Eye candy might more appropriately be called brain candy. Seeing a pretty face is like eating a piece of oh-so-sweet chocolate — for the brain, if not for the stomach. In fact, attractive faces activate the same reward circuitry in the brain as food, drugs and money. For humans, there is something captivating and unforgettable about the arrangement of two balls, a point and a horizontal slit on the front of the head. The power of faces isn’t lost on psychologists. “Faces are interesting because they impart so much information — expression, attention — and these interact... (p. 24)

People like to think they understand their world. They seek explanations for things that go well and excuses for failures. “To swim against the current of human intuition is a difficult task,” Mlodinow notes. In this guide to randomness, he explores how people misunderstand the power of praise and punishment, hot and cold career streaks, and the luck in the lottery, all because of a misunderstanding of the influence of chance. But not to worry. Mlodinow provides lessons on what he calls “a field of subtlety,” from the basic laws of probability, to regression toward the m...

In 1964, Paul Colinvaux began his life’s work—trying to understand the ice-age climate of the Amazon through mud cores and the pollen found within. Having sharpened his drill in the Arctic, the ecologist looked south to “terra incognita.” When he began his effort, no ice-age deposit or site in the Amazon had been identified. Then in 1969, ornithologist Jurgen Haffer proposed a hypothesis to explain the Amazon’s vast biodiversity. During the last ice age (which peaked about 21,000 years ago), he suggested, most of the forest became arid grassland. In pockets of surviving gr...

When science writer Carl Zimmer looks into a petri dish teeming with E. coli, he sees himself, humanity and all life. In Microcosm, Zimmer traces the lessons biologists have learned from the microbe, which calls our guts its home. He also uses it to discuss some of the most fundamental questions in biology: What is life? How does it persist? Why must it end? “I look at life through a lens made of E. coli,” Zimmer writes, and many biologists are doing the same. E. coli was the species scientists first used to decipher the genetic code, and later to understand how genes switch on...