Through an evolutionary lens, this book explores proposals — probable and improbable — that seek to explain the mysteries of human biology and behavior. Looking at questions such as what adaptive advantages, if any, human ancestors might have gotten out of developing the mental capacities for art, Barash provides no pat answers. Instead, he delights in all that remains unknown and unexplained. 10.19.12 | more >>

Quammen’s book has a touch of the big, sweeping suspense novel about it. The next scary new microbe (think the SARS or Ebola viruses) most likely lurks in some animal, waiting to spill over to people. And human behavior, explosively populating the planet and pushing into remote landscapes, is speeding the arrival of the next outbreak. Serious stuff, but writer Quammen mixes gentle ... 10.05.12 | more >>

IQ scores have risen dramatically over the last few generations. Flynn, a psychologist who discovered this trend 25 years ago, takes a provocative look at what escalating scores mean for the death penalty, racial differences in IQ and other controversial social issues. 10.05.12 | more >>

In today’s Google Earth world, it’s hard to remember that until recently much of the planet remained a literal blank on the map. Ocean floors, in particular, were a greater mystery than the surface of the moon. 09.21.12 | more >>

The Pleistocene epoch — lasting from 2.6 million to about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago — was an exciting time: Continent-sized ice sheets advanced and retreated multiple times, and several varieties of humans inhabited Earth. During warm interglacial episodes, hyenas and hippos lived as far north as England; in colder periods, exotic species rendered Europe, in the words of this ... 09.21.12 | more >>

In this dispatch from the front lines of consciousness research, neuroscientist Bor offers an introspective interpretation of what the human mind is and what it’s good for. 09.07.12 | more >>

A human geneticist has dipped his DNA testing kit into the great melting pot, exploring the genetic history, genealogy and anthropology of Americans. Sykes travels across the country meeting ordinary people and creating portraits of their chromosomes that reflect from whence their ancestors hailed. All the volunteers are given pseudonyms drawn from Hollywood movies, but the stories of their ... 09.07.12 | more >>

Deep in the earth, from eastern Ohio through West Virginia, Pennsylvania and upstate New York, lies the Marcellus Shale, a nearly 400-million-year-old geologic formation harboring vast quantities of natural gas. That statement isn’t up for debate, which makes it rare in the divisive discussions about the rush for gas — and particularly about hydraulic fracturing, the process used to ... 08.24.12 | more >>

Computers are mathematically pretty powerful, considering the only numbers they use are 0 and 1. That power, of course, stems from binary digital logic, dimly foreseen by Francis Bacon four centuries ago and articulated more clearly by Leibniz several decades later. But the modern computer’s ability to exploit that power grew from the mathematical imagination of Alan Turing (SN: 6/30/12, p. ... 08.24.12 | more >>

As the inventor of the time-out procedure for disciplining misbehaving kids, Staats transformed modern parenting. Now he wants to give a time-out to popular biology-based explanations of human behavior. Genes and brains orchestrate bodies, he argues, but don’t determine behavior or inner states such as intelligence and cruelty. 08.10.12 | more >>

When smallpox was eradicated in the 1970s, many people thought it was “game over” for infectious diseases as global threats. How wrong they were. 08.10.12 | more >>

A modern list of most-hated viruses might include ones that have triggered recent pandemics: HIV, or the lethal H1N1 swine flu. Wasik and Murphy are here to say such a list shows people today have far too short a memory. 07.27.12 | more >>

Early in the 20th century, German biologist Hans Spemann separated two cells of a salamander zygote using a strand of his daughter’s hair. His experiment produced two fully formed amphibians, demonstrating that each cell contains the full genetic blueprint to build a living thing, not the partial instructions that scientists had previously supposed. 07.13.12 | more >>

Others have already written the atomic bomb’s biography, and Fetter-Vorm doesn’t add new insights or historical scholarship. But he does provide a remarkably accessible — and frankly, beautiful — introduction to the events that ushered in the Atomic Age. 07.13.12 | more >>

In 2001, in the melee of a Fourth of July beach brawl, someone plunged a hunting knife deep into Matt Nagle’s neck as the former football player tried to pull people off his friends. Nagle survived, but the knife severed his spinal cord, paralyzing him below the neck. 06.29.12 | more >>

