New Books in Science
752 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 19 hours ago - ★★★★ - 13 ratingsInterviews with Scientists about their New Books
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Episodes
Daniel Lieberman, "Exercised: How We Did Not Evolve to Exercise and What to Do about It" (Pantheon, 2021)
December 31, 2020 10:00 - 31 minutesToday I talked to Daniel Lieberman about his book Exercised: How We Did Not Evolve to Exercise and What to Do about It (Pantheon, 2021). In the book Lieberman explodes 12 different myths, chief among them we’re supposed to want to exercise. Much of the conversation explores differences between Westerners and their lifestyles, including of course exercise, versus the daily energy expenditures of non-Westerners and especially people in Africa. It provides insights to show how aging and senescen...
Jonathan C. Slaght, "Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl" (FSG, 2020)
December 24, 2020 09:00 - 38 minutesThe Blakiston’s fish owl is the world’s largest living species of owl, with larger females of the species weighing as much as ten pounds. It lives in the Russian Far East and Northern Japan. It is also endangered: global populations are estimated to be around 1500 owls in total. The story of one conservationist’s efforts to save these owls is told in Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2020), the first book by Jonathan Slaght. ...
Russell T. Warne, "In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
December 24, 2020 09:00 - 39 minutesIn this episode I talked to Russell T. Warne about his book In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence (Cambridge UP, 2020). Warne takes on the “nature versus nurture” debate regarding the source of intelligence. It also looks at a host of other angles related to IQ: from the failures of the No Child Left Behind act to what are the disadvantages to society are of an emerging intellectual meritocracy. Along the way it explores differences in scores based on ethnic/racial origins...
Paul Davies, "The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
December 24, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourWhat is life? For generations, scientists have struggled to make sense of this fundamental question, for life really does look like magic: even a humble bacterium accomplishes things so dazzling that no human engineer can match it. Huge advances in molecular biology over the past few decades have served only to deepen the mystery. In this penetrating and wide-ranging book, world-renowned physicist and science communicator Paul Davies searches for answers in a field so new and fast-moving that...
Eben Kirksey, "The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans" (St. Martin's Press, 2020)
December 23, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans (St. Martin's Press, 2020), anthropologist Eben Kirksey visits the frontiers of genetics, medicine, and technology to ask: Whose values are guiding gene editing experiments? And what does this new era of scientific inquiry mean for the future of the human species? At a conference in Hong Kong in November 2018, Dr. He Jiankui announced that he had created the first genetically modified babies—twin girls named Lulu and N...
Louise M. Pryke, "Turtle" (Reaction Books, 2020)
December 16, 2020 09:00 - 46 minutesAs ancient creatures that once shared the Earth with dinosaurs, turtles have played a crucial role in maintaining healthy terrestrial and marine ecosystems for more than one hundred million years. While it may not set records for speed on land, the turtle is exceptional at distance swimming and deep diving, and some are gifted with astounding longevity. In human thought, the animal's ties to creativity, wisdom, and warfare stretch back to the world's earliest written records. In Turtle, Louis...
Nick Haddad, "The Last Butterflies: A Scientist's Quest to Save a Rare and Vanishing Creature" (Princeton UP, 2019)
December 16, 2020 09:00 - 56 minutesButterflies have long captivated the imagination of humans, from naturalists to children to poets. Indeed it would be hard to imagine a world without butterflies. And yet their populations are declining at an alarming rate, to the extent that even the seemingly ubiquitous Monarch could conceivably go the way of the Passenger Pigeon. Many other, more obscure, butterfly species are already perilously close to extinction. For the last 20 years, Nick Haddad has worked to identify and save some of...
Scholarly Communications: A Discussion with Elisa De Ranieri, Editor-in-Chief of "Nature Communications"
December 07, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourListen to this interview of Elisa De Ranieri, Editor-in-Chief of Nature Communications. We talk about knowing the research you have done, but communicating the message you want said. Interviewer: "When a submission lands on your desk, or better said, you call it up on your screen, what are you pleased to see, what makes your work easier?" Elisa De Ranieri: "Yeah, well, I guess what makes the job easier for an editor is to receive a paper that is well-written and well-constructed and where the...
