New Books In Science

Most of us appreciate the importance of the immune system yet have very little knowledge about how it actually works. If you fall into this camp and are curious to learn more about this intricate system, Bobby Cherayil's book is an excellent resource. The Logic of Immunity: Deciphering an Enigma was published in January 2024 by John Hopkins University Press. It gives a great overview of this complex system, including several findings from the recent years. It also points out the many areas of ongoing research and open questions. The book introduces the actors of the system and the many interactions between them: the various types of immune cells, the pathogens and pathogen-associated patterns they recognize, the cascade of events that ultimately leads to an immune response. The opening chapter explains (and visualizes!) where these cells are located. It explains how they contribute to the immune response, and how we broadly categorize them into innate and adaptive immunity. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss the in

Situated at the intersection of natural science and philosophy, Our Genes: A Philosophical Perspective on Human Evolutionary Genomics (Cambridge University Press, 2023) explores historical practices, investigates current trends, and imagines future work in genetic research to answer persistent, political questions about human diversity. Readers are guided through fascinating thought experiments, complex measures and metrics, fundamental evolutionary patterns, and in-depth treatment of exciting case studies. The work culminates in a philosophical rationale, based on scientific evidence, for a moderate position about the explanatory power of genes that is often left unarticulated. Simply put, human evolutionary genomics - our genes - can tell us much about who we are as individuals and as collectives. However, while they convey scientific certainty in the popular imagination, genes cannot answer some of our most important questions. Alternating between an up-close and a zoomed-out focus on genes and genomes, in

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Guru Madhavan, Norman R. Augustine Senior Scholar and Senior Director of Programs at the National Academy of Engineering, about his recent book, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World (W. W. Norton & Company, 2024). In Wicked Problems, Madhavan draws on a rich body of literature from the humanities and social sciences to think through how engineers can do a better job working on problems that include complex social and technical realities. The pair also talk about how Madhavan came to the National Academy of Engineering after working as an engineer and entrepreneur and some of his future work, including ongoing writing on the importance of maintenance and “grind problems” in engineering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, Ai, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains (Mariner Books, 2023) tells two fascinating stories. One is the evolution of nervous systems. It started 600 million years ago, when the first brains evolved in tiny worms. The other one is humans' quest to create more and more intelligent systems. This story begins in 1951 with the first reinforcement learning algorithm trying to mimic neural networks. Max Bennett is an AI entrepreneur and neuroscience researcher. His work combines insights from evolutionary neuroscience, comparative psychology, and AI. As each chapter describes how a skill evolved, it also explains whether(!) and how an AI system has managed to implement something similar. A recurring theme is how human brains and neural circuits have influenced AI architecture. The other side of this bi-directional connection is also intriguing. AI has often served as a litmus test, giving a clue how a not well understood neurobiological phenomenon might work, h

Claudia de Rham has been playing with gravity her entire life. As a diver, experimenting with her body's buoyancy in the Indian Ocean. As a pilot, soaring over Canadian waterfalls on dark mornings before beginning her daily scientific research. As an astronaut candidate, dreaming of the experience of flying free from Earth's pull. And as a physicist, discovering new sides to gravity's irresistible personality by exploring the limits of Einstein's general theory of relativity.  In The Beauty of Falling: A Life in Pursuit of Gravity (Princeton UP, 2024), de Rham shares captivating stories about her quest to gain intimacy with gravity, to understand both its feeling and fundamental nature. Her life's pursuit led her from a twist of fate that snatched away her dream of becoming an astronaut to an exhilarating breakthrough at the very frontiers of gravitational physics. While many of us presume to know gravity quite well, the brightest scientists in history have yet to fully answer the simple question: what exactl

Listen to this interview of Emma Frances Bloomfield, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. We talk about her novel analytical tool for helping you narrativize research! Bloomfield's new book is Science V. Story: Narrative Strategies for Science Communicators (U California Press, 2024) Emma Bloomfield : "I'd love to see more direct incorporation of communication studies and communication skills into the science curriculum but also into a researcher's overall training as well. Because I think that researchers can be very good at communication, but unfortunately they're not specifically trained in it and they're not really incentivized to do it. Basically, we put researchers, unnecessarily, before the choice of becoming either public intellectuals or recognized members of their research community and tenured professors at university. But we can give people more time and more compensation so that they can do both — and that will benefit the research and the communica

Listen to this interview of Brandon Brown, Professor of Physics at the University of San Francisco. We talk about factoring in both message-sender and -receiver to your writing for STEM. Brown is the author of Sharing Our Science: How to Write and Speak STEM (MIT Press, 2023). Brandon Brown : "I've seen so many different scientists and communicators, including Nobel Laureates, all the way to grad students who are struggling with the English — and it's just apparent to me that some people do have a much better sense of audience. And to my mind, that level of compassion, even perhaps of connection — that is what makes their communication work so very well. And really, this is a talent or disposition which is independent of a person's linguistic skills or background, isn't it?" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

In Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate (Columbia Global Reports, 2023), Lorraine Daston, Director Emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, delves into the 350-year history of one of the most elusive communities of all: the “scientific community.” For the apparent simplicity and relative ubiquity of the expression hides in fact a complex and constantly evolving reality. As Daston puts it to open her book, “The scientific community is by any measure a very strange kind of community. For starters, no one knows who belongs to it, much less who speaks for it.” The very word of “community” and its rather friendly connotation can also be deceiving, as scientists across the globe and throughout history have never ceased to compete and engage in all sorts of polemics and debates.  Beginning with the Republic of Letters, Daston takes a closer look at a series of ambitious scientific enterprises that required the collaboration of a variety of scientific actors across the globe. T

Why do we sleep? How can we improve our sleep? A century ago, sleep was considered a state of nothingness—even a primitive habit that we could learn to overcome. Then, an immigrant scientist and his assistant spent a month in the depths of a Kentucky cave, making nationwide headlines and thrusting sleep science to the forefront of our consciousness. In the 1920s, Nathaniel Kleitman founded the world’s first dedicated sleep lab at the University of Chicago, where he subjected research participants (including himself) to a dizzying array of tests and tortures. But the tipping point came in 1938, when his cave experiment awakened the general public to the unknown—and vital—world of sleep. Kleitman went on to mentor the talented but troubled Eugene Aserinsky, whose discovery of REM sleep revealed the astonishing activity of the dreaming brain, and William Dement, a jazz-bass playing revolutionary who became known as the father of sleep medicine. Dement, in turn, mentored the brilliant maverick Mary Carskadon, who

What if our goal had not been to land on Mars, but in pure consciousness? The experience of pure consciousness—what does it look like? What is the essence of human consciousness? In The Elephant and the Blind. The Experience of Pure Consciousness: Philosophy, Science, and 500+ Experiential Reports (MIT Press, 2024)," influential philosopher Thomas Metzinger, one of the world's leading researchers on consciousness, brings together more than 500 experiential reports to offer the world's first comprehensive account of states of pure consciousness. Drawing on a large psychometric study of meditators in 57 countries, Metzinger focuses on “pure awareness” in meditation—the simplest form of experience there is—to illuminate the most fundamental aspects of how consciousness, the brain, and illusions of self all interact. Starting with an exploration of existential ease and ending on Bewusstseinskultur, a culture of consciousness, Metzinger explores the increasingly non-egoic experiences of silence, wakefulness, and c

C. S. Sherrington said “All the brain can do is to move things". The Brain in Motion: From Microcircuits to Global Brain Function (MIT Press, 2023) shows how much the brain can do "just" by moving things. It gives an amazing overview of the large variety of motor behaviors and the cellular basis of them. It reveals how motor circuits provide the underlying mechanism not just for walking or jumping, but also for breath or chewing. The book emphasizes the evolutionary perspective. It demonstrates how the basic structures are the same across all vertebrates, suggesting that these systems have been around for more than 500 million years. At the very beginning, Grillner introduces the analogy of an orchestra: The microcircuits are the musicians, and the forebrain acts as the conductor. In the following chapters, the readers get to know all the important actors and their contribution to this "performance": the CPGs and motor centers that execute the movements, the tectum that synthesizes input from the direct sur

Listen to this interview of Christopher Reddy, environmental chemist and Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. We talk about his book Science Communication in a Crisis: An Insider's Guide (Routledge Earthscan 2023). Christopher Reddy : "Communication definitely teaches us scientists things that we hadn't knows or appreciated, even in our own research. I mean, when you have to rethink about how and why you're doing something and what the outcomes mean, that is a series of mental gymnastics. And when we do gymnastics, we become fitter. We increase our longevity and have a richer and fuller quality of life. And that goes for science too: When you are challenged in the communication, you are putting yourself on a treadmill and you become fitter." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

What makes a species a species? Aristotle answered the species question by positing unchanging essences, properties that all and only members of a species shared. Individuals belonged to a species by possessing this essence. Biologists and philosophers of biology today are either not essentialists at all, or if they are think there are essences they are relational, historical properties.  In his provocative book Biological Essentialism (Oxford UP, 2023), Michael Devitt argues for a new form of biological essentialism in which intrinsic essences, probably largely genetic properties, are part of what tie species together and that the actual explanatory practices of biologists commit them to this view. Devitt, who is distinguished professor of philosophy, emeritus, at CUNY Graduate Center, responds to many philosophers critical of his position, and applies his essentialism to debates about race realism and anti-realism. Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. Learn more about your ad

