Books
NASA |
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Astronaut Buzz Aldrin erects a solar wind experiment on the moon after Apollo 11's historic landing on July 20, 1969. Click on the image for a high-resolution view.
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That's one small step for a man ... and one giant stack of books for the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
The pile of new publications about NASA's moon effort, timed to anticipate the anniversary on July 20, has been rising so high that Robert Pearlman, editor of the CollectSpace Web site, had to clear out his bookshelves this week. "I now have stacks of older books sitting around my office," he told me today.
It's Pearlman's job to keep track of the memories and the memorabilia surrounding space missions, and even he is impressed by the breadth of offerings being released this year. "Each of them is slightly different - they're not just telling the same story over and over again," he said.
That sentiment is echoed by Andrew Chaikin, author of "A Man on the Moon," the classic chronicle of the Apollo missions. "Apollo was such an enormous undertaking that I'm continually reminded that you can never truly know everything about that program. There were so many people, and so much, and all of them have their stories to tell," he said.
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UW-Madison |
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Terry Devitt and David J. Tenenbaum, two of the brains behind "The Why Files,"
hang out in the Zoology Museum at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
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Can poker make you sick? How can a few herbs make your Memorial Day barbecue a little healthier? Why has the world community failed to stop genocide? "The Why Files" takes on scientific questions great and small, on the Web and in a new book. (Answers below.)
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Hulton Archive / Getty Images file |
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An engraving shows the HMS Beagle being greeted by Fuegian natives as it sails
through the Strait of Magellan in 1834 with naturalist Charles Darwin aboard.
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Evolutionary biology isn't just something you do in the lab or the library: Over the past two centuries, scientific pioneers have had to weather seasickness, survive shipwrecks and watch out for polar bears while they ferreted out the facts.
In his latest book, "Remarkable Creatures," molecular biologist Sean B. Carroll recounts the rip-roaring adventure tales behind the great advances in the theory of evolution.
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Donald Johanson |
It’s been 35 years since anthropologist Don Johanson found the fossilized skeleton of Lucy, the world’s best-known ancestor of modern humans, but Johanson says his 3.2 million-year-old “girlfriend” from Ethiopia still has lessons to teach.
"I never thought, when I found her on that November day, that she would turn out to be such an icon in human evolution," Johanson said last week during a visit to the "Lucy's Legacy" exhibit at Seattle's Pacific Science Center.
Lucy has become an icon, of course. In part, that's because Johanson and his colleagues recovered an incredible 40 percent of the complete skeleton, which is laid out in Seattle like a gem collection in a jewel case. The biggest reason, however, is that Lucy came from an era when our ancestors were just becoming human (as Johanson explains on this marvelous Web site).
"Lucy has gone a long way in introducing people not just to the idea of evolutionary change, but particularly to the fact that humans have evolved," he said.
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Young et al. / SwRI / NASA |
To be or not to be ... a planet? That's not really the big question anymore, no matter how you feel about Pluto's so-called demotion.
The truly big question, addressed in two books that look at Pluto's present position from completely different perspectives, has to do with what kinds of planets are out there. That applies to our own solar system as well as the hundreds of other worlds being detected in the universe beyond.
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Bat Conservation Int'l via AFP - Getty |
Vampire bats are the stars of Bill
Schutt's "Dark Banquet."
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Between the "Twilight" movie and book series and HBO's "True Blood" TV series, vampires are getting a lot of exposure these days. But in biologist Bill Schutt's book, those fictional fang-wearers don't even deserve to be called vampires.
Instead, in "Dark Banquet," Schutt focuses on the true bloodsuckers of the natural world - vampire bats, leeches, bed bugs, the dreaded candiru fish and other critters that inspire tales as macabre and mysterious as any Halloween thriller.
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Pat Rawlings / NASA |
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In the novel "Mars Life," explorers like the ones shown in this speculative artwork
find evidence of long-gone intelligent life in the Red Planet's Tithonium Chasma.