If you’re waiting for an apocalypse on December 21, 2012, you’re in for a big disappointment, says Keating. The physicist’s book aims to reassure people that the world is not going to end, educate them about why and entertain along the way. He succeeds on all fronts. 06.29.12 | more >>

William Temple Hornaday may have been a small man, but there was nothing diminutive about the naturalist’s ego, bravery, energy or ambition. Born a few years before the U.S. Civil War, the tenacious naturalist accomplished so much in his 82 years that Bechtel’s biography of him reads like larger-than-life fiction. Yet few will recognize Hornaday’s name. 06.15.12 | more >>

In 1943, Rutgers graduate student Albert Schatz isolated two strains of bacteria that produced an unknown antibiotic. As World War II raged in Europe, tuberculosis and other diseases tore through refugee camps. New antibiotics were sorely needed, as Schatz, a former Army lab technician, knew well. He noted the new find under the heading “Exp. 11” in his lab notebook and shared his notes ... 06.15.12 | more >>

The Internet seems to be everywhere, thanks to the wonders of Wi-Fi: the home office, the local coffee shop, even aircraft cruising at 30,000 feet. Yet the largest technological construction that people interact with on a daily basis has its limits. It is, after all, a network of parts and pieces, from dusty desktop routers and squirrel-gnawed phone lines to transoceanic cables and enormous ... 06.01.12 | more >>

Don’t be misled. This book’s satirical title is sorted out in the subtitle: “Untangling Twisted Messages about Health, Fitness, and Happiness.” That’s the task at hand, and Caulfield leaves few myths unassailed. 06.01.12 | more >>

Next time you’re having a bad day at work, consider the travails of Guillaume Le Gentil, an 18th century French astronomer. He spent more than a decade toiling over measuring the transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769. By precisely timing the planet’s passage across the face of the sun, Le Gentil hoped to contribute to a global scientific effort to determine the size of the solar system. 05.18.12 | more >>

Years ago, Long realized there was something fishy about robots — that is, robots could be made to be fishlike.

Director of the Interdisciplinary Robotics Research Laboratory at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Long reflects on his career as a biologist who uses robots to study fish evolution. Up front, he tackles the social hazards that come with his occupation, fielding questions like, “What do robots have to do with biology?” 05.18.12 | more >>

Earth’s history is a saga of change. The planet has evolved ever since it and its solar system companions coalesced from a massive interstellar cloud of gas and icy dust. What was once a barren lava planet is now a teeming orb where life occupies nearly every conceivable niche on and near its surface. 05.04.12 | more >>

Nearly any time a major natural disaster strikes — an earthquake in Japan, an eruption in Chile — someone tries to link it to climate change. 05.04.12 | more >>

Had T.S. Eliot been around to read this book, he might have said: This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a shortage. 04.20.12 | more >>

Even decked out in cultural finery, people make monkeys of themselves. Maestripieri, a veteran monkey investigator, builds a fascinating and occasionally disturbing case for fundamental similarities in the social shenanigans of people, apes and monkeys due to a shared evolutionary heritage. 04.20.12 | more >>

At least one in three people are introverts, and this book may prove a revelation for them and everyone who lives, works or interacts with them. Quiet cites a wealth of new and ongoing research about this psychological trait: who is an introvert, how these introspective souls got that way, and why they can be ideally suited to become scientists, engineers, journalists, therapists and money ... 04.06.12 | more >>

“Are you dead or alive?”

The Undead opens with a question that seems like it should have an easy answer. But Teresi, a science writer, argues that in today’s age of beating-heart cadavers that can breathe, urinate and even give birth while legally dead, it can be hard to tell. 04.06.12 | more >>

Gene therapy, long heralded as the savior of those suffering from rare genetic disorders, has a lot to thank Corey Haas for. Haas was 8 years old when, in 2008, doctors injected engineered viruses into his eyes in an attempt to cure his hereditary blindness. It worked, and that success swept away shadows that had haunted gene therapy for nearly two decades. 03.23.12 | more >>

Casu marzu is made in Sardinia by adding fly larvae to sheep’s cheese and allowing the concoction to rot. It is eaten with thousands of little maggots still squirming inside it. 03.23.12 | more >>