Studying a sundial at age six, Roger Penrose first glimpsed a mathematical “world behind the world” where the shape of things revealed the universe’s deep secrets. In The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius, Patchen Barss follows Penrose from childhood to Nobel Prize, capturing the intense mix of joy and sacrifice that allowed him to rewrite our understanding of the cosmos.
Viruses that prey on bacteria, known as phages, may be our best defense against the next bacterial pandemic, Lina Zeldovich asserts in The Living Medicine: How a Lifesaving Cure Was Nearly Lost—and Why It Will Rescue Us When Antibiotics Fail. Multi drug-resistant bacteria kill more than a million people annually, she reports. Anthony Fauci and others have called for further phage research.
Essays on how to evaluate ideas before you pitch, conduct difficult interviews, write a great lede and self-edit are among 42 articles in The Craft of Science Writing: Selections from The Open Notebook, expanded edition, edited by Siri Carpenter. Beyond craft, the book also addresses such topics as working with a sensitivity reader and dealing with the emotional toll science reporting may take.
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.
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