Science & Nature

In a case study comes in the book’s fifth chapter, I discuss how paleontological studies of extinction intersected with political debates about nuclear proliferation in the 1970s and 1980s.A variety...

I started Listed when I was working in Washington, DC, as a policy fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At the time the Endangered Species Act...

Bees don't just tell one another where to go — they also signal where not to go, mark flowers with scent, and even eavesdrop on rivals. This is a tour of communication as evolution actually built it: waggle dances, stop signals, and warnings shaped by predators, competitors, and spies. An invitation to follow very small animals into a world dense with messages we usually miss.

The Chemical Age is the story of intense famines, ceaseless wars, ravaging diseases, and ecological disasters, told through the personal lives of the scientists who strove to either halt calamity...

The book is full of stories connected with each of these segments of my life. I hope different browsers will first look at the table of contents, then open to...

It was a beautiful day in June on the campus of Mount Holyoke College. I had planned to go strawberry picking, but I found myself instead in the basement of...

Animal Ethos is framed by efforts to unearth and decipher moral thought and action in experimental forms of laboratory science. More specifically, as an ethnographic project, it attends to the...

We have come to understand that all the matter we have ever observed is made of a scant hundred chemical elements. The past century has shown that the atomic elements...

The cover of the book is a water strider—an insect that stands on water as if it were land. As the animal rows, it generates waves on the water surface,...

Pure Adulteration is about the origins of manufactured food. More centrally, it is about the struggles people had with the introduction of new foods in the later 1800s. The book...

In the beginning of the prologue I draw upon a specific recent event: the theft of thousands of scientists’ emails, including many of mine. This is the world in which...

This book contains a chapter on cosmology from a wide perspective. Before the scientific method was used to understand the universe, various cultures across the globe developed their own theories...

Even more than it is about performance, this book is about evolution. What really draws me to performance is how central it is to a variety of areas in evolutionary...

I have a longstanding interest in old maps. My last book, Mapping the Nation, traced a sea change in the way that Americans and Europeans thought about and used maps...

How do physicists decide that some data might constitute a discovery?The way to find out is to watch. For 18 months I watched physicists arguing about a burst of data...

Disciplines like zoology and veterinary medicine have always taken animals seriously as the subject of research. In the humanities and social sciences, the field sometimes known as “animal studies” began...

Loath to Print considers a brief moment in the much longer history of knowledge production and dissemination; specifically, the book addresses ideas of scientific elitism. With the advent of print,...

Quarks to Culture involves a new, big picture perspective of the universe. Now, by universe I do not mean the astronomical cosmos that the word usually refers to. I mean...

Relevance can be an accident. When I started working on this project in 2010, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway had just published Merchants of Doubt, their account of organized science...

The motivation for the book comes from the uncertain future that faces humanity. The twentieth century, as I wrote in my previous book, The Big Ratchet, was an extraordinary time...

Readers who seek a taste of Genomic Politics might want to read chapter 1 (which presents the controversies around each case and the typology for understanding the controversies) and chapter...

A fairly standard practice – a look at the introduction and the last chapter – should give the reader a sense of the book. The introduction provides an overview of...

Entropy is a concept that's almost as important as energy, but far less widely understood. The book explains how until the 1850s the two concepts were confused, and that a clear understanding of what entropy really is was reached only in 1947...

We tend to view cosmopolitan science as a universal form that is practiced in many places. But, does modern knowledge itself become transformed in the midst of its peregrinations? Relatedly,...

Many people are fully convinced that animals such as dogs, cats and other mammals are conscious, but what about all the others? What about, birds, fish, octopuses and even crabs and insects? If a dog is conscious, what about the fleas living in the dog’s fur?

In A Kingdom of Stargazers I analyze the nebulous and tendentious practice that astrology occupied within the culture of the later Middle Ages, a period characterized by profound and multiple...

If someone were fanning through the pages of this book at a local bookstore or library, I would encourage them to peruse the first chapter “Targeting a Single Gene: Huntington’s...

When I began working on The Skull Collectors, human remains seemed to be causing trouble everywhere. In the 1990s, new states in Eastern Europe unburied and sorted out the Soviet...

The decade-long, vituperative debate about the aggression instinct is the subject of chapter 5. The earlier chapters, 1 through 4, provide the lead-up, introducing the characters and the stakes on...

