New Books: Math & Natural Sciences

Those inheriting our planet's environmental problems expect to encounter challenges, but they may not foresee the feelings of powerlessness and despair that often accompany social activism in the face of a seemingly intractable situation. Drawing on ten years' experience, Sarah Jaquette Ray has created an "existential toolkit" for the climate generation. Combining insights from psychology, sociology, social movements, mindfulness, and the environmental humanities, Ray explains why and how we need to let go of eco-guilt, resist burnout, and cultivate resilience.

Through the centuries, the march of economic progress has been accompanied by the spread of industrial pollution. As our capacities for production and our aptitude for consumption have increased, so have their byproducts--chemical contamination from fertilizers and pesticides, diesel emissions, oil spills, a vast "plastic continent" found floating in the ocean. This book offers a social and political history of industrial pollution, mapping its trajectories over three centuries, from the toxic wastes of early tanneries to the fossil fuel energy regime of the 20th century.

Nearly a hundred years after its publication, Kurt Gödel's famous proof that every mathematical system must contain propositions that are true--yet never provable--continues to unsettle mathematics, philosophy, and computer science. An intimate portrait of the scientific and intellectual circles in prewar Vienna and the early days of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, this biography fully draws upon Gödel's voluminous letters and writings to explore his profound intellectual friendships, his moving relationship with his mother, his troubled yet devoted marriage, and the debilitating bouts of paranoia that ultimately took his life.

In The Sound of the Sea, Cynthia Barnett blends cultural history and science to trace our long love affair with seashells and the hidden lives of the mollusks that make them. Spiraling out from the great cities of shell that once rose in North America to the warming waters of the Maldives and the slave castles of Ghana, Barnett has created an unforgettable account of the world's most iconic seashells. She begins with their childhood wonder, unwinds surprising histories like the origin of Shell Oil as a family business importing exotic shells, and charts what shells and the soft animals that build them are telling scientists about our warming, acidifying seas.

Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup, the most commonly used weedkiller in the world. Agrichemical companies claim that glyphosate is safe for humans, animals, and the environment. But emerging scientific research on glyphosate's deadly disruption of the gut microbiome, its crippling effect on protein synthesis, and its impact on the body's ability to use and transport sulfur tells a very different story. MIT senior research scientist Stephanie Seneff, PhD sounds the alarm on glyphosate, giving you essential information to protect your health, your family's health, and the planet on which we all depend.

Colwell, the first female director of the National Science Foundation, discusses the entrenched sexism in science, the elaborate detours women have taken to bypass the problem, and how to fix the system. When she first applied for a graduate fellowship in bacteriology, she was told, "We don't waste fellowships on women." Over her six decades in science, as she encounters other women pushing back against the status quo, Colwell also witnessed the advances that could be made when men and women worked together. Here she offers a diagnosis of how to fix the problem of sexism in science-- and a celebration of the women pushing back.

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is one of the leading physicists of her generation. She is also one of the fewer than one hundred Black women to earn a PhD in physics. In The Disordered Cosmos, Prescod-Weinstein shares with readers her love for the science of physics to the physics of melanin in skin, to the latest theories of dark matter - all with a new spin and rhythm informed by pop culture, hip hop, politics, and Star Trek. Her vision of the cosmos is vibrant, inclusive and buoyantly non-traditional. As she makes clear, what we know about the universe won't be complete until we learn to think beyond the limitations of white-dominated science.

Rather than imagining modern humans as a species with godlike powers, or Homo deus, The Selfish Ape recasts us as Homo narcissus-- paragons of self-absorption. This story offers an immense sweep of modern biology, leading readers from earth's unexceptional location in the cosmos to the story of our microbial origins and the inner workings of the human body. It explores human genetics, reproduction, brain function, and aging, creating an enlightened view of man as a brilliantly inventive, yet self-destructive animal. This is a book about human biology, the intertwined characteristics of our greatness and failure, and how we have plundered the biosphere.

In This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs -- opium, caffeine, and mescaline. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs, while consuming (or in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants, and the equally powerful taboos with which we surround them. A unique blend of history, science, memoir, as well as participatory journalism, Pollan examines and experiences these plants from several very different angles and contexts, and shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively.

Renowned Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Nurse takes readers on a wondrous journey through five fundamental biological ideas--the Cell, the Gene, Evolution by Natural Selection, Life as Chemistry, and Life as Information--introducing the scientists who made the most important advances and taking us into his own lab to give us a sense of the thrill of scientific discovery. Nurse also addresses biology's most pressing ethical issues--including gene-editing, genetic testing, and genetically modified crops--and he concludes with a stirring encomium to biology's role in tackling infectious disease.