There's an army of tiny workers buzzing around our fields, helping our food grow. But over the past few decades, populations of bees and other insect pollinators have dropped precipitously. This looming "insect apocalypse" has many causes, from climate change to habitat loss, and it is already fueling malnutrition in some parts of the world.

One of the biggest factors in bee declines is industrial agriculture. "Big Ag" — with its emphasis on vast fields planted with a single crop, its heavy reliance on powerful pesticides, and its intensive use of commercial bee colonies to pollinate crops like almonds — reduces pollinator populations by killing and disorienting the insects, reducing their natural food sources, and leaving colony bees overworked and, therefore, prone to parasites like Varroa.

But industrial agriculture isn't the only force driving down bee populations. In her new book, "Bitter Honey: Big Ag's Threat to Bees and the Fight to Save Them" (Princeton University Press, 2026), writer and environmental researcher Jennie Durant takes a look at one surprising factor that may be hurting bees — and how new laws could protect these pollinators.

It's midsummer in Columbia, Maryland, and Janet Crouch's garden is in full bloom. It began in spring, when deep purple violets and bright yellow ragwort blossomed in April and early May. By midsummer, pink and purple-hued garden phlox emerged alongside scarlet bee balm, eventually giving way to Turk's cap lilies with their curled-back orange petals that dangle gracefully like bells. Pollinators creep and flutter throughout the garden, including bees and hummingbirds, moths and butterflies — and a host of other birds and insects.

It wasn't always like this. The yard was barren back in 1999, when Janet and her husband, Jeff, first bought their home. A solitary maple stood in the front yard, and a few nonnative barberry bushes flanked the house. Each property had a private lawn, but without fences, the yards blended into a seamless green expanse that bordered a fifty-acre county park forest. Over the years, the couple transformed their lawn into a lush pollinator garden.

Over time, the Crouches' yard became a sanctuary, especially for Jeff, a practicing therapist. "He'd come home from work, drop his keys, and head outside to see who was around," Janet said. "He'd check to see what new flower had bloomed, what butterfly or moth was in the yard, or spot a bird we hadn't seen before. It's become a huge, huge part of our lives." Sometimes, kids would even walk by and take an interest in the garden, and Jeff would pick them a flower.

But everything changed in 2017. The Crouches received a letter from their homeowners association (HOA), which they paid into biannually, that threatened to undo all the work they had poured into their garden. HOAs govern housing communities, from condominium complexes to suburban neighborhoods, and set rules for property maintenance and aesthetic standards.

An elected board of homeowners typically runs the HOA and collects fees to cover shared expenses like landscaping, common areas, and building maintenance. The first letter seemed harmless. It simply asked them to practice seasonal maintenance: mow the grass, trim overgrown plants, and tidy up. The Crouches worked with Janet's sister Nancy — a native plant gardener and advocate — to craft a response, explaining that the lawn was already mowed, and they were gardening ecologically, which meant things might look more natural than the typical lawn-centric yard.

Weeks passed without a reply. Then, just before Thanksgiving, the Crouches received a cease-and-desist notice from the HOA's attorney. They were given ten days to tear out their garden and replace it with turf grass or face legal action. By this point, the Crouches had tended their garden for seventeen years, so the thought of tearing it all out was gut-wrenching.

Instead, they hired an attorney, who argued that they hadn't broken any HOA rules because the community guidelines didn't address the type of garden they'd installed. Despite their tight deadline to get an attorney and craft a response, the Crouches heard nothing from the HOA for six months, leaving them in anxious limbo. When the HOA finally responded, it ignited a legal battle that drew the attention of state legislators and eventually changed Maryland law.

The Crouches were stunned by the HOA's reply: The board didn't just want them to do maintenance, they wanted them to pull out everything, including their pollinator gardens in the front and back. The Crouches were baffled — they'd never had any complaints about their garden until now.

