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Who is excluded from science? What is the role of museums in this exclusion? In Equity, Exclusion and Everyday Science Learning: The Experiences of Minoritised Groups (Routledge, 2019), Dr Emily Da...

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Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contri...

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Rick Van Noy, "Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As climate change politics abound, Dr. Rick Van Noy’s Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South (University of Georgia Press, 2019) cuts through it all to get to the core. Wha...

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Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson, "Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body" (Avery, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emotional Intelligence involves self awareness, self control, relationship management and social awareness. Being emotionally intelligent can make you a better leader, parent, friend and partner. I...

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Jonathan Birch, "The Philosophy of Social Evolution" (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It seems to go against evolutionary theory for an individual to give up its own chances at reproducing in order to increase the fitness of others. Yet social behavior is found throughout nature, fr...

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Peter Hotez, "Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Peter Hotez is a pediatrician-scientist who develops vaccines for neglected tropical diseases affecting the worlds poor. He is also the father of a daughter who was diagnosed with autism. The a...

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Elliott Sober, "The Design Argument" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The story goes: you are walking in the woods and see a wrist-watch on the ground; you don’t know how it got there or why it has come to be abandoned here, but you can surmise that someone somewhere...

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Benoît Majerus, "From the Middle Ages to Today: Experiences and Representations of Madness in Paris" (Parigramme, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With Paris as the organizing locus of his new book, Du moyen âge à nos jours, expériences et représentations de la folie à Paris [From the Middle Ages to Today, Experiences and Representations of M...

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Maria Kronfeldner, "What's Left of Human Nature? A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Much of the debate about the roles of nature vs. nurture in the development of individual people has settled into accepting that it's a bit of both, although what each contributes to a given trait ...

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George E. Mobus and Michael C. Kalton, "Principles of Systems Science" (Springer Verlag, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Of the many barriers to a more robust presence for systems approaches in the academy, the relative scarcity of sufficient introductory textbooks in the field stands out as a particular irritant. I...

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William B. Young and Stephen D. Silberstein, "Navigating Life with Migraine and Other Headaches" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Migraine headaches can be absolutely devastating. In the book Navigating Life with Migraine and Other Headaches (Oxford University Press, 2018), William B. Young and Stephen D. Silberstein set out...

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Paul A. Offit, "Do You Believe in Magic?: Vitamins, Supplements, and All Things Natural" (Harper, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is alternative medicine quackery? In the book Do You Believe in Magic? Vitamins, Supplements, and All Things Natural: A Look Behind the Curtain (Harper, 2014) (Harper Paperbacks, 2014),Paul A. Offi...

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Steve Stewart-Williams, "The Ape That Understood the Universe: How Mind and Culture Evolve" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, cross-posted from from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Yael Schonbrun takes a dive into evolutionary psychology with professor and author, Dr. Steve Stewart-Williams. ...

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Samuel Schindler, "Theoretical Virtues in Science: Discovering Reality Through Theory" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A fundamental problem in science, and in philosophy of science, is that of theory choice. Scientists propose theories to explain data, but when two scientific theories can both explain the same dat...

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McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty...

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Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers, "The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The prologue to The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War (University of Chicago Press, 2018) begins by provocatively invoking a question Americ...

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Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes, “A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If the universe was even slightly different in some of its fundamental physical properties, life could not exist – such is the claim of ‘fine tuning’ of the universe for life. The topic of fine tun...

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David P. Barash, “Through a Glass Brightly: Using Science to See Our Species as We Really Are” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Human beings have long seen themselves as the center of the universe, as specially-created creatures who are anointed as above and beyond the natural world. Professor and noted scientist David P. B...

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Andrew C. A. Elliott, “Is That a Big Number?” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrew C. A. Elliott‘s Is That a Big Number? (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a book that those of us who feast on numbers will absolutely adore, but will also tease the palates of those for whom...

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Rachel Z. Arndt, “Beyond Measure” (Sarabande Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Our world today is full of algorithms and metrics designed to help us keep up, to keep track, to keep going. New devices, such as the smartwatch, now make it possible to quantify and standardize ev...

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Theodore M. Porter, “Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity (Princeton University Press, 2018), Theodore Porter uncovers the unfamiliar origins of human genetics in the asylums of Europe and...

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Hervé Guillemain, “Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History” (Alma, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Schizophrènes au XXe siècle: des effets secondaires de l’histoire [Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History] is a strong argument in support of the history of psychiatry...

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Peter Harries-Jones, “Upside-Down Gods: Gregory Bateson’s World of Difference” (Fordham UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The work of polymath Gregory Bateson has long been the road to cybernetics travelled by those approaching this trans-disciplinary field from the direction of the social sciences and even the humani...

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Byron Reese, “The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity” (Simon & Schuster, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity (Simon & Schuster, 2018), futurist, technologist, and CEO of Gigaom, Byron Reese makes the case that t...

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S. Hayes and D. S. Wilson, “Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science: An Integrated Framework for Understanding, Predicting, and Influencing Human Behavior” (Context Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Evolution science and behavioral science both have strong theories that can help us understand humans in context, and yet, until now, the two fields have been mostly separate. In this episode, cros...

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Anjan Chakravartty, “Scientific Ontology: Integrating Naturalized Metaphysics and Voluntarist Epistemology” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A scientific ontology is a view about what a scientific theory says exists. Longstanding philosophical debate on this issue divides into two broad camps: anti-realists, who think scientific theorie...

