History Science

The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists & Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb

The story of the Manhattan Project that produced the world’s first atomic bomb is well known and well told. Without its success, the United States might have invaded Japan’s main island in bloody fashion. Less well-known is the story of how the nuclear ambitions of Nazi Germany failed. With an atomic bomb, Hitler might have annihilated London or New York City and changed the shape of the war. Their ultimate failure determined the course of…

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Science

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us & a Grander View of Life

Humanity has known about the microbial world of bacteria for centuries. Ever since technology for optical lenses progressed to a certain point, we’ve known that there is a super-small world that populates almost every region on this planet’s surface. What we didn’t know what how well it worked with animal bodies to promote life. The relatively recent development of microbiology taught us that, and ongoing research into the microbiome spills forth clues into how human…

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Healthcare Science Society

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic

Pandemics were on global leaders’ agendas before 2020, but since no global catastrophe happened since 1918, most did not prioritize these concerns. I hope that will not happen as much going forward. Preventative work has gained a new life. Bill Gates, co-founder of both Microsoft and the philanthropic Gates Foundation, uses his privileged, bird’s-eye view to organize what work can be done to avoid the “next pandemic.” Though humanity has moved onto other challenges, doing…

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Healthcare Science

The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine & the New Human

Siddhartha Mukherjee, one of our age’s most brilliant medical writers, is a cancer doctor with research interests in the basic sciences of cell biology and genetics. He is also an engaging writer with a deep knowledge of the history of science. His books, one of which has won a Pulitzer Prize, combine all these crosscurrents to convey a compelling narrative. He’s done it for both genetics and cancer, and here, he hits another home run…

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Presentation Science Writing-Communication

The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science

A popular impression about science is that scientists do not know how to write well; that is, they only write in highly technical jargon that’s, well, boring. Scientists spend so much of their training, the story goes, learning about facts that they do not master the art and craft of communication. Montgomery, in this work, seeks to counter that argument by teaching scientists how to communicate well. In so doing, he harkens to a centuries-long…

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Religion-Philosophy Science

Questions of Truth: Fifty-one Responses to Questions about God, Science & Belief

John Polkinghorne is a Cambridge physicist who decided, mid-career, to become an Anglican priest. Like a good scientist working out a theory, he worked out how his orthodox Christian beliefs were essentially compatible with modern physics. He has won international acclaim and awards for his insights about religion and science. Especially central to his contributions is the idea that both disciplines require a certain amount of belief and faith. This book, compiled with his collaborator…

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Biography-Memoir Healthcare Science Society

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing & the Future of the Human Race

In our generation, codes comprise some of the most interesting subjects of study. We code computers to do work for us; we also are beginning to decode the genetic code to propel life forward. The discovery of CRISPR promises to allow us to edit the human genome, and Professor Doudna sits among this innovation’s prime discoverers. Along with another female scientist Professor Charpentier, she won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2020. This biography, written…

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Healthcare History Science

The Gene: An Intimate History

Genetics is a field of biomedical research that is both in motion and influential over our daily lives. It promises to help millions afflicted with horrific disease, yet it could be poised to change (or unravel?) human life as we seek to write our own destinies in DNA. Real action in this field has only occurred in the last 200 years, starting with Gregor Mendel and accelerating in the early twentieth century. Mukherjee, an oncologist…

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Environment Science Society

From Knowledge to Power: The Comprehensive Handbook for Climate Science & Advocacy

Climate science is a hot topic these days, and many books (like Bill Gates’ How to Avoid a Climate Disaster) provide introductions to the topic for a popular audience. Those books are written to be digested by the masses, but detailed academic work is often lacking in them. Enter Perona’s textbook. (He calls it a “handbook,” but it more resembles an interdisciplinary textbook.) He explains the nitty-gritty of the science and extends the reasoning from…

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Religion-Philosophy Science

Belief in God in an Age of Science

Religious belief and science are often put at odds with each other in contemporary society and popular culture. One needs only to listen to fundamentalist preachers or read newspapers about anti-vaccine protestors to think that these groups are forever at odds. Further, the histories of religious wars and persecutions turn many educated, reality-based citizens off of the religious path. To this situation, Polkinghorne offers a detente by suggesting that the two fields are cousins in…

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