In histories of quantum physics, Hugh Everett III’s name appears frequently, but without much about the life of the man behind the name. He did not pursue a career in academic physics, opting instead to work as an analyst for secret military projects, and he died young, in 1982 at age 51. 11.05.10 | more >>

True story: A novelist gets up one morning and snatches the newspaper off his doorstep only to find the words appear to be written in some unintelligible script, perhaps Cyrillic. He suspects a practical joke but soon realizes he has lost the ability to read. The novelist finds he can still write, but can’t proofread what he’s just set down. Determined, he finds a way to produce another novel. 11.05.10 | more >>

What many people in the West view as vile, slimy creatures are, according to Prosek, the world’s most mysterious fish. (Yes, despite often being mistaken for snakes, eels are fish.) They can live for a century, they spend most of their lives in fresh water but must return to sea to spawn, and they can travel up to a quarter of the globe to do that spawning. 11.05.10 | more >>

Magic wands, fake drop boxes and invisible thread may be fun gimmicks, but a magician’s most valuable tool weighs about three pounds and sits in the skull of the spectator. 10.22.10 | more >>

Gestation isn’t destiny, but a person’s physical and emotional future do start to form before birth. In her up-close look at the first nine months, Paul deftly intersperses a scientific tour of how fetal environments influence later health and well-being with personal glimpses of her second pregnancy. 10.22.10 | more >>

The 2000 U.S. presidential election should have been decided by a coin flip.

Or so argues Seife, a mathematician-turned-journalist who tackles some of society’s biggest math problems in his new book. The race between George W. Bush and Al Gore was, mathematically speaking, too close to call. So, Seife suggests, instead of counting chads, the contested state of Florida should have relied on an age-old procedure for breaking a tie: drawing lots. 09.24.10 | more >>

If aliens ever land on Earth, Kean writes, one of the few things humans could present that might actually be understood by the visitors is the periodic table of the elements. That observation is typical of this quirky, thoughtful and thorough book. 09.24.10 | more >>

A millennium ago, the Islamic world was civilization’s Science Central, the primary haven for contemplating the cosmos and discerning the natural laws governing physical existence. While the Arabo-Islamic scientists of this period have on occasion been portrayed as mere preservers and translators of ancient Greek science, they in fact engaged in extensive creative scientific activity, ... 09.10.10 | more >>

Consider everything you do in 24 hours. Now consider doing it without gravity. Roach’s new book explores just that, unveiling the “man” in “manned space exploration.” She’s not interested in heroes, but in humans — the dirty, hungry, sleep- and stimulus-deprived souls shot into the isolation of space, and the scientists who test every contingency to put them there. The ... 08.27.10 | more >>

Numberland is a topsy-turvy place. In his new book, Bellos follows math’s counterintuitive twists and turns with the surprise and delight of someone rediscovering a long-lost landscape. 08.27.10 | more >>

In 2008, science and technology writer Nicholas Carr asked in The Atlantic if Google is “making us stupid.” His latest book is an effort to answer that question and, more broadly, to explore how the tools of the Internet age are altering the way people find and use information. 08.13.10 | more >>

Dire predictions about global warming make it hard to imagine how the human race will cope with the droughts, heat waves and advancing seas that climate change is expected to bring later this century. But economist Matthew Kahn has a message for prosperous urbanites in developed (and rapidly developing) nations who worry about the fate of their children and grandchildren in a greenhouse world: ... 08.13.10 | more >>

Chimpanzees tantalize and taunt scientists. Some researchers see these expressive-faced apes as dandy models of human ancestors; others cite the perils of viewing another species as “almost human.” In his new book, Cohen, a science writer, takes a largely entertaining journey into the fractious world of chimp studies. He falls short, though, of fulfilling the title’s promise of showing ... 07.30.10 | more >>

Of all human attributes, wisdom is perhaps the most vaunted. Yet ask someone to define the trait and the answer will probably echo the test applied to obscenity in 1964: I know it when I see it. 07.16.10 | more >>

What with Mars rovers that tweet and space telescopes with Facebook fan pages, one might think space exploration today is just another part of modern life. In this new book, however, environmental scholar Pyne reminds readers of the rich cultural history that underlies humankind’s exploration of the cosmos. 07.16.10 | more >>

