Science writing news

While humans have evolved to detect visible light — the energy range our Sun radiates most strongly — we also are surrounded by an invisible spectrum that ranges from radio waves to gamma rays. In Light: The Visible Spectrum and Beyond, Kimberly Arcand and NASW member Megan Watzke, both of whom work in the communications group at NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, explore and explain, using words and artists’ science-based visual translations, all the light we can and cannot see.

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Heather Hansen’s love of national parks started at age seven, when she was a junior ranger at Cape Cod National Seashore. To research Prophets and Moguls, Rangers and Rogues, Bison and Bears: 100 Years of the National Park Service, she drove over 20,000 miles, and she has visited 150 national parks. She spoke with park rangers, superintendents, historians, archaeologists, architects, wildlife biologists, education and interpretation experts, youth ambassadors, and others. Published in time for the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service’s creation, her book includes 125 images, many of them archival photos.

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The Akha hill tribe of Northern Thailand once raised poppies for opium. With financial support and technical advice from two entrepreneurs, one Thai, one Canadian, the tribe now grows high quality organic Arabica coffee. As Mark Pendergrast describes in Beyond Fair Trade: How One Small Coffee Company Helped Transform a Hillside Village in Thailand, the coffee’s success has improved the community’s health, education, and, often, quality of life. At the same time, television, computers, and other aspects of modern life also have altered the community’s cultural landscape.

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NASW member Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn teamed up with her father, Vincent T. DeVita, M.D., a former director of the National Cancer Institute, to provide an insider’s perspective on decades of cancer research. In The Death of Cancer, they call for changes in delivery of cancer treatment in the U.S. Optimal care of people with cancer, they say, requires better-informed and less timid physicians, refocused national agendas, and fewer bureaucratic hurdles.

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The 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson put finishing touches on the so-called “Standard Model” of particle physics. In From the Great Wall to the Great Collider: China and the Quest to Uncover the Inner Workings of the Universe, Harvard mathematician Shing-Tung Yau and NASW member Steve Nadis describe plans to build a giant accelerator in China.

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Readers eager to learn more about Ebola and its West Africa outbreak will find that information in the timely publication of the second edition of Carl Zimmer’s A Planet of Viruses. Zimmer also reports on the emergence of MERS, and provides updates on the influenzas, smallpox, and HIV.

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