Listen to Episode No.6 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois, and today as well, Bradley Alger, Professor Emeritus, Department of Physiology, University of Maryland School of Medicine. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is How the hypothesis means. What does out knowledge mean after it’s been hypothesized and tested? And what can we claim to know by having tested it? Also, just how far into the scientific enterprise does hypothetical testing reach — in other words, why are scientists writing so much when the hypotheses they test seem to be testing so little? What's all the communication about? These questions — and many, many more — make the meat of this lively discuss about meaning and the hypothesis. Listeners might be interested in my interview with Bradley Alger about his book Defense of the Scientific Hypothesis

Aquaculture is the fastest-growing protein production industry globally, with Vietnam one of the top producers and exporters of seafood products. In Vietnam, aquaculture is seen as a means of protecting rural livelihoods threatened by the consequences of climate change on agriculture. But climate change also drives the emergence of marine bacterial pathogens, causing considerable losses to aquaculture production. Traditionally, pathogen blooms have been treated with antimicrobials – but this has resulted in the emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance in aquaculture settings. So how can we combat these bacterial pathogens without fostering antimicrobial resistance whilst also continuing to produce the seafood needed to meet the world’s protein needs? Dr Carola Venturini is an expert research microbiologist and lecturer at the Sydney School of Veterinary Sciences at the University of Sydney. Her work investigates solutions to the crisis posed by the global rise in antimicrobial resistance in bacteria c

Listen to this interview of Natalie Aviles, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia. We talk about how organizations shape people, and how people shape science. Natalie Aviles : "I think, in general, the more self-conscious that scientists can be about what motivates them, about what makes them happy, about what drives them — the more, then, they can try to imagine a future that satisfies not only their intellectual curiosity but helps them navigate, too, the very sort of prosaic conditions that they find themselves in on a day-to-day basis." Works referred to in the interview: Natalie Aviles. An Ungovernable Foe: Science and Policy Innovation in the U.S. National Cancer Institute (Columbia University Press 2023) Natalie Aviles. "Environing innovation: Toward an ecological pragmatism of scientific practice." (Sociological Perspectives 2023) Robin Scheffler and Natalie Aviles. "State planning, cancer vaccine infrastructure, and the origins of the oncogene theory." (Social Studies of Science

What do we really know about our cousins, the Neanderthals? For over a century we saw Neanderthals as inferior to Homo Sapiens. More recently, the pendulum swung the other way and they are generally seen as our relatives: not quite human, but similar enough, and still not equal. Now, thanks to an ongoing revolution in paleoanthropology in which he has played a key part, Ludovic Slimak shows us that they are something altogether different -- and they should be understood on their own terms rather than by comparing them to ourselves. As he reveals in this stunning book, the Neanderthals had their own history, their own rituals, their own customs. Their own intelligence, very different from ours. Slimak has travelled around the world for the past thirty years to uncover who the Neanderthals really were. A modern-day Indiana Jones, he takes us on a fascinating archaeological investigation: from the Arctic Circle to the deep Mediterranean forests, he traces the steps of these enigmatic creatures, working to deciph

How does human language arise in the mind? To what extent is it innate, or something that is learned? How do these factors interact? The questions surrounding how we acquire language are some of the most fundamental about what it means to be human and have long been at the heart of linguistic theory.  Harry van der Hulst's book A Mind for Language: An Introduction to the Innateness Debate (Cambridge UP, 2023) provides a comprehensive introduction to this fascinating debate, unravelling the arguments for the roles of nature and nurture in the knowledge that allows humans to learn and use language. An interdisciplinary approach is used throughout, allowing the debate to be examined from philosophical and cognitive perspectives. It is illustrated with real-life examples and the theory is explained in a clear, easy-to-read way, making it accessible for students without a background in linguistics. An accompanying website contains a glossary, questions for reflection, discussion themes and project suggestions, to

We are all familiar with the “march of progress” image - the representation of evolution that depicts a series of apelike creatures becoming progressively taller and more erect before finally reaching the upright human form. It’s a powerful image. In his book Monkey to Man: The Evolution of the March of Progress Image (Yale UP, 2024), Professor Gowan Dawson examines its origins and its influence on the public understanding of evolution. Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Can we have science without freedom of speech? Dr. Scott Atlas's professional work and personal experiences bring to light an important and often under-discussed element of speech: freedom of speech in the hard sciences. The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a host of new questions and concerns surrounding our medical system and government health agencies: as Special Advisor to the President and a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force from July to December 2020, Dr. Atlas was at the forefront of such debates. In this conversation, he discusses the importance of debate not only to science itself but also to popular trust in and support of the sciences, which since the pandemic have suffered a steep decline. Dr. Scott Atlas, MD, is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health care policy at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and the co-director of the Global Liberty Institute. In addition to his role in White House he has served as Senior Advisor for Health Care to several numerous candidates for