Music, Math, and Mind is written for musicians and music lovers, and will take them through a journey that uncovers the science of music and sound. Because artists and art...

In modern day life, often people look at archaeology and they think, you know that’s interesting, but it’s not relevant to me. But actually, archaeology does have a great deal...

How Economics Shapes Science focuses on how costs and incentives—core concepts in economics—shape the practice of science, especially the practice of science at universities.Costs matter: they play a role in...

The book is a social history of the science of the body’s inner senses. We think we know about the five senses that Aristotle had identified and placed into a...

If you were asked to name some famous figures of Renaissance culture, you would probably name Leonardo, Michelangelo or Erasmus. But you could have mentioned some Arabic names too. There...

If you were to flip through the book in a bookstore, you might land somewhere around pages 85-90, or if not there somewhere else in chapter 3: “Anti-Prague.” The chapter...

Almost all discourse about nature and nurture only focuses on genetics when it comes to the nature side of things, ignoring natural selection, adaptation, and the fundamental goal of all living things...

When fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas are combusted they release CO2. This greenhouse gas is no ordinary pollutant but an inherent waste byproduct of the energy conversion. The CO2 is...

The book explores the fascinating story of the Gulf Stream, a powerful Atlantic Ocean current with a force 300 times that of the mighty Amazon. During Europe’s dominance in the...

My book is called The Parrot in the Mirror: How Evolving to Be Like Birds Makes Us Human. This book initially grew out of a single conversation as I was...

What we tend to underestimate, though, is the importance of spirituality or religious belief in human life. As an anthropologist of religion, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at how religion provides a lens for understanding everything from politics to food to gender roles to economics.

From the DNA in our bodies to the formation of planets in the universe, friction is present and that’s what makes it such an intriguing force. However, friction is arguably the most underappreciated force in our lives...

The book is principally about the science of clouds but its unique and distinctive feature - one that differentiates it from any other book ever published on weather and clouds – is our use of classic 18th and 19th century impressionist art to illustrate the clouds...

The main point I am trying to make in this book is to introduce the idea that science is everywhere. Everything we see. Everything we touch. Everything we look at....

The Mirror and the Mind traces the history of the mirror self-recognition test—the experiment of placing subjects in front of a mirror and looking for signs of self-recognition—showing how it...

But it was not until after World War II that pet cats became common. In this sense, pet cats on a mass scale occupy only one per cent of the time that cats and humans have had relationships. That's why it's so important for a history of cats to cover not only pet cats, but also the more numerous feral and street cats. They have longer histories.

I was a graduate student at Rice University in Houston Texas when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated overhead as it was returning to Earth. I watched communities in and around...

This book is about nothing. Or at least 99.999999999999% bits of nothingness. And yet it is about everything – all that you can touch, see, taste, smell, and feel, and...

Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see...

Life on Mars is about both the astronomers who have made claims about the existence of past or present life on Mars and about those discoveries themselves. It is about...

I went to graduate school in the 1980s, at the height of the Carter-Reagan Cold War. It was a very scary time, and not only because the risk of nuclear...

"Not only do humans sleep the least of any primate, but we have the most REM, proportionally. So we have this really special, unique kind of sleep architecture relative to other primate species."

While diligent readers who behave according to the plan should recognize the coherence of this project, it has, I admit, an inescapably far-flung character. The long chapter titles attest to...

My own involvement with chimpanzees came about fortuitously. In the late 1980s, I was conducting my doctoral research in Bangladesh on a previously little-known monkey called the capped langur. I...

Given the declining number of new drugs, and the crisis in the pharmaceutical industry, many are asking what can be done.The Obama administration has proposed a new initiative to help...

Most people don’t try to parse cuteness. Like pornography, we know it when we see it. With a bit of examination, however, cuteness has easily quantifiable aesthetics. Take a moment...

The first chapter, “Strawberries,” presents the formative experience: the voyage of HMS Beagle that formed Darwin’s views on the common humanity of all people and set the stage for his...

Stunning beauty abounds in nature. We see it everywhere we look. The brilliant colors and dances of butterflies and fishes, the songs of crickets, frogs, and birds, and even the...

Giovanni Batista Belzoni was a towering figure at the beginning of archaeology in Egypt, not for his recognized talents but for his 6’6” height.Nearly 200 years later he is still...