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Andrew J. Hogan, “Life Histories of Genetic Disease: Patterns and Prevention in Postwar Medical Genetics” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did clinicians learn to see the human genome? In Life Histories of Genetic Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Andrew J. Hogan makes the subtle argument that a process described by ...

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Albert Müller, ed., “The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name: Seven Days With Second-Order Cybernetics” (Fordham UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Between his retirement from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne in 1975 and his death in 2002, many cyberneticians made the pilgrimage to Pescadero, California to unravel the oft-elusive...

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Dorothy H. Crawford, “Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped our History” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The history of mankind is interlinked with microbes. As humans evolved and became more advanced, microbes evolved right along with us. Through infection, disease, and pandemic they have helped shap...

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Joëlle Gergis, “Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia” (Melbourne UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia (Melbourne University Press, 2018), Joëlle Gergis, a climate scientist and writer from the University of Mel...

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Sabina Leonelli, “Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study” (U Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Commentators have been forecasting the eclipse of hypothesis-driven science and the rise of a new ‘data-driven’ science for some time now. Harkening back to the aspirations of Enlightenment empiric...

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Randi Hutter Epstein, “Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything” (Norton, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Metabolism, behavior, sleep, mood swings, the immune system, fighting, fleeing, puberty, and sex: these are just a few of the things our bodies control with hormones. Armed with a healthy dose of w...

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Eric Winsberg, “Philosophy and Climate Science” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that there is a warming trend in the global climate that is attributable to human activity, with an expected increase in global temperat...

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Sam Kean, “The Violinist’s Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code” (Back Bay, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Disappearing Spoon, bestselling author Sam Kean unlocked the mysteries of the periodic table. In The Violinist’s Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genet...

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Jonathan W. Marshall, “Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot is perhaps most well known today from the images of his “hysterical” female patients featured in Bourneville’s Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. ...

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Jörg Matthias Determann, “Space Science and the Arab World: Astronauts, Observatories, and Nationalism in the Middle East” (I. B. Tauris, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Space Science and the Arab World, Astronauts, Observatories and Nationalism in the Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 2018) a recently published history of Arab exploration of space, offers a fascinating i...

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Sam Kean, “The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons” (Little, Brown and Co., 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Early studies of the functions of the human brain used a simple method: wait for misfortune to strike—strokes, seizures, infectious diseases, lobotomies, horrendous accidents-and see how the victim...

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Sigrid Schmalzer, et. al., “Science for the People: Documents from America’s Movement of Radical Scientists (UMass Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“What is needed now is not liberal reform or withdrawal, but a radical attack, a strategy of opposition. Scientific workers must develop ways to put their skills at the service of the people and ag...

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Susan M. Squier, “Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor” (Duke UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Susan M. Squier’s book, Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor (Duke University Press, 2017) is about development— biological and ecological. It explores how the media (paintings, films, grap...

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Karl H. Muller et al., “New Horizons for Second-Order Cybernetics” (World Scientific, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In their volume, New Horizons for Second-Order Cybernetics (World Scientific, 2017), editors Alexander Riegler, Karl H. Muller and Stuart A. Umpelby have assembled almost 60 articles, including the...

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Thomas Morris, “The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations” (Thomas Dunne, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For thousands of years the human heart remained the deepest of mysteries; both home to the soul and an organ too complex to touch, let alone operate on. Then, in the late nineteenth century, medics...

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Molly Ladd-Taylor, “Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eugenic sterilization is usually associated with Nazi horrors before and during World War II. But, as Dr. Molly Ladd-Taylor reminds us, it was also practiced in the United States. In her new book F...

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Menachem Fisch, “Creatively Undecided: Toward a History and Philosophy of Scientific Agency” (U Chicago Press, 2017 ) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thomas Kuhn upset both scientists and philosophers of science when he argued that transitions from one scientific framework (or “paradigm”) to another were irrational: the change was like a religio...

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Andrew Lees, “Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment” (Notting Hill Editions, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment (Notting Hill Editions, 2017) is a fascinating account by one of the world’s leading and most decorated neurologists of the profound influence...

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Henry Jay Przybylo, “Counting Backwards: A Doctor’s Notes on Anesthesia” (W.W. Norton, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For many of the 40 million Americans who undergo anesthesia each year, it is the source of great fear and fascination. From the famous first demonstration of anesthesia in the Ether Dome at Massach...

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Michael Shermer, “Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia” (Henry Holt, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For millennia, religions have concocted numerous manifestations of heaven and the afterlife, and though no one has ever returned from such a place to report what it is really like—or that it even e...

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Dmitry Novikov, “Cybernetics: Past to Future” (Springer Verlag, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With all of its entailed engagements with epistemology, emergence, and self-organization, cybernetics began (and arguably still is) the science of communication and control in the animal and the ma...

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Howard I. Kushner, “On the Other Hand: Left Hand, Right Brain, Mental Disorder, and History” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the early twentieth century, Robert Hertz, a French anthropologist, and Cesare Lombroso, the Italian criminologist, debated the causes and consequences of left-handedness. According to Lombroso,...

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Ty Tashiro, “Awkward: The Science of Why We’re Socially Awkward and Why That’s Awesome” (Harper Collins, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Some people can’t help but be ‘awkward’ despite their lifelong efforts to blend in. They feel ashamed of their social ineptitude and end up shying away from social situations, yet research offers i...

