Science writing news

On average, children in the United States will have had twenty courses of antibiotics by the time they reach adulthood, Emily Monosson reports in Natural Defense: Enlisting Bugs and Germs to Protect Our Food and Health. Today’s scientists seek ways to prevent the potentially adverse consequences of wiping out beneficial and/or harmless bacteria along with pathogens. “Twentieth century technology isolated us from nature,” Monosson writes, “but now twenty-first century technology is repairing the rift.”

• read more

The nation’s sad state of oral health often gets short shrift in the mainstream press. In Teeth: the Story of Beauty, Inequality and the Struggle for Oral Health in America, Mary Otto explores economic disparities in dental care, the connection between tooth decay and diminished job prospects, the continuing fake debate over the value of water fluoridation, the ethics of cosmetic dentistry, and more. Having focused her reporting on such issues for more than a decade, Otto serves as oral health topic leader for the Association of Health Care Journalists, for which she writes a weekly blog.

• read more

What procedures, drugs, foods, environmental exposures, and everyday practices can help or harm your children in pregnancy, birth, and the first years of life? What can you do to protect your children’s health and development? In Dirt Is Good, Jack Gilbert, Rob Knight, and NASW member Sandra Blakeslee provide a parent-friendly guide to the human microbiome — the community of mostly friendly microbes that populate the human body. The Q&A format gives parents quick access to their most pressing questions, and, Blakeslee reports, streamlined the writing process.

• read more

On August 21, 2017, for the first time in 99 years, the moon’s shadow will traverse the entire breadth of the continental United States. The event presents a host of opportunities for both scientific research and media coverage. In American Eclipse, David Baron examines the total solar eclipse of 1878, which crossed western North America from Alaska to Texas and Louisiana, attracting Thomas Edison and others. “Those three minutes of midday darkness,” he writes, “would enlighten a people and elevate a nation.”

• read more

The Atlanta BeltLine, now in the works, aims to transform a 22-mile ring of mostly defunct rail lines running through 45 diverse downtown Atlanta neighborhoods into a green pedestrian walkway and path for runners and bikers with a possible streetcar line, an urban planner’s dream. In City on the Verge: Atlanta and the Fight for America’s Urban Future, Mark Pendergrast, an Atlanta native, explores the BeltLine’s development and potential impact on the communities through which it will run. He also addresses broader urban issues, including transportation, race, housing, education, religion, public health, and the economy.

• read more

Sitting too much, and exercising too little, weaken gluteal and postural muscles essential for supporting the spine, and may trigger back pain. Treatment for back pain is a microcosm of everything wrong with the health care system, Cathryn Jakobson Ramin asserts in Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery. Ramin aims to give patients “the information they need to make good decisions, to know what works sometimes, what works rarely, and what can cause harm.”

• read more