The birth of this manuscript was the need for a summer writing project married to the accidental spotting of C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures near the shelf where I was...

Animal exploitation is rampant in American culture today. In factory farms, shelters, zoos, puppy mills, science labs, and many other sites, animals are often treated as senseless commodities. Loving Animals...

The first two chapters of the book propose a completely new reading of this period. I don’t believe that things drop from heaven. That all of a sudden one caliph...

Towards the end of the book I put forward four myths about climate change. I would hope people may recognise the truths about our relationship with climate change that each...

The Essential Engineer is about the similarities and differences between scientists and engineers, and between science and engineering, and how they relate to contemporary technological issues. The book provides historical...

I am a scholar of Buddhism—we call ourselves Buddhologists—focusing on late Indian Buddhism (roughly from the fifth to twelfth centuries) and on Tibetan Buddhism. My early work was on Indian...

Reptiles and amphibians are in trouble for a variety of reasons. Most are connected to habitat loss and degradation because of human activities. Many animals, including some reptiles, are eaten. They are items in the diet, especially in Asia.

The existence of a balance of nature has been a dominant part of Western philosophy since before Aristotle. But the science of ecology and evolutionary biology together demonstrate that there...

Among the scientific, historical, and military themes in Six-Legged Soldiers, the reader will find three “big picture” ideas, all of which are cause for curiosity and concern.Using insects as weapons...

If I Am Right, and I Know I Am is the story of a woman who changed our understanding of the planet but never received the recognition she deserved. It is the first biography of Inge Lehmann, the Danish geophysicist who discovered Earth’s solid inner core in 1936.I didn’t want to write a traditional scientific biography. I wanted to write a book...

The idea that all human beings are descended from Adam has been a long-standing conviction in the West. Indeed it’s been a central doctrine among the monotheistic religions more generally....

In much of the world, cities are expanding and growing to astronomical sizes. Along with the growth of cities comes the spread of suburbs. Suburban areas now dominate the perimeter...

The idea of Snake Detection actually took me by surprise. I wasn’t looking for it. I was instead pursuing answers to questions that were more consistent with my academic background...

Weather Matters is a history of all these phenomena. It explores the questions why and how we talk about the weather in science, the media, popular culture, and the arts....

In a case study comes in the book’s fifth chapter, I discuss how paleontological studies of extinction intersected with political debates about nuclear proliferation in the 1970s and 1980s.A variety...

I started Listed when I was working in Washington, DC, as a policy fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At the time the Endangered Species Act...

Bees don't just tell one another where to go — they also signal where not to go, mark flowers with scent, and even eavesdrop on rivals. This is a tour of communication as evolution actually built it: waggle dances, stop signals, and warnings shaped by predators, competitors, and spies. An invitation to follow very small animals into a world dense with messages we usually miss.

The Chemical Age is the story of intense famines, ceaseless wars, ravaging diseases, and ecological disasters, told through the personal lives of the scientists who strove to either halt calamity...

The book is full of stories connected with each of these segments of my life. I hope different browsers will first look at the table of contents, then open to...

It was a beautiful day in June on the campus of Mount Holyoke College. I had planned to go strawberry picking, but I found myself instead in the basement of...

Animal Ethos is framed by efforts to unearth and decipher moral thought and action in experimental forms of laboratory science. More specifically, as an ethnographic project, it attends to the...

We have come to understand that all the matter we have ever observed is made of a scant hundred chemical elements. The past century has shown that the atomic elements...

The cover of the book is a water strider—an insect that stands on water as if it were land. As the animal rows, it generates waves on the water surface,...

Pure Adulteration is about the origins of manufactured food. More centrally, it is about the struggles people had with the introduction of new foods in the later 1800s. The book...

In the beginning of the prologue I draw upon a specific recent event: the theft of thousands of scientists’ emails, including many of mine. This is the world in which...

This book contains a chapter on cosmology from a wide perspective. Before the scientific method was used to understand the universe, various cultures across the globe developed their own theories...

Even more than it is about performance, this book is about evolution. What really draws me to performance is how central it is to a variety of areas in evolutionary...

I have a longstanding interest in old maps. My last book, Mapping the Nation, traced a sea change in the way that Americans and Europeans thought about and used maps...

How do physicists decide that some data might constitute a discovery?The way to find out is to watch. For 18 months I watched physicists arguing about a burst of data...