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Erika Dyck and Alex Deighton, “Managing Madness” (U Manitoba Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Embracing a multi-perspectival authorial voice, Managing Madness: Weyburn Mental Hospital and the Transformation of Psychiatric Care in Canada (University of Manitoba Press, 2017), tells the story ...

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Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs, “Jonas Salk: A Life” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Polio was a scourge that terrified generations of people throughout the United States and the rest of the world until Jonas Salk’s vaccine provided the first effective defense against it. In Jonas ...

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Dan Flores, “Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History” (Basic Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Wile E. Coyote has a family tree with many roots and branches, argues University of Montana A.B. Hammond Professor Emeritus Dan Flores in his recent book, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural...

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Abby Hafer, “The Not-So-Intelligent Designer: Why Evolution Explains the Human Body and Intelligent Design Does Not” (Cascade Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Have you ever asked yourself why humans have an appendix that will sometimes explode and kill us? Why do men’s testicles hang outside the body where theyre arguably awkward and vulnerable? And if t...

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Scott Bembenek, “The Cosmic Machine: The Science That Runs Our Universe and the Story Behind It” (Zoari Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Scott Bembenek‘s The Cosmic Machine: The Science That Runs Our Universe and the Story Behind It (Zoari Press, 2017) is a wonderful way to introduce an intellectually curious person to how physics a...

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Michael Wintroub, “The Voyage of Thought: Navigating Knowledge Across the Sixteenth-Century World” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you are an enthusiast of The Cheese and the Worms (1976), The Great Cat Massacre (1984), or The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), then Michael Wintroub‘s The Voyage of Thought: Navigating Knowledg...

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Brian Clegg, “Big Data: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our Lives” (Icon Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Big Data: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our Lives (Icon Books, 2017), by Brian Clegg, is a relatively short book about a subject that has emerged only recently, but is rapidly beco...

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Jan De Winter, “Interests and Epistemic Integrity in Science” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the 1960’s Thomas Kuhn argued, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that scientists’ choices between competing theories could not be determined by the empirical evidence. Ever since, phil...

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Iwan Rhys Morus, ed.,”The Oxford Illustrated History of Science” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is science? A seemingly profound, yet totally ridiculous question to try and answer. Yet, when Oxford University Press reached out to the brilliant scholar of Victorian science, Iwan Rhys Morr...

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Ron Edwards, “The Edge of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity, and Doctor Moreau” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As I was reading Ron Edward’s fascinating and far-reaching new book, The Edge of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity, and Doctor Moreau (Oxford University Press, 2016), I had a flashback. I must have ...

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Robert Wright, “Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment” (Simon and Schuster, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

All “true believers” believe their beliefs are true. This is particularly true of true religious believers: for Christians, Christianity is the true religion, for Jews, Judaism is the true religion...

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Gualtiero Piccinini, “Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A popular way of thinking about the mind and its relation to physical stuff is in terms of computation. This general information-processing approach to solving the mind-body problem admits of a num...

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Brian Clegg, “The Reality Frame: Relativity and Our Place in the Universe” (Icon Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Clegg is one of England’s most prolific and popular writers on science. His latest work, The Reality Frame: Relativity and Our Place in the Universe (Icon Books, 2017), covers Einstein’s Theo...

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Kees van Deemter, “Computational Models of Referring: A Study in Cognitive Science” (MIT Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sometimes we have to depend on philosophy to explain to us why something apparently simple is in fact extremely complicated. The way we use referring expressions – things that pick out the entities...

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Neil M. Maher, “Apollo in the Age of Aquarius” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the summer of 1969, two seminal events of the sixties happened within a few weeks of each other: the first man walked on the moon and the Woodstock music festival was held in upstate New York. A...

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Beau Lotto, “Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently” (Hatchette Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We may think we see the world as it is, but neuroscience proves otherwise. Which is a good thing, according to neuroscientist and author Beau Lotto. In his new book Deviate: The Science of Seeing D...

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Sophia Roosth, “Synthetic: How Life Got Made” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sophia Roosth‘s wonderful new book follows researchers clustered around MIT beginning in 2003 who named themselves synthetic biologists. A historically informed anthropological analysis based on ma...

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Tara H. Abraham, “Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science” (MIT Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Fueling his bohemian lifestyle and anti-authoritarian attitude with a steady diet of ice cream and whiskey, along with a healthy dose of insomnia, Warren Sturgis McCulloch is best known for his fou...

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Lisa Messeri, “Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds” (Duke UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What kind of object is a planet? Lisa Messeri‘s new book asks and addressed this question in a fascinating ethnography that explores how scientific practices transform planets into places and helps...

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J. C. McKeown, “A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Healing Arts of Greece and Rome” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The back cover of J. C. McKeown‘s new book, A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities (Oxford University Press, 2017), is adorned not with review quotes from contemporary scholars, but rather the di...

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Tania Munz, “The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language” (U of Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tania Munz‘s new book is a dual biography: both of Austrian-born experimental physiologist Karl von Frisch, and of the honeybees he worked with as experimental, communicating creatures. The Dancing...

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Raz Chen-Morris, “Measuring Shadows: Kepler’s Optics of Invisibility” (Penn State UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Raz Chen-Morris‘s new book traces a significant and surprising notion through the work of Johannes Kepler: in order to account for real physical motions, one has to investigate artificially produce...

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Colleen Derkatch, “Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine” (U of Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What makes for new science? What happens to the evidentiary basis of the medical profession when patients demand treatments beyond the range of their conception of human biology? Are the criteria o...