James D. Stein, "The Fate of Schrodinger's Cat: Using Math and Computers to Explore the Counterintuitive" (World Scientific, 2020)
December 07, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourCan we correctly predict the flip of a fair coin more than half the time -- or the decay of a single radioactive atom? Our intuition, based on a lifetime of experience, tells us that we cannot, as these are classic examples of what are known to be 50-50 guesses. But mathematics is filled with counterintuitive results -- and this book discusses some surprising and entertaining examples. It is possible to devise experiments in which a flipped coin lands heads completely at random half the time,...
A. Espay and B. Stecher, "Brain Fables: The Hidden History of Neurodegenerative Diseases and a Blueprint to Conquer Them" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
December 04, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourAn estimated 80 million people live with a neurodegenerative disease, with this number expected to double by 2050. Despite decades of research and billions in funding, there are no medications that can slow, much less stop, the progress of these diseases. The time to rethink degenerative brain disorders has come. With no biological boundaries between neurodegenerative diseases, illnesses such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's result from a large spectrum of biological abnormalities, hampering ef...
Glenn Sauer, "Points of Contact: Science, Religion, and the Search for Truth" (Orbis Books, 2020)
December 02, 2020 09:00 - 59 minutesAs a scientist and practicing Catholic, Dr. Sauer brings a unique perspective to several of the important issues related to finding a space for dialogue between the at times opposing fields of science and religion. Drawing on insights from Darwin, Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Kuhn, and many others, Dr. Sauer presents a powerful and important framework for reconciling the historically changing divide between science and religion. His take is that we need to encourage a stance of intellectual hu...
Anna Weltman, "Supermath: The Power of Numbers for Good and Evil" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020)
December 01, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourMathematics as a subject is distinctive in its symbolic abstraction and its potential for logical and computational rigor. But mathematicians tend to impute other qualities to our subject that set it apart, such as impartiality, universality, and elegance. Far from incidental, these ideas prime mathematicians and the public to see in mathematics the answers—for example, an impartial arbiter, or a meritocratic equalizer—to many urgent societal questions. Anna Weltman's new book, Supermath: The...
Soraya de Chadarevian, "Heredity Under the Microscope: Chromosomes and the Study of the Human Genome" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
November 24, 2020 09:00 - 52 minutes“What are chromosomes? And what does it mean to treat them as visual objects?” asks Soraya de Chadarevian in her new book, Heredity Under the Microscope: Chromosomes and the Study of the Human Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Considering this question as she follows the history of microscope-based practices in chromosomal research across a variety of contexts—from the medical clinic to the study of human variation—de Chadarevian offers readers a new history of postwar human genetic...
K. C. Smith and C. Mariscal, "Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology" (Oxford UP, 2020)
November 23, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourSocial and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology (Oxford University Press, 2020) focuses on the emerging scientific discipline of astrobiology, exploring many of the humanistic issues this multidisciplinary field is generating. Despite there being myriad scientific questions that astrobiologists have only begun to address, this is not a purely scientific enterprise. More research on the broader social and conceptual aspects of astrobiology is needed and this volume does an outstanding job of sett...
Gina Rippon, "Gender and our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds (Vintage, 2020)
November 16, 2020 09:00 - 39 minutesThere is a long history of brain research that seems to legitimize widely held beliefs about the men versus women. According to my guest, much of that research is founded on biases and misguided experiments, which raises the questions: Are there any meaningful neurological differences between men and women? And if so, what are they? To find out, you’ll want to listen to my interview with Dr. Gina Rippon, author of the book, Gender and our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the...
Jimena Canales, "Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science" (Princeton UP, 2020)
November 16, 2020 09:00 - 44 minutesScience may be known for banishing the demons of superstition from the modern world. Yet just as the demon-haunted world was being exorcized by the enlightening power of reason, a new kind of demon mischievously materialized in the scientific imagination itself. Scientists began to employ hypothetical beings to perform certain roles in thought experiments—experiments that can only be done in the imagination—and these impish assistants helped scientists achieve major breakthroughs that pushed ...
