Imagine a food additive that makes any food irresistible. Restaurant buffets would prompt stampedes. People unable to slake their cravings may devour unpalatable items. Terrorists could use the additive to destabilize large populations. That’s the sci-fi scenario Dennis Meredith presents in Attack of the Food Zombies, a cautionary tale on the risks of food additives and manufactured foods.
When a child sleeps poorly, parents may, too. In Beyond Tired: A Sleep Physician's Guide to Solving Your Child’s Sleep Problems for Good, Funke Afolabi-Brown draws on personal and professional experience to offer practical tips. She addresses such topics as the need for children who shuttle between homes to have consistent sleep schedules and for adolescents to have healthy school start times.
As the climate warms, perennial patches of ice and snow in mountain ranges around the world melt, exposing artifacts hidden for 100s, even 1000s of years. After travels to Norway, the Alps, the Andes, and around the US, Lisa Baril tells what archeologists have found in The Age of Melt: What Glaciers, Ice Mummies, and Ancient Artifacts Teach Us about Climate, Culture, and a Future Without Ice.
Military bases often serve as islands of biodiversity. Nearly 500 threatened or endangered species live on US military bases, more than in US National Parks, Sneed Collard III reports in Defending Nature: How the US Military Protects Threatened and Endangered Species. In this book for readers ages 9-14, Collard focuses on three at-risk species and the biologists and others working to save them.
Smartphones, daylight saving time, jet travel, shiftwork, lighting, and other aspects of modern life disrupt biological clocks that govern sleep and alertness, appetite, mood, response to medications, and other bodily functions, Lynne Peeples writes in The Inner Clock: Living in Sync with Our Circadian Rhythms. Paying more attention to body time, she asserts, could improve health and happiness.
Why do we still need vaccines? How do I sort out the good information about vaccines from the bad? Isn’t it better to be naturally infected than immunized? In Vaccines and Your Family: Separating Fact from Fiction, 2nd Ed., Paul A. Offit, MD, and NASW member Charlotte A. Moser, of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Vaccine Education Center provide a broad overview of current vaccine topics.
“One of the first great things about birds: they are everywhere,” Sneed B. Collard III writes in Birding for Boomers—and Everyone Else Brave Enough to Embrace the World’s Most Rewarding and Frustrating Activity. Collard offers tips for new birders on binoculars, field guides, and bird ID apps, coping with age-related hearing/vision loss, birding travel destinations, and bird conservation.
Sadie Dingfelder scolded a man in a grocery store for choosing the wrong item. She mistook him for her husband. After she learned she is faceblind, her reportorial instincts kicked in. In Do I Know You? A Faceblind Reporter's Journey into the Science of Sight, Memory, and Imagination, she says she’s learned how to cope: “If I pay close attention and ask the right questions, I’ll figure it out.”
Over billions of years, life forms from microbes to mammoths transformed continents, oceans, and the atmosphere, Ferris Jabr reports in Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life. To explore this process, Jabr visited a former gold mine a mile underground, now a science lab; an Arctic region once home to megafauna; and a 1066-ft tall observatory for global climate studies in the Amazon rainforest.
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