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Kathleen McAuliffe, “This is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society” (Mariner Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kathleen McAuliffe‘s This is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society (Mariner Books, 2017) unveils the world of parasites. From the influence of parasi...

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Stephanie Ruphy, “Scientific Pluralism Reconsidered: A New Approach to the (Dis)unity of Science (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The idea that the sciences can’t be unified–that there will never be a single ‘theory of everything’–is the current orthodoxy in philosophy of science and in many sciences as well. But different ve...

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Carl Gillett, “Reduction and Emergence in Science and Philosophy” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Are complex phenomena “nothing but the sum of their parts”, or are they “more than the sum of their parts”? Physicists, chemists, and biologists as well as philosophers have long argued on both sid...

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Berit Brogaard, “On Romantic Love: Simple Truths about a Complex Emotion” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why is falling in love so exciting and painful at the same time? And what explains our longing for people who are bad for us or no longer love us back? In her book On Romantic Love: Simple Truths a...

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Randy Olson, “Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story” (U. Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Randy Olson, author of Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story (University of Chicago Press, 2015), has an unusual background. He is a Harvard-trained biologist and former tenured pro...

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Projit Bihari Mukharji, “Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Science: (University of Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Projit Bihari Mukharji’s new book explores the power of small, non-spectacular, and everyday technologies as motors or catalysts of change in the history of science and medicine. Focusing on practi...

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Joshua Howe, “Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming” (U. Washington Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The year 2016 was the hottest year on record, and in recent months, drought and searing heat have fanned wildfires in Fort McMurray Alberta and in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Meanwhile, the Arctic has h...

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Brian Clegg, “Are Numbers Real? The Uncanny Relationship of Mathematics and the Physical World (St. Martin’s Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Clegg’s Are Numbers Real? The Uncanny Relationship of Mathematics and the Physical World (St. Martin’s Press, 2016) is a compact, very readable, and highly entertaining history of the develop...

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Ian Stewart, “Calculating the Cosmos: How Mathematics Unveils the Universe” (Basic Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The book discussed here is Ian Stewart’s Calculating the Cosmos: How Mathematics Unveils the Universe (Basic Books, 2016). If you would like to read a book that in my opinion represents the nicest ...

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Pamela S. Turner, “Crow Smarts/Samurai Rising” (HMH/Charlesbridge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Award-winning author, Pamela S. Turner discusses two new books, Crow Smarts: Inside the Brain of the Worlds Smartest Bird (HMH Books for Young Readers, 2016), and Samurai Rising: The Epic Life of M...

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J.D. Trout, “Wondrous Truths: The Improbable Triumph of Modern Science” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The social practice we call science has had spectacular success in explaining the natural world since the 17th century. While advanced mathematics and other precursors of modern science were not un...

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Asif A. Siddiqi, “The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Asif Siddiqi approaches the history of the Soviet space program as a combination of ...

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Kenneth Schaffner, “Behaving: What’s Genetic, What’s Not, and Why Should We Care?” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the genes vs. environment debate, it is widely accepted that what we do, who we are, and what mental illnesses we are at risk for result from a complex combination of both factors. Just how comp...

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Alfred S. Posamentier and Robert Geretschlager, “The Circle: A Mathematical Exploration Beyond the Line” (Prometheus Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alfred S. Posamentier and Robert Geretschlager, The Circle: A Mathematical Exploration Beyond the Line (Prometheus Books, 2016) goes considerably beyond what its modest title would suggest. The cir...

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Sandra Harding, “Objectivity and Diversity: A New Logic of Scientific Inquiry” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is the scientific value of objectivity in conflict with the social justice commitment to diversity? In her latest book, Objectivity and Diversity: A New Logic of Scientific Inquiry (University of C...

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James Rodger Fleming, “Inventing Atmospheric Science: Bjerknes, Rossby, Wexler, and the Foundations of Modern Meteorology” (MIT Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This is a book about the future – the historical future as three interconnected generations of atmospheric researchers experienced it and envisioned it in the first part of the twentieth century. J...

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Peter Harrison, “The Territories of Science and Religion” (U. of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Contemporary debates would lead you to believe that science and religion are eternally at odds with each other. In The Territories of Science and Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Peter...

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Marta Zaraska, “Meathooked: The History and Science of our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat” (Basic Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Here in the U.S. we’ve just celebrated the Fourth of July, with its parades, fireworks, and, of course, cook-outs. If you’re like me, the smell of a grilling burger can make you salivate from acros...

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Michael F. Robinson, “The Lost White Tribe: Explorers, Scientists, and the Theory that Changed a Continent” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael F. Robinson‘s new book is such a pleasure to read, I cant even. It’s not just because you get to say Gambaragara over and over again if you read it aloud. (I recommend doing this, even if j...

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Beineke and Rosenhouse, eds., “The Mathematics of Various Entertaining Subjects: Research in Recreational Math” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jennifer Beineke and Jason Rosenhouse‘s new book The Mathematics of Various Entertaining Subjects: Research in Recreational Math (Princeton University Press, 2015) covers a multitude of topics and ...

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Eben Kirksey, “Emergent Ecologies” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eben Kirksey new book asks and explores a series of timely, important, and fascinating questions: How do certain plants, animals, and fungi move among worlds, navigate shifting circumstances, and f...

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Eric Dietrich, “Excellent Beauty: The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of the World” (Columbia UP, ) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Although there are many deep criticisms of a scientific view of humanity and the world, a persistent theme is that the scientific worldview eliminates mystery, and in particular, the wonders and my...