Alfred S. Posamentier, "The Joy of Geometry" (Prometheus, 2020)
November 11, 2020 09:00 - 57 minutesAlfred S. Posamentier's The Joy of Geometry (Prometheus, 2020) is a book for someone who has taken geometry but wants to go further. This book, as one might expect, is heavy on diagrams and it is sometimes hard to discuss some of the ideas without reference to a diagram. Also, to be fair, this is not a book intended to be read casually. To fully appreciate this book, it is necessary to sit down, preferably in a comfortable chair with a beverage of one’s choosing, and prepare to give the diagr...
Hugh Raffles, "The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time" (Pantheon Books, 2020)
November 04, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourAt 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 Lost Time (Pantheon Books, 2020) is a truly beguiling book. Moving through Manhattan marble, Norwegian “blubberstone”, extra-terrestrial meteorites, and several other geological forms, Raffles uses the geological concept of “unconformity” to examine those historical moments where time seems to have dis...
M. Bekoff and J. Pierce, "The Animals' Agenda: Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Human Age" (Beacon Press, 2017)
November 03, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourA 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 about just how intelligent and emotional animals are—did you know rats like to play and laugh, and also display empathy, and the ears and noses of cows tell us how they’re feeling? At times, we humans translate that knowledge into compassion for other animals; think of the public outcry against the fa...
I. Newkirk and G. Stone, "Animalkind: Remarkable Discoveries about Animals and Revolutionary New Ways to Show Them Compassion" (Simon and Schuster, 2020)
October 30, 2020 08:00 - 49 minutesThe 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, a wealth of new information has emerged about who animals are—intelligent, aware, and empathetic. Studies show that animals are astounding beings with intelligence, emotions, intricate communications networks, and myriad abilities. In Animalkind: Remarkable Discoveries about Animals and Revolutionar...
Gina Rippon, "Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds" (Vintage, 2020)
October 27, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourFor 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. However, new research in neuroimaging suggests that this is little more than “neurotrash.” In Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds (Vintage, 2020), acclaimed professor of neuroimaging, Gina Rippon, finally challenges this damaging myth by showi...
Robert Plomin, "Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are" (MIT Press, 2019)
October 22, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourHave 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 research shows that DNA differences inherited from our parents are the consistent lifelong sources of our psychological individuality―the blueprint that makes us who we are. Robert Plomin’s decades of work demonstrate that genetics explains more about the psychological differences among people than ...
Valerie Olson, "Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth" (U Minnesota Press, 2018)
October 20, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourWhat 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 Beyond Earth (U Minnesota Press, 2018), revealing how outer space contributes to making what counts as the scope and scale of today’s natural and social environments. With unprecedented access to spaceflight worksites ranging from astronaut training programs to life science labs and architecture studio...
Rene Almeling, "GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health" (U California Press, 2020)
October 15, 2020 08:00 - 36 minutesRene 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 reproductive health and this knowledge gap shapes reproductive politics today. Over the past several centuries, the medical profession has made enormous efforts to understand and treat women’s reproductive bodies. It is only recently, however, that researchers have begun to ask basic questions about how men’s ...
Scholarly Communication: An Interview with Joerg Heber of PLOS
October 14, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourOpen 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 nonprofit's largest in number of articles published and its broadest in coverage, ranging as it does over all topics in the natural sciences and medicine, to include, as well, some in the social sciences, too. PLOS One appears only online, a format the staff bring into service to foster Open Access Sci...
Boel Berner, "Strange Blood: The Rise and Fall of Lamb Blood Transfusion in 19th-Century Medicine and Beyond" (Transcript Verlag, 2020)
October 12, 2020 08:00 - 59 minutesIn 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 as a means to reanimate seemingly dead soldiers on the battlefield. It was a contested therapy because it meant crossing boundaries and challenging taboos. Was the transfusion of lamb blood into desperately sick humans really defensible? Boel Berner, Strange Blood: The Rise and Fall of Lamb Blood T...
Kat Arney, "Rebel Cell: Cancer, Evolution, and the New Science of Life's Oldest Betrayal" (Benbella Books, 2020)
October 09, 2020 08:00 - 50 minutesCancer 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 Books, 2020), Kat Arney reveals the secrets of our most formidable medical enemy, most notably the fact that it isn't so much a foreign invader as a double agent: cancer is hardwired into the fundamental processes of life. New evidence shows that this disease is the result of the same evolutionary c...