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Over the course of more than 45 years, and through more than 115 books, Ben Bova has been chronicling space exploration as fiction and fact. But in his latest novel, "Mars Life," Bova uses facts about the Red Planet - plus facts about the blue planet we live on - to weave a tale of interplanetary politics as well as scientific discovery.
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Justin Knight Photography |
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Nobel-winning physicist Frank Wilczek says reality at its most basic level is best
described as the interplay of energy fields in "empty" space.
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What is the Matrix? It might be more than a cult movie classic, if you side with Nobel-winning physicist Frank Wilczek. In his new book, "The Lightness of Being," Wilczek sets forth the concept that at its most basic level, our universe exists as a vibrant energy field he calls "the Grid." (He says he might have considered calling it the Matrix, "but the sequels tarnished that candidate.")
The way Wilczek sees it, interactions in virtually empty space give rise to the substance of subatomic particles and complex molecules, of everyday objects and distant galaxy clusters. But you shouldn't just take his word for it: He says experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, the particle-smasher that is now under repair far beneath the French-Swiss border, could unlock some of the Grid's biggest mysteries.
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An African-American chemist's ascent to success, the often-frustrating quest for fertility, the ins and outs of genetic screening and the local effects of global climate change are among the subjects covered in this year's crop of award-winning science sagas, as selected by the National Association of Science Writers.
NASW says its Science in Society Journalism Awards recognize "innovative reporting that goes well beyond the research findings and considers the associated ethical problems and social effects." The winners, who were chosen by a panel of their peers, will be honored on Oct. 26 during the association's annual meeting in Palo Alto, Calif. This year's awards carry a cash prize of $2,500.
I was lucky enough to win one of the 2002 Science in Society awards for my genetic genealogy tale, and since then I've served on the judging committee a couple of times (but not this year). Take a look at this year's stand-outs:
- Books: "Everything Conceivable," by Washington Post Magazine feature writer Liza Mundy, examines assisted reproduction technologies and their often-unexpected ramifications. "Even people who think they are really up to date on these issues are going to be very surprised," one judge said. Another said the book documented trends that are "as baffling as they are unknown."
- Periodicals (magazines and newspapers): "The Match," a five-part series by Newsday reporter Beth Whitehouse, traces the case of a girl suffering from a rare blood disorder - and her family's controversial quest to cure her. The series appeared in the newspaper Sept. 30-Oct. 4, 2007. "This is such a wonderful example of what a newspaper can do in a very personal way," one of the judges said. "To take a single story, a single family, and turn it into a symbol of this entire debate over prenatal genetic screening."
- Electronic media (TV, radio, Internet): "Forgotten Genius," a TV documentary that first aired on PBS on Feb. 6, 2007, chronicles the life of Arican-American chemist Percy Julian. Writer/producers Stephen Lyons and Llewellyn M. Smith share the award. One of the judges said the show is "one of the few docudramas that actually blends documentary with the drama and really grips the viewer." In addition to the latest honor, "Forgotten Genius" has won a Science Journalism Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
- Honorable mention: NPR's "Climate Connections" is a series of 170 stories that document how humans around the world are addressing - or failing to address - the challenge of global warming. The judges said they were impressed by NPR's "incredible commitment of resources." Editor/correspondents Alison Richards and David Malakoff share the honors.
In all, 155 works were entered in this year's competition.
"I think the quality of all the entries showed that science journalism is alive and well, but we should not take that for granted," one of the judges, Madeleine Jacobs of the American Chemical Society, said in NASW's news release. "In this era of very short attention spans and dwindling resources for journalism, we are blessed that we still have publishers that are willing to commit the resources to ensure that the public learns about these extremely important issues."
Scott Eklund / Seattle Post-Intelligencer file |
University of Washington physicist John Cramer has designed an experiment
in reverse-time causality - and has written a novel about time travel as well.
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Have you heard the one about the physics experiment that created globe-gobbling black holes? Or killer neutrino beams? Or the voice of God? How about antimatter explosives and the boson bomb? There's even a supercollider that set off a crisis so huge that scientists had to be sent back in time to make sure the supercollider was never built in the first place.
All these subatomic nightmares, and more besides, are pure science fiction ... with a bit of science woven in.
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