New Books: Math & Natural Sciences

Sand, iron, salt, oil, copper and lithium: The struggle for these fundamental materials has created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and our greed for thousands of years. Though we are told we now live in a weightless world of information, we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. And it's getting exponentially worse. Why? Because these ingredients are the basis for everything. They power our phones and electric cars, build our homes and offices, enable the printing of our books, and supply our packaging. Our world would not exist without them, and the battle to control them will shape our future.

As a little boy, Roger Penrose and his father discovered a sundial in a clearing behind their home. This discovery marked the beginning of a journey toward becoming one of the world's most influential mathematicians, philosophers, and physicists. He proved the limitations of general relativity, and he set a new agenda for theoretical physics. However, as Patchen Barss documents in The Impossible Man, success came at a price. Penrose's longing for knowledge was matched only by his inability to understand those around him, and he struggled to connect with friends, family, and especially the women in his life.

In The Three Ages of Water, expert on water resources and climate change Peter Gleick guides us through the long, fraught history of our most valuable resource. Spread over a ten-thousand-year human history, it begins with the fundamental evolutionary role water had in shaping early civilizations and empires, crests to the scientific and social revolutions that created modern society, and spills into the global water crisis of depleted groundwater reserves and ubiquitous pollution. We now face a fight to preserve clean water globally, a fight we cannot afford to lose.

Putting readers in the middle of animal soundscapes, Mathevon reveals the amazing variety of animal vocalizations. He describes how animals use sound to express emotion, to choose a mate, to trick others, to mark their territory, to call for help, and much more. What may seem like random chirps, squawks, and cries are actually signals that, like our human words, allow animals to carry on conversations with others. Mathevon explains how the science of bioacoustics works to decipher the ways animals make and hear sounds, what information is encoded in these sound signals, and what this information is used for in daily life.

In May 2016, the city of Fort McMurray in Alberta--the seat of the Canadian oil industry, from which the U.S. derives almost half its oil imports--burned to the ground. The unprecedented disaster forced 88,000 people from their homes and showed us what the fires of the future look like: increasingly destructive, already here. While the chemistry and physics of wildfires remain unchanged over the last century and a half, climate change has created conditions that give fire exponentially more opportunity to burn. And yet there is no other natural force or element over which we have such a compelling illusion of control. Fire yearns, above all, for freedom.

Foreign Bodies tells of humanity caught between the terror of contagion and the ingenuity of science. Set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we watch as smallpox strikes London; cholera hits Paris; plague comes to India. Threading through the scenes of terror, suffering and hope - in hospitals and prisons, palaces and slums - are an unforgettable cast of characters. At the heart of it all is an unsung hero: Waldemar Haffkine, a gun-toting Jewish student in Odesa turned microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute. Creator of the world's first mass production line of vaccines in Mumbai, he is tragically brought down in an act of shocking injustice.

To survive and thrive while rooted in a single spot, plants have adapted ingenious methods of survival. In recent years, scientists have learned about their ability to communicate, recognize their kin and behave socially, hear sounds, morph their bodies to blend into their surroundings, store useful memories that inform their life cycle, and trick animals into behaving to their benefit. In looking closely, we see that plants, rather than imitate human intelligence, have perhaps formed a parallel system. Zoë Schlanger takes us across the globe, digging into the soil with the scientists who have spent their waking days studying these amazing entities up close.

Nature, it has been said, invites us to eat by appetite and rewards by flavor. But what exactly are flavors? Why are some so pleasing while others are not? Delicious is a supremely entertaining foray into the heart of such questions. With generous helpings of warmth and wit, the authors offer bold new perspectives on why food is enjoyable and how the pursuit of delicious flavors has guided the course of human history. They consider the role that flavor may have played in the invention of the first tools, the extinction of giant mammals, the evolution of the world's most delicious and fatty fruits, the creation of beer, and our own sociality.

Evolving Tomorrow scrutinizes how evolutionary change happens, how modern-day genetic engineering can influence it, and what consequences we can expect to see in the future of the Anthropocene era. The first half of this book explores how living organisms change over time and how it can happen fast. It explains nature's evolutionary forces, how these forces interplay with genetics, and the intricacies of genetic biotechnologies like CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing. The second half of the book investigates the applications and implications of manipulating evolution and genetic engineering to alter and create new species.

If memory is a simple thing, why does it often go awry? How can you be certain about something you remember and be wrong about it? Why is it so difficult to remember people’s names? How can you study hard for an exam but not be able to recall the material on the test? This fascinating book covers everything you need to know about memory, from how it works, to what you can do to control and improve your memory, and how aging, mental and physical health, and lifestyle (sleep, consumption of alcohol or drugs, nutrition, exercise, and more) can impact memory.