Established in the 1970s, HOAs have a significant footprint in the United States: They govern millions of residential acres and house more than seventy-five million Americans, representing nearly 30 percent of the country's housing stock. HOAs offer a range of benefits for house and condo owners: They enforce rules and community standards; maintain shared amenities like parks, gyms, pools, and clubhouses; and foster a sense of community. Homes in HOA-governed communities often sell at a premium as well.

But the appeal of an HOA home is far from universal. The perks come with restrictions that often stifle a homeowner's freedom to manage their property as they wish. HOA boards can turn authoritarian, sparking conflicts with residents or fueling tensions between neighbors. Sky-high fees can trap homeowners, making it difficult to sell the house or keep up with payments, sometimes leading to legal trouble. It's no surprise that homeowners have mixed feelings about HOAs: A 2024 survey reported that nearly 60 percent of members had a negative view of their HOA.

While overtly abusive HOAs have made the news, their role in stifling pollinator gardens is less understood. It comes down to aesthetics: Many HOAs mandate manicured lawns and turf grass and dismiss pollinator gardens or wildflower meadows as messy, unruly, or unattractive. They tend to favor nonnative ornamental plants over native species to maintain a uniform, tidy look. The ornamentals are often chosen to match a landscaping style, signal status (nothing says wealth like a perfect row of hydrangeas), or simply because they're easier for the HOA's landscaping company to maintain.

But that manicured perfection comes at a cost. For pollinators, the mowed lawn is a food desert. Regular mowing prevents weeds like dandelions and clover from flowering and providing food. Lawns also replace diverse landscapes filled with wildflowers, shrubs, and native plants — the forage that pollinators evolved with over thousands of years and rely on for survival.

Lawns don't just deprive pollinators of food; they also eliminate their homes. More than 70 percent of native bee species nest in the ground, but manicured turf prevents bees from finding the loose, sandy soil they need to burrow. Mowing and trimming tall grass also strips away shelter for insects like butterflies and beetles. In pursuit of neatness, homeowners typically remove brush piles, leaf litter, tall grasses, or fallen logs — spaces pollinators might use as nests. Neighborhoods dominated by lawns fragment forage corridors and force pollinators to travel greater distances to find food, making survival even harder.

The pursuit of a pristine lawn also involves an arsenal of chemicals. Many of the same bee-toxic substances used in industrial agriculture — like neonics, organophosphates, and carbamates — are also sprayed on home lawns, gardens, and HOA common spaces. These chemicals affect plants, seep into the soil, and disrupt ecosystems. Healthy soil supports wild plants, insects, and fungi that benefit pollinators, but chemical lawn treatments can kill those beneficial insects and degrade soil health.

The Crouches received not only a cease-and-desist notice from their HOA but also threatening letters warning them not to garden in ways that might attract birds, as if birds were some kind of nuisance.

They soon discovered the HOA's attacks were driven by a complaint from their next-door neighbor. Instead of complaining to the Crouches directly so they could find a solution, he'd gone straight to the HOA. In September 2018, the Crouches and their neighbor had a contentious hearing before the HOA board, where the HOA's attorney argued that landscaping should only be for decoration, not wildlife habitat.

Many more months went by without a resolution, and then in 2019, the legal fight began in earnest. The Crouches sued the HOA board in August, citing a lack of actual violations, and the HOA countersued in November.

For many, this kind of fight might have soured the gardening experience altogether. But for Janet and Jeff, it only reinforced what they already knew: Their garden was about more than just aesthetics. It was a space of purpose, resilience, and joy. This helped fuel them throughout their ordeal.

The months that followed were rife with anxiety. As the lawsuit progressed into 2020, people drove by and took photographs of their lawn and garden, which made Janet feel exposed and overwhelmed. But still, it didn't deter them. "I don't like bullies, and we were being bullied in our own home," Janet said. "I just kept thinking about all the people who didn't have the capacity or resources I did, like my sister, who could provide suggestions and be an ear. I was more determined than ever to keep going."

Janet cast a wide net for support, turning to social media, local newspapers — anyone who could offer ideas or help spread the word. She attended environmental events to share her story and discuss the legal battle with her HOA.