Disciplines like zoology and veterinary medicine have always taken animals seriously as the subject of research. In the humanities and social sciences, the field sometimes known as “animal studies” began...

Loath to Print considers a brief moment in the much longer history of knowledge production and dissemination; specifically, the book addresses ideas of scientific elitism. With the advent of print,...

Quarks to Culture involves a new, big picture perspective of the universe. Now, by universe I do not mean the astronomical cosmos that the word usually refers to. I mean...

Relevance can be an accident. When I started working on this project in 2010, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway had just published Merchants of Doubt, their account of organized science...

The motivation for the book comes from the uncertain future that faces humanity. The twentieth century, as I wrote in my previous book, The Big Ratchet, was an extraordinary time...

Readers who seek a taste of Genomic Politics might want to read chapter 1 (which presents the controversies around each case and the typology for understanding the controversies) and chapter...

A fairly standard practice – a look at the introduction and the last chapter – should give the reader a sense of the book. The introduction provides an overview of...

Entropy is a concept that's almost as important as energy, but far less widely understood. The book explains how until the 1850s the two concepts were confused, and that a clear understanding of what entropy really is was reached only in 1947...

We tend to view cosmopolitan science as a universal form that is practiced in many places. But, does modern knowledge itself become transformed in the midst of its peregrinations? Relatedly,...

Many people are fully convinced that animals such as dogs, cats and other mammals are conscious, but what about all the others? What about, birds, fish, octopuses and even crabs and insects? If a dog is conscious, what about the fleas living in the dog’s fur?

In A Kingdom of Stargazers I analyze the nebulous and tendentious practice that astrology occupied within the culture of the later Middle Ages, a period characterized by profound and multiple...

If someone were fanning through the pages of this book at a local bookstore or library, I would encourage them to peruse the first chapter “Targeting a Single Gene: Huntington’s...

When I began working on The Skull Collectors, human remains seemed to be causing trouble everywhere. In the 1990s, new states in Eastern Europe unburied and sorted out the Soviet...

The decade-long, vituperative debate about the aggression instinct is the subject of chapter 5. The earlier chapters, 1 through 4, provide the lead-up, introducing the characters and the stakes on...

Music, Math, and Mind is written for musicians and music lovers, and will take them through a journey that uncovers the science of music and sound. Because artists and art...

In modern day life, often people look at archaeology and they think, you know that’s interesting, but it’s not relevant to me. But actually, archaeology does have a great deal...

How Economics Shapes Science focuses on how costs and incentives—core concepts in economics—shape the practice of science, especially the practice of science at universities.Costs matter: they play a role in...

The book is a social history of the science of the body’s inner senses. We think we know about the five senses that Aristotle had identified and placed into a...

If you were asked to name some famous figures of Renaissance culture, you would probably name Leonardo, Michelangelo or Erasmus. But you could have mentioned some Arabic names too. There...

If you were to flip through the book in a bookstore, you might land somewhere around pages 85-90, or if not there somewhere else in chapter 3: “Anti-Prague.” The chapter...

Almost all discourse about nature and nurture only focuses on genetics when it comes to the nature side of things, ignoring natural selection, adaptation, and the fundamental goal of all living things...

When fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas are combusted they release CO2. This greenhouse gas is no ordinary pollutant but an inherent waste byproduct of the energy conversion. The CO2 is...

The book explores the fascinating story of the Gulf Stream, a powerful Atlantic Ocean current with a force 300 times that of the mighty Amazon. During Europe’s dominance in the...

My book is called The Parrot in the Mirror: How Evolving to Be Like Birds Makes Us Human. This book initially grew out of a single conversation as I was...

What we tend to underestimate, though, is the importance of spirituality or religious belief in human life. As an anthropologist of religion, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at how religion provides a lens for understanding everything from politics to food to gender roles to economics.

From the DNA in our bodies to the formation of planets in the universe, friction is present and that’s what makes it such an intriguing force. However, friction is arguably the most underappreciated force in our lives...

The book is principally about the science of clouds but its unique and distinctive feature - one that differentiates it from any other book ever published on weather and clouds – is our use of classic 18th and 19th century impressionist art to illustrate the clouds...

The main point I am trying to make in this book is to introduce the idea that science is everywhere. Everything we see. Everything we touch. Everything we look at....