Morality in Nature: What Honeybees and Flowers Can Tell Us about its Origin
October 07, 2020 08:00 - 17 minutesIs morality solely a human creation? Or can we find evidence of morality in other parts of nature? Honeybees and flowers have co-evolved to form a mutualistic relationship. This means that these creatures have developed optimization processes that ultimately contribute to the continuity of life itself, pointing towards the existence of morality between the two. In this podcast episode, Dr. Christopher Ketcham, an independent researcher, discusses his theories on how studying the flower and ho...
Jeremy England, "Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things" (Basic Books, 2020)
October 05, 2020 08:00 - 1 hour“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 we. Scientists have wrestled with the problem through the ages, and yet they still don’t agree on what kind of answer they are even looking for. But in 2013, at just 30 years old, physicist Jeremy England published a paper that has utterly upended the ongoing study of life’s origins. In Every Life is...
Frans de Waal, "Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves" (Norton, 2019)
October 01, 2020 08:00 - 59 minutesMama'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 chimpanzee matriarch who formed a deep bond with biologist Jan van Hooff. Her story and others like it—from dogs “adopting” the injuries of their companions, to rats helping fellow rats in distress, to elephants revisiting the bones of their loved ones—show that humans are not the only species with the capac...
Scholarly Communications: An Interview with Helen Pearson of 'Nature'
September 29, 2020 08:00 - 48 minutesNature 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 in journal publishing because in an issue of Nature, research stands side by side with editorials, news and feature reporting, and opinion articles. In fact, over two-thirds of the pieces Nature publishes are journalism and opinion content. This is the remit of Helen Pearson. Helen Pearson is Chief ...
Dr. Christopher Harris on Teaching Neuroscience
September 24, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourDr. 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 robots for neuroscience education. In their recent open-access research paper, Dr. Harris and his team describe, and present results from, their classroom-based pilots of this new and highly innovative approach to neuroscience and STEM education. They argue that neurorobotics has enormous potential ...
Zachary Dorner, "Merchants of Medicine: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long 18th Century" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
September 18, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn 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 ingested them. By investigating the different contexts and practices associated with the British long-distance trade in patent medicines, Zachary Dorner unravels the intertwined history of financial markets, health concerns, and colonial warfare. He argues that from the late seventeenth-century, medici...
Nick Chater, "The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain" (Yale UP, 2019)
September 17, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourPsychologists 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 complex set of inner beliefs, values, and desires that govern our thoughts, ideas, and actions, and that to know this depth is to know ourselves. In the The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain (Yale UP, 2019), behavioural scientist Nick Chater contends just the opposite: ...
Carl Safina, "Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace" (Henry Holt, 2020)
September 17, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourSome 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 and Co.) looks into three cultures of other-than-human beings in some of Earth’s remaining wild places. It shows how if you’re a sperm whale, a scarlet macaw, or a chimpanzee, you too experience your life with the understanding that you are an individual within a particular community. You too are no...
Jessica Pierce, "Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets" (U Chicago Press, 2016)
September 14, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourA 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 emotion, less often acknowledged, that can be nearly as powerful: guilt. When we see our cats gazing wistfully out the window, or watch a goldfish swim lazy circles in a bowl, we can’t help but wonder: are we doing the right thing, keeping these independent beings locked up, subject to our control? Is ke...
Katherine Kinzler, "How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do - And What It Says About You" (HMH, 2020)
September 11, 2020 08:00 - 52 minutesWe 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 even more powerful: the way we speak. As the pioneering psychologist Katherine Kinzler reveals in How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do - And What It Says About You (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), the way we talk is central to our social identity because our speech largely reflects the voices we ...
David Haig, "From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life" (MIT Press, 2020)
September 10, 2020 08:00 - 45 minutesIn 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 rise to a living world of purpose and meaning. Natural selection is a process without purpose, yet gives rise to purposeful beings who find meaning in the world. Haig proposes that the key to this is the origin of mutable “texts” that preserve a record of what has worked in the world, in other words: g...