At first glance, it’s hard to see the downside of being civilized. Compared with Stone Age living, an office job doesn’t look too shabby. Throw in the Internet, leisure time and dessert, and all this culture looks like a win-win. 07.02.10 | more >>

Politicians and salesmen aren’t the only people who use — or even rely on — vague language. Never mind that much of the world can be measured in neatly defined units such as centimeters, milligrams and degrees, writes van Deemter, a computer scientist. Most people have little sense of those units, so vagueness permeates speech and ideas, from describing a person as “tall” to the ... 07.02.10 | more >>

People wearing gorilla suits don’t always stand out in a crowd. When volunteers were asked to count the number of ball passes made by a basketball team in a video, half never noticed a gorilla-suited intruder walking across the court doing chest thumps. 06.18.10 | more >>

In 1951, a group of American men suited up to go to war. This wasn’t unusual at the time — the Korean War was on — but this brigade was armed with field notebooks and test tubes, and was trained to take aim at threats to public health. Inside the Outbreaks tells the story of this little-known corps, the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 06.18.10 | more >>

Scientists have never been able to clearly explain why the laws of physics, on paper, work equally well forward or backward in time (see essay on Page 26) yet real life offers only a one-way street into the future. Innumerable books have been written about the conundrum of time’s direction, or “arrow,” but none have succeeded in answering the question to everyone’s satisfaction. So now ... 06.04.10 | more >>

People impressed by the size of dinosaurs should be really enthralled by whales: These aquatic mammals include the heftiest creatures ever to have lived, and they still share the planet with us. 06.04.10 | more >>

Hack the Planet: Science's Best Hope - or Worst Nightmare - for Averting Climate CatastropheEli Kintisch

How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth's ClimateJeff Goodell Buy this book 05.21.10 | more >>

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/080189560X?ie=UTF8&tag=sciencenews06-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=080189560XThe real science of fake science sounds like a recipe for factual disaster. But this exploration of the long-running TV series delivers on its promise to answer the kinds of questions raised by the best of science fiction. The book takes ... 05.21.10 | more >>

Understanding the intricacies of subatomic physics isn’t easy, but in this book the concepts literally leap off the page. The pop-up story about the world’s largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, provides a 3-D tour of the 27-kilometer underground racetrack for colliding protons that straddles the countryside between France and Switzerland. 05.21.10 | more >>

Connoisseurs of fine fiction had a shock in January when the New Yorker published a short story in which all the characters were ants. Now the greatly anticipated source of that excerpt has appeared as a full-length novel, with humans as characters too.Mostly the book follows Raphael Semmes Cody, who grows up in the fictional Nokobee County, a place inspired by real longleaf pine forests near ... 05.07.10 | more >>

As the outdoor reading season opens, Stutchbury’s new, informal work on bird behavior just begs to be read under a backyard tree. The book could serve as beach reading too; marine birds such as the albatross and rhinoceros auklet put in appearances. But Stutchbury, a biologist at York University in Toronto, has done much of her research on songbirds, and tales of their behavior form the ... 05.07.10 | more >>

Most people believe “Here be dragons” appears on ancient maps as a warning of the dangers rife in unexplored or unfamiliar regions. But the phrase is found on no such maps and on only one small globe, McCarthy reveals in his book, which chronicles how real creatures got to be where they are and the significance of their movements. In fact, the phrase etched over Southeast Asia on that 16th ... 04.09.10 | more >>

After 50 years of scanning the skies for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, astronomers have only silence to report — an eerie silence, Davies argues. Part history of the search, part road map for its future and (large) part mind-stretching exercise, the book provides Davies’ perspective on profound questions that have implications far beyond alien hunting. Is life inevitable? What ... 04.09.10 | more >>

As a key leader of the Human Genome Project, Collins brings a unique perspective to the discussion of the promise and perils of genome-based medicine. His latest book presents an accessible and comprehensive assessment of genetic testing and its relevance to health care. Collins targets the general public. To begin, he gives a rudimentary overview of Genetics 101, then lightly touches on more ... 03.26.10 | more >>

Astronomers once had the most romantic job in science. Working alone atop a rickety telescope platform, the astronomer was like a sailor in a crow’s nest, unspooling the universe’s secrets by hand. But with advances in computers and the advent of space telescopes, it has become much easier to decode the cosmos from an air-conditioned office. In The Edge of Physics, Ananthaswamy shows that ... 03.26.10 | more >>