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David J. Stump, “Conceptual Change and the Philosophy of Science: Alternative Interpretations of the A Priori” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ever since Kant argued that there was a category of truths, the synthetic a priori, that grounded the possibility of empirical knowledge, philosophers have debated the concept of a priori knowledge...

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Ronald Chase, “Schizophrenia: A Brother Finds Answers in Biological Science” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his book, Schizophrenia: A Brother Finds Answers in Biological Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), biologist Ronald Chase explores the frequently misunderstood condition through an e...

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Dale Jamieson, “Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How are we to think and live with climate change? In Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future (Oxford University Press, 2014), Dale J...

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Peter J. Gloviczki, “Journalism and Memorialization in the Age of Social Media” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Humans have coped with tragedy using ritual and memorials since the Neolithic era. Doka called a memorial a space invested with meaning, “set aside to commemorate an event such as a tragedy.” Memor...

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Natasha Myers, “Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After reading Natasha Myers’s new book, the world begins to dance in new ways. Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Duke University Press, 2015) is a sensory ethnograph...

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Brian Clegg, “How Many Moons Does the Earth Have? The Ultimate Science Quiz Book” (Icon Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Clegg, who is arguably the most prolific science writer since Isaac Asimov, and almost certainly the most prolific British one, has written a delightfully tantalizing book entitled How Many M...

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Eric T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder, “Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

By now it is incontrovertible that new technology has had an effect on how regular people get information. Whether in the form of an online newspaper or a Google search, new technology has allowed ...

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Anita Guerrini, “The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anita Guerrini‘s wonderful new book explores Paris as a site of anatomy, dissection, and science during the reign of Louis XIV between 1643-1715. The journey begins with readers accompanying a dead...

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Eugene Raikhel, Todd Meyers, Emily Yates-Doerr, “Somatosphere.net” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Somatosphere is “a collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry, psychology and bioethics.” Founded in July 2008, So...

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Isabelle Dussauge, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, and Francis Lee, “Value Practices in the Life Sciences and Medicine” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Valuation is a central question in contemporary social science. Indeed the question of value has a range of academic projects associated with it, whether in terms of specific questions or in terms ...

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Sandra Harding, “Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sandra Harding‘s new book Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research (University of Chicago Press, 2015) raises new questions about two central concepts in STS – objectivity an...

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Tom Jackson, “Chilled: How Refrigeration Changed the World and Might Do So Again” (Bloomsbury, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tom Jackson‘s Chilled: How Refrigeration Changed the World and Might Do So Again (Bloomsbury, 2015) is a completely engrossing look into the history and technology of refrigeration. This book read...

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Raf De Bont, “Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870-1930” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While museums, labs, and botanical gardens have been widely studied by historians of science, field stations have received comparatively little attention.Raf De Bont‘s new book rectifies this overs...

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James A. Secord, “Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age” (U of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James A. Secord‘s new book is both deeply enlightening and a pleasure to read. Emerging from the 2013 Sandars Lectures in Bibliography at the Cambridge University Library, Visions of Science: Books...

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Tom McLeish, “Faith and Wisdom in Science” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Much of the public debate about the relationship between science and theology has been antagonistic or adversarial. Proponents on both sides argue that their respective claims are contradictory–tha...

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Chris Morgan, “The Comic Galaxy of Mystery Science Theater 3000” (McFarland, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While there are many well known cult television shows still revered by fans, MST3K continues to have an incredibly large following with a thriving following 25 years after its final episode. Chris ...

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A. Mark Smith, “From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A. Mark Smith‘s new book is a magisterial history of optics over the course of two millennia. From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics (University of Chicago Press, 2015) sugg...

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Nick Wilding, “Galileo’s Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and the Politics of Knowledge” (U Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nick Wilding‘s new book is brilliant, thoughtful, and an absolute pleasure to read. Galileo’s Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and The Politics of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2014) takes an ...

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Edmund Russell, “Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth” ( from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Evolution is among the most powerful ideas in the natural sciences. Indeed, the evolutionary theoristTheodosius Dobzhansky famouslysaid nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evoluti...

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Orit Halpern, “Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945” (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The second half of the twentieth century saw a radical transformation in approaches to recording and displaying information. Orit Halpern‘s new book traces the emergence of the “communicative objec...

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Nicolas Rasmussen, “Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicolas Rasmussen‘s new book maps the intersection of biotechnology and the business world in the last decades of the twentieth century. Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterpris...

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Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain, “Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History in the Twentieth Century” (U of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In lucid prose that’s a real pleasure to read, Karen Rader and Victoria Cain‘s new book chronicles a revolution in modern American science education and culture. Life on Display: Revolutionizing U....

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William Sheehan and Christopher Conselice, “Galactic Encounters” (Springer, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Galactic Encounters: Our Majestic and Evolving Star-System, From the Big Bang to Time’s End, by William Sheehan and Christopher Conselice, takes readers on a journey through time, unfolding the lon...

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David A. Rothery, “Planet Mercury: From Pale Pink Dot to Dynamic World” (Springer, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Planet Mercury: From Pale Pink Dot to Dynamic World (Springer, 2014) by David A. Rothery, introduces the innermost planet in our solar system and brings readers up to speed on recent spacecraft dis...