David J. Hand, "Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters" (Princeton UP, 2020)
September 04, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThere 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 Matters (Princeton University Press, 2020) is unique in this genre for its focus on those data that aren't collected or don't get analyzed. More than an introduction to missingness and how to account for it, this book proposes that the whole of data analysis can benefit from a "dark data" perspectiv...
Adam Rutherford, "How to Argue With a Racist" (The Experiment, 2020)
August 27, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourRacist 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 our discourse on everything from sports to intelligence. Even well-intentioned people repeat stereotypes based on “science,” because cutting-edge genetics is hard to grasp, and all too easy to distort. Paradoxically, these misconceptions are multiplying even as scientists make unprecedented discoveri...
György Buzsáki, "The Brain from Inside Out" (Oxford UP, 2019)
August 27, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn 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 methodology. The ‘outside-in’ approach, which he sees as dominating thinking in the field at present and in most of recent history, conceptualizes the brain as a passive, information-absorbing, coding device. The ‘inside-out’ perspective, which Buzsáki seeks to develop and advocate, sees the brain rather as a...
Steven Shapin, "The Scientific Revolution" (U Chicago Press, 2018)
August 26, 2020 08:00 - 1 hour“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 (University of Chicago Press, 2018), his bold, vibrant exploration of the origins of the modern scientific worldview, now updated with a new bibliographic essay featuring the latest scholarship. Steven Shapin is the Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. His book...
David Bressoud, "Calculus Reordered: A History of the Big Ideas" (Princeton UP, 2019)
August 24, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourCalculus 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 know today. David Bressoud explains why calculus is credited to seventeenth-century figures Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, and how its current structure is based on developments that arose in the nineteenth century. Bressoud argues that a pedagogy informed by the historical development of calculus...
Stuart Ritchie, "Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype in Science" (Penguin Books, 2020)
August 10, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourSo 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 professor of psychology at King’s College London, lucidly explains how science works, and exposes the systemic issues that prevent the scientific enterprise from living up to its truth-seeking ideals. While the scientific method will always be our best way of knowing about the world, the current system of ...
Solomon Goldstein-Rose, "The 100% Solution: A Plan for Solving Climate Change" (Melville House, 2020)
July 29, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourAt 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 public policy to understand what physically has to happen to solve climate change, and served in the Massachusetts state legislature on a climate-focused platform. In 2018 he canceled his campaign for re-election so he could work full-time on climate change at the national and global levels. The 10...
Marc Zimmer, "The State of Science" (Prometheus Books, 2020)
July 21, 2020 08:00 - 59 minutesNew 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 scientists that are making it happen? And, how are we to introduce these revolutions to a society in which a segment of the population has become more and more skeptical of science? These are the questions which Marc Zimmer, professor of chemistry at Connecticut College, asks in his new book, The State of Sc...
David Kaiser, "Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
July 13, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourDavid 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 studies mostly 20th-century physics, and in particular the history of quantum mechanics, Feynman diagrams, physics in the counterculture era, and much more. As a physicist, he studies particle physics and theories of cosmology, focused mostly on the early expansion of the universe. In this New Books Netw...
Cailin O’Connor, "Games in the Philosophy of Biology" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
July 10, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe 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 social relations between humans and between nonhuman creatures. In Games in the Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Cailin O’Connor introduces the basics of game theory and its particular branch, evolutionary game theory, and discusses how game theoretic models have helped exp...
Eric Holthaus, "The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming" (HarperOne, 2020)
June 30, 2020 08:00 - 59 minutesWe 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), leading climate change advocate and weather-related journalist Eric Holthaus (“the Rebel Nerd of Meteorology”–Rolling Stone) offers a radical vision of our future, specifically how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades. Anchored by world-class repo...
Henry M. Cowles, "The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey" (Harvard UP, 2020)
June 17, 2020 08:00 - 55 minutesThe 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 from facts gathered through direct observation or deduced from first principles. But during the nineteenth century, science came to mean something else: a way of thinking. The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey (Harvard University Press, 2020) tells the story of how th...