The Mirror and the Mind traces the history of the mirror self-recognition test—the experiment of placing subjects in front of a mirror and looking for signs of self-recognition—showing how it...

But it was not until after World War II that pet cats became common. In this sense, pet cats on a mass scale occupy only one per cent of the time that cats and humans have had relationships. That's why it's so important for a history of cats to cover not only pet cats, but also the more numerous feral and street cats. They have longer histories.

I was a graduate student at Rice University in Houston Texas when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated overhead as it was returning to Earth. I watched communities in and around...

This book is about nothing. Or at least 99.999999999999% bits of nothingness. And yet it is about everything – all that you can touch, see, taste, smell, and feel, and...

Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see...

Life on Mars is about both the astronomers who have made claims about the existence of past or present life on Mars and about those discoveries themselves. It is about...

I went to graduate school in the 1980s, at the height of the Carter-Reagan Cold War. It was a very scary time, and not only because the risk of nuclear...

"Not only do humans sleep the least of any primate, but we have the most REM, proportionally. So we have this really special, unique kind of sleep architecture relative to other primate species."

While diligent readers who behave according to the plan should recognize the coherence of this project, it has, I admit, an inescapably far-flung character. The long chapter titles attest to...

My own involvement with chimpanzees came about fortuitously. In the late 1980s, I was conducting my doctoral research in Bangladesh on a previously little-known monkey called the capped langur. I...

Given the declining number of new drugs, and the crisis in the pharmaceutical industry, many are asking what can be done.The Obama administration has proposed a new initiative to help...

Most people don’t try to parse cuteness. Like pornography, we know it when we see it. With a bit of examination, however, cuteness has easily quantifiable aesthetics. Take a moment...

The first chapter, “Strawberries,” presents the formative experience: the voyage of HMS Beagle that formed Darwin’s views on the common humanity of all people and set the stage for his...

Stunning beauty abounds in nature. We see it everywhere we look. The brilliant colors and dances of butterflies and fishes, the songs of crickets, frogs, and birds, and even the...

Giovanni Batista Belzoni was a towering figure at the beginning of archaeology in Egypt, not for his recognized talents but for his 6’6” height.Nearly 200 years later he is still...

The birth of this manuscript was the need for a summer writing project married to the accidental spotting of C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures near the shelf where I was...

Animal exploitation is rampant in American culture today. In factory farms, shelters, zoos, puppy mills, science labs, and many other sites, animals are often treated as senseless commodities. Loving Animals...

The first two chapters of the book propose a completely new reading of this period. I don’t believe that things drop from heaven. That all of a sudden one caliph...

Towards the end of the book I put forward four myths about climate change. I would hope people may recognise the truths about our relationship with climate change that each...

The Essential Engineer is about the similarities and differences between scientists and engineers, and between science and engineering, and how they relate to contemporary technological issues. The book provides historical...

I am a scholar of Buddhism—we call ourselves Buddhologists—focusing on late Indian Buddhism (roughly from the fifth to twelfth centuries) and on Tibetan Buddhism. My early work was on Indian...

Reptiles and amphibians are in trouble for a variety of reasons. Most are connected to habitat loss and degradation because of human activities. Many animals, including some reptiles, are eaten. They are items in the diet, especially in Asia.

The existence of a balance of nature has been a dominant part of Western philosophy since before Aristotle. But the science of ecology and evolutionary biology together demonstrate that there...

Among the scientific, historical, and military themes in Six-Legged Soldiers, the reader will find three “big picture” ideas, all of which are cause for curiosity and concern.Using insects as weapons...

If I Am Right, and I Know I Am is the story of a woman who changed our understanding of the planet but never received the recognition she deserved. It is the first biography of Inge Lehmann, the Danish geophysicist who discovered Earth’s solid inner core in 1936.I didn’t want to write a traditional scientific biography. I wanted to write a book...

The idea that all human beings are descended from Adam has been a long-standing conviction in the West. Indeed it’s been a central doctrine among the monotheistic religions more generally....

In much of the world, cities are expanding and growing to astronomical sizes. Along with the growth of cities comes the spread of suburbs. Suburban areas now dominate the perimeter...

The idea of Snake Detection actually took me by surprise. I wasn’t looking for it. I was instead pursuing answers to questions that were more consistent with my academic background...

Weather Matters is a history of all these phenomena. It explores the questions why and how we talk about the weather in science, the media, popular culture, and the arts....