Science writing news

As a 23-year-old postgraduate student working with Edward Teller in 1951, Richard Garwin came up with the design that led to the hydrogen bomb, Joel Shurkin reports. Outside of a small group in Los Alamos, however, Garwin’s role was completely unknown, Shurkin asserts in True Genius: The Life and Work of Richard Garwin, The Most Influential Scientist You Never Heard of. Garwin’s other inventions include air traffic control systems and the first laser printer. Of the bomb, Shurkin notes, Garwin once said, “If I had a magic wand, I would make it go away.”

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“Urban walking is simply the best way to get to know a place and to develop deeper connections to its story,” David Williams insists. In Seattle Walks, he provides 18 maps and 50 color illustrations for walks in his home town that take readers to such sites as a downtown building with dozens of carved faces, an unexpected Civil War cemetery, Seattle’s most infamous lost ship, and one of the city’s earliest houses of ill-repute. Seattle visitors and armchair travelers will enjoy tagging along.

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“Is genetic knowledge empowering or fear-inducing, or both? Will it heighten the anxieties of already hyper-anxious helicopter moms and dads, always waiting for the genetic shoe to drop? … Will it stress parents out or make them savvier?” — Bonnie Rochman poses these questions in The Gene Machine, as she explores not only present and potential advantages of genetic screening of fetuses and children, but also its drawbacks.

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This book tells the story of Lonni Sue Johnson, an accomplished artist, musician, pilot and organic dairy farmer who came down with viral encephalitis in her late 50’s and became what neuroscientists call “densely amnesic.” Like the celebrated H.M., she can no longer remember more than a fraction of her past, and can’t form new memories to carry into the future.

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Ever heard of the Dyna-Soar? The US Air Force gave that name to a planned space-capable hypersonic glider that never got past the mockup stage. After six years and about $660 million in development costs, the project was canceled in 1963. Rob Pyle reports this story and other little-known aspects of space history in Amazing Stories of the Space Age: True Tales of Nazis in Orbit, Soldiers on the Moon, Orphaned Martian Robots, and Other Fascinating Accounts From the Annals of Spaceflight.

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For 100 years, most scientists have contended that nuclear reactions can occur only in high-energy physics experiments and in large nuclear reactors. Nuclear reactions, however, also can occur in bench top experiments, Steven B. Krivit reports. In his three-book series, Explorations in Nuclear Research, Krivit describes the emergence of low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), a new field of science that bridges chemistry and physics, which he distinguishes from, as he says, the erroneous idea of "cold fusion."

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