Then, in October 2019, things started to turn in their favor. They got a call from Mary Catherine Cochran, the legislative assistant to their state representative, Terri Hill. Mary Catherine had an idea: Would Janet be interested in helping craft a law to stop HOAs from requiring turf grass lawns? By January of 2020, just months before the pandemic shut everything down, Nancy and several environmental groups joined Janet in Annapolis to provide testimony. The pandemic delayed their progress, but the bill eventually moved through both houses with overwhelming support — only two people voted against it.

On October 1, 2021, Maryland House Bill 332 was passed into law. Thanks to the bill, Maryland HOAs can no longer prohibit low impact landscaping, including pollinator gardens, rain gardens, and other environmentally beneficial practices. It was a massive victory for native plant and pollinator advocates throughout the state, and homeowners who hope to follow in the Crouches' footsteps.

The Maryland law set a precedent for other states as well: Maine passed a similar law in 2023 to create habitat for wildlife and pollinators by protecting low-impact landscaping. Illinois enacted the Garden Act in 2022 to support local gardens, followed by a Homeowners Native Landscaping Act in 2024 to allow gardeners in HOAs to plant native gardens.

The Maryland law's passage didn't happen in time to help the Crouches, who chose to settle with the HOA in December of 2020 rather than take the case to trial. Fortunately, the only concession they had to make — in addition to a jaw-dropping $60,000 in attorney's fees — was to keep their garden within a six-foot setback from the front property line and three feet from the neighbor's, the latter of which they'd already done.

Now that Janet and Jeff's battle is over, they can enjoy their yard and extend their efforts beyond their neighborhood. But their story highlights a simple truth: Individual actions can sometimes drive systemic change.

As the Crouches have shown, anyone, whether they have a sprawling yard, a small patch of land, or just a balcony, can take steps to support pollinators. A single garden might feel insignificant but small changes can rewrite laws, shift local norms, and transform ecosystems. If we rethink what a garden can be, we open the door to new possibilities — not just for pollinators, but for our landscapes and our connection to the natural world.

Over five decades ago, astronomer Frank Drake used one of Earth's largest radio antennas to beam a coded message into space, hoping that it might one day reach the eyes, ears or other inscrutable sensory organs of intelligent aliens. Slicing silently through the Milky Way at light speed, the now-famous Arecibo message has traveled roughly 50 light-years from Earth — about 10 times the distance to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, but only one-five-hundredth the way to its intended destination in the Hercules constellation.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a waiting game — but for radio astronomer Emma Chapman, an astrophysicist at the University of Nottingham, whether humans will ever make contact with extraterrestrial life isn't a question of if but when. The universe is too vast and too plentiful with planets for humanity to be the only game in town, Chapman writes in her new book, "The Echoing Universe: How Radio Astronomy Helps Us See the Invisible Cosmos" (Basic Books, 2026). And when we do hear from our hypothetical alien neighbors, radio astronomers will be the first to know.

In this excerpt from Chapman's book, she tells us the intriguing story of Drake's message to the stars, the initial fears that it would awaken the attention of "malevolent or hungry" aliens, and why the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is still so valuable today.

During public lectures, I'm often asked, "Do you think aliens exist?"

I am always a little taken aback, as is the audience, when they hear my emphatic answer: "Absolutely. I have no doubts at all."

My surprise comes about because, as a radio astronomer, I have no doubt that life is out there, and I sometimes forget that there can even be a question about the matter.

There is little controversy amongst astronomers, not since the avalanche of exoplanet observations showed us that it was only a matter of time before we found Earth 2.0. Even if habitable worlds are scarce or the emergence of life is rare, the sheer number of planets in the Milky Way, let alone the universe, makes it implausible to think we are alone.

I am not engaging here in a willful misunderstanding of what we mean by "alien." When I say I believe there are aliens, I mean intelligent, complex lifeforms, not just basic, microbial life.

The audience is often silent for a beat after I have answered, not expecting such certainty. People expect heated debate over the question of alien life, I think, because there is a conflation, even in the scientific world, between a belief in alien life and a belief in UFOs, or alien abductions. "Have aliens