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Vera Kolb, “Astrobiology: An Evolutionary Approach” (CRC Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Astrobiology: An Evolutionary Approach (CRC Press, 2014) is a new volume edited by Dr. Vera Kolb that brings together 37 authors from a variety of different research backgrounds to introduce this r...

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Daniel Margocsy, “Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel Margocsy‘s beautiful new book opens with a trip to Amsterdam by Baron Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, and closes with a shopping spree by Peter the Great. These two trips bookend a series of...

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James Giordano, “Neurotechnology in National Security and Defense” (CRC Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Neurotechnology in National Security and Defense: Practical Considerations, Neuroethical Concerns (CRC Press, 2014), edited by Dr. James Giordano, is an impressive collection of essays by authors a...

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William J. Turkel, “Spark from the Deep” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“In a sense, all life consists of the colonization of an electric world. But to see that, we have to go back to the very beginning.” William J. Turkel‘s new book traces the emergence and inhabiting...

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Lawrence Lipking, “What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution” (Cornell UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lawrence Lipking‘s new book, What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) examines the role of imagination and creativity in the seventeenth century develo...

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Roberto Trotta, “The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is” (Basic Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Roberto Trotta‘s new book, The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is (Basic Books, 2014) uses only the thousand (or ten-hundred) most common words in the English language to ...

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Don Lincoln, “The Large Hadron Collider” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Don Lincoln‘s new book, The Large Hadron Collider: The Extraordinary Story of the Higgs Boson and Other Stuff That Will Blow Your Mind (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014), presents an insider’s view of the la...

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Mary-Jane Rubenstein, “Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse” (Columbia UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Where can the the boundaries of science, philosophy, and religion be drawn? Questioning the nature of the universe is an excellent place to rethink how these categories have been deployed across ti...

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David N. Livingstone, “Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David N. Livingstone‘s new book traces the processes by which communities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that shared the same Scottish Calvinist heritage engaged with Darwin a...

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Thomas McFaul and Al Brunsting, “God is Here to Stay: Science, Evolution, and Belief in God” (Wipf and Stock, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The book discussed in this interview is God is Here to Stay: Science, Evolution, and Belief in God (Wipf and Stock, 2014) by Thomas McFaul and Al Brunsting, two authors with very different backgrou...

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Jane Maienschein, “Embryos Under the Microscope: The Diverging Meanings of Life” (Harvard UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why do we study the history of science? Historians of science don’t just teach us about the past: along with philosophers of science, they also help us to understand the foundations and assumptions...

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Omar W. Nasim, “Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Omar W. Nasim‘s new book, a series of fascinating characters sketch, paint, and etch their way toward a mapping of the cosmos and the human mind. Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the ...

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Melinda B. Fagan, “Philosophy of Stem Cell Biology: Knowledge in Flesh and Blood” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Philosophy of science has come a very long way from its historically rooted focus on theories, explanations, and evidential relations in physics elaborated in terms of a rather mythical “theory T”....

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Richard Yeo, “Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the Great Fire of London in September 1666, Samuel Pepys went out to the garden and dug some holes. There he placed his documents, some wine, and “my parmezan cheese” for safekeeping as the ...

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Oscar E. Fernandez, “Everyday Calculus: Discovering the Hidden Math All around Us (Princeton UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The book discussed in this interview is Everyday Calculus: Discovering the Hidden Math All around Us (Princeton University Press, 2014) by Oscar E. Fernandez, who teaches mathematics – and calculus...

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Robert Mitchell, “Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Mitchell‘s new book is wonderfully situated across several intersections: of history and literature, of the Romantic and contemporary worlds, of Keats’ urn and a laboratory cylinder full of ...

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Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, “Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Abena Dove Osseo-Asare‘s wonderful new book is a thoughtful, provocative, and balanced account of the intersecting histories and practices of drug research in modern Ghana, South Africa, and Madaga...

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David Kaiser, “How the Hippies Saved Physics” (W.W. Norton, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Kaiser‘s recent book is one of the most enjoyable and informative books on the history of science that you’ll read, full-stop. The deservedly award-winning How the Hippies Saved Physics: Scie...

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Matthew C. Hunter, “Wicked Intelligence” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The pages of Matthew C. Hunter‘s wonderful new book are full of paper fish, comets, sleepy-eyed gazes, drunk ants, and a cast full of fascinating (and sometimes hilarious) members of the experiment...

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John Hibbing et al., “Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences” (Routledge, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Hibbing, Kevin Smith, and John Alford are the authors of Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences (Routledge, 2013). Hibbing is professor of political sci...

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Michael Pettit, “The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Parapsychology. You may have heard of it. You know, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis. Spoon-bending and that sort of thing. If you have heard of it, you probably think of it as ...

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Chuck Adler, “Wizards, Aliens, and Starships: Physics and Math in Fantasy and Science Fiction” (Princeton UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

[Re-posted with permission from Wild About Math] I’ve admitted before that Physics and I have never gotten along. But, science fiction is something I enjoy. So, when Princeton University Press sent...

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Hallam Stevens, “Life Out Of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hallam Stevens‘s new book is a rich and fascinating ethnographic and historical account of the transformations wrought by integrating statistical and computational methods and materials into the bi...

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John Waldman, “Running Silver: Restoring Atlantic Rivers and Their Great Fish Migrations” (Lyons Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When it comes to understanding why our planet’s biodiversity is declining so precipitously, no phrase has as much explanatory power as “shifting baselines” — as essayist Derrick Jensen put it, “[T...

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Michael Weisberg, “Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1956 and 1957, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided to test a plan to dam up the San Francisco Bay in order to protect its water supply: they built a 1.5 acre model of the Bay area in a ware...

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Gabriel Finkelstein, “Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany” (MIT Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“A good wife and a healthy child are better for one’s temper than frogs.” For Gabriel Finkelstein, Emil du Bois-Reymond was “the most important forgotten intellectual of the nineteenth century.” Mo...

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Angela N. H. Creager, “Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Angela Creager‘s deeply researched and elegantly written new book is a must-read account of the history of science in twentieth-century America. Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science a...

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Sarah S. Richardson, Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Men and women are different, there’s no doubt about it. And you might well want to know what the root of that difference is. What makes a man a man and a woman a woman? Before the beginning of the ...

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Kim TallBear, “Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is genetic testing a new national obsession? From reality TV shows to the wild proliferation of home testing kits, there’s ample evidence it might just be. And among the most popular tests of all i...

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Muhammed Ali Khalidi, “Natural Categories and Human Kinds: Classification in the Natural and Social Sciences” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The division between natural kinds – the kinds that ‘cut nature at its joints’ – and those that simply reflect human interests and values has a long history. The natural kinds are often thought to ...

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William J. Clancey, “Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Exploration Rovers” (MIT Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does conducting fieldwork on another planet, using a robot as a mobile laboratory, change what it means to be a scientist? In Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Expl...

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Dorothy H. Crawford, “Virus Hunt: The Search for the Origin of HIV” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you think about it, pretty much everything has a history insofar as everything exists in time. Historians, however, usually limit themselves to the history of humans and the things humans make. ...

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Adam R. Shapiro, “Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Anti-Evolution Movement in American Schools” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the 1924-25 school year, John Scopes was filling in for the regular biology teacher at Rhea County Central High School in Dayton, Tennessee. The final exam was coming up, and he assigned rea...

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Tim Maudlin, “Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time” (Princeton UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tim Maudlin‘s Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time (Princeton University Press, 2012) is a clear, approachable, and engaging introduction to the philosophy of physics that focuses on fundamental n...

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Michael Ruse, “The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Michael Ruse offers a fascinating history of the Gaia Hypothesis in the context of the transformations of prof...

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Hannah S. Decker, “The Making of DSM-III: A Diagnostic Manual’s Conquest of American Psychiatry” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Like it or not, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) has an enormous influence in deciding what qualifies as a mental health disorder in the United States ...

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David Munns, “A Single Sky: How an International Community Forged the Science of Radio Astronomy” (MIT Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do you measure a star? In the middle of the 20thcentury, an interdisciplinary and international community of scientists began using radio waves to measure heavenly bodies and transformed astron...

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Nathaniel Comfort, “The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine” (Yale UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“This is a history of promises.”So begins Nathaniel Comfort‘s gripping and beautifully written new book on the relationships between and entanglements of medical genetic and eugenics in the history...

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Maki Fukuoka, “The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in 19th-Century Japan” (Stanford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Zograscope. Say it with me: zograscope. ZooooOOOOOoooograscope. There are many optical wonders in Maki Fukuoka’s new book The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in 1...

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Brian Clegg, “Dice World: Science and Life in a Random Universe” (Icon Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The book discussed in this interview is Dice World: Science and Life in a Random Universe (Icon Books, 2013), by Brian Clegg, an acclaimed British writer of books on science for the general public....

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Helen Longino, “Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What explains human behavior? It is standard to consider answers from the perspective of a dichotomy between nature and nurture, with most researchers today in agreement that it is both. For Helen ...

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Victor Stenger, “God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion” (Prometheus, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Are science and religion compatible, or are they fundamentally different ways of viewing the world? In the book,God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion(Prometheus, 2...

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Marlene Zuk, “Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live” (Norton, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Hebrews called it “Eden.” The Greeks and Romans called it the “Golden Age.” The philosophes–or Rousseau at least–called it the “State of Nature.” Marx and Engels called it “Primitive Communism....

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Kathleen M. Vogel, “Phantom Menace or Looming Danger?: A New Framework for Assessing Bioweapons Threats” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kathleen M. Vogel‘s new book is enlightening and inspiring. Phantom Menace or Looming Danger?: A New Framework for Assessing Bioweapons Threats (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) uses an approa...

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Hugh Raffles, "The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time" (Pantheon Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At once an examination of geology, a biography of monuments, and a meditation on the connection between personal loss and massive loss, Hugh Raffles’ The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Los...

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Meir Hemmo and Orly Shenker, “The Road to Maxwell’s Demon: Conceptual Foundations of Statistical Mechanics” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Among the very many puzzling aspects of the physical world is this: how do we explain the fact that the laws of thermodynamics are time-asymmetric while those of statistical mechanics are time-symm...

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M. Bekoff and J. Pierce, "The Animals' Agenda: Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Human Age" (Beacon Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A compelling argument that the time has come to use what we know about the fascinating and diverse inner lives of other animals on their behalf Every day we are learning new and surprising facts ab...

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Lawrence M. Krauss, “A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing” (Atria, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing (Atria, 2012), Lawrence M. Krauss presents this big idea: something can–and perhaps must–come from nothing. That something is,...

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I. Newkirk and G. Stone, "Animalkind: Remarkable Discoveries about Animals and Revolutionary New Ways to Show Them Compassion" (Simon and Schuster, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The founder and president of PETA, Ingrid Newkirk, and bestselling author Gene Stone explore the wonders of animal life and offer tools for living more kindly toward them. In the last few decades, ...

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Christopher I. Beckwith, “Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World (Princeton University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World (Princeton University Press, 2012), Christopher I. Beckwith gives us a rare window into the global movements...

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Abigail Foerstner, “James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles” (University of Iowa Press, 2007) from 2008-02-27T00:12:12

This week we feature an interview with Abigail Foerstner about her new book, James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles (University of Iowa Press, 2007). Dr. Foerstner teaches news writing and ...

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Abigail Foerstner, “James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles” (University of Iowa Press, 2007) from 2008-02-27T00:12:12

This week we feature an interview with Abigail Foerstner about her new book, James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles (University of Iowa Press, 2007). Dr. Foerstner teaches news writing and ...

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Podcasts by New Books in Science

All episodes

Making Meaning Episode 21: Throbbing with Life from 2023-02-24T09:00

Dissecting Morality: What do Scientists Have To Say About Ethics? (Part 2) from 2023-01-28T09:00

Dissecting Morality: What do Scientists Have To Say About Ethics? (Part 1) from 2023-01-27T09:00

On Einstein's Discoveries from 2022-09-29T08:00

On Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" from 2022-09-08T08:00

On Edwin Hubble’s "The Realm of the Nebulae" from 2022-08-22T08:00

On Edwin Hubble’s "The Realm of the Nebulae" from 2022-08-22T08:00

Gina Rippon, "Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds" (Vintage, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alec Foege, “The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors Who Make America Great” (Basic Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Plomin, "Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael D. Gordin, “The Pseudo-Science Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Valerie Olson, "Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth" (U Minnesota Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Katy Price, “Loving Faster Than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rene Almeling, "GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Sepkoski, “Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline” (University of Chicago, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Scholarly Communication: An Interview with Joerg Heber of PLOS from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chris Cooper, “Run, Swim, Throw, Cheat: The Science Behind Drugs in Sport” (Oxford University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Boel Berner, "Strange Blood: The Rise and Fall of Lamb Blood Transfusion in 19th-Century Medicine and Beyond" (Transcript Verlag, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Westman, “The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order” (University of California Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kat Arney, "Rebel Cell: Cancer, Evolution, and the New Science of Life's Oldest Betrayal" (Benbella Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anjan Chakravartty, “A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable” (Cambridge UP, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeremy England, "Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things" (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

P. Kyle Stanford, “Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives” (Oxford UP, 2006) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Frans de Waal, "Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hanna Rose Shell, “Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance” (Zone Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thom van Dooren, "The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Philip Kitcher, “Science in a Democratic Society” (Prometheus Books, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Scholarly Communications: An Interview with Helen Pearson of 'Nature' from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

D. Graham Burnett, “The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Christopher Harris on Teaching Neuroscience from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul Thagard, “The Cognitive Science of Science: Explanation, Discovery, and Conceptual Change” (MIT Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Zachary Dorner, "Merchants of Medicine: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long 18th Century" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lawrence Busch, “Standards: Recipes for Reality” (MIT Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carl Safina, "Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace" (Henry Holt, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Edwards, “The Lab: Creativity and Culture” (Harvard University Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nick Chater, "The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Eric Goff, “Gold Medal Physics: The Science of Sports” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jessica Pierce, "Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets" (U Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mark Stephen Meadows, “We Robot: Skywalker’s Hand, Blade Runners, Iron Man, Slutbots, and How Fiction Became Fact” (Lyons Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Katherine Kinzler, "How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do - And What It Says About You" (HMH, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alex Vilenkin, “Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes” (Hill and Wang, 2006) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Haig, "From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ian Sample, “Massive: The Missing Particle that Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science” (Basic Books, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David J. Hand, "Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ann Fabian, “The Skull Collectors: Race, Science and America’s Unburied Dead” (University of Chicago, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Adam Rutherford, "How to Argue With a Racist" (The Experiment, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James Fleming, “Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control” (Columbia UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

György Buzsáki, "The Brain from Inside Out" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Abigail Foerstner, “James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles” (University of Iowa Press, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Steven Shapin, "The Scientific Revolution" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Bressoud, "Calculus Reordered: A History of the Big Ideas" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stuart Ritchie, "Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype in Science" (Penguin Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Solomon Goldstein-Rose, "The 100% Solution: A Plan for Solving Climate Change" (Melville House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Marc Zimmer, "The State of Science" (Prometheus Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Kaiser, "Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cailin O’Connor, "Games in the Philosophy of Biology" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eric Holthaus, "The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming" (HarperOne, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lee McIntyre, "The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Henry M. Cowles, "The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Wade Roush, "Extraterrestrials" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Wenfei Tong, "Bird Love: The Family Life of Birds" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ray Dorsey, "Ending Parkinson's Disease: A Prescription for Action" (Public Affairs, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Adrian Currie, "Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrew Leigh, "Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Are Changing Our World" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kareem Khalifa, "Understanding, Explanation and Scientific Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amy Shira Teitel, "Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA" (Bloomsbury, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alistair Sponsel, "Darwin’s Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Travis Dumsday, "Dispositionalism and the Metaphysics of Science" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Gil Eyal, "The Crisis of Expertise" (Polity, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael F. Robinson, "The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2006) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Adger, "Language Unlimited: The Science Behind Our Most Creative Power" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Clegg, "Conundrum: Crack the Ultimate Cipher Challenge" (Icon Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Neil Maher, "Apollo in the Age of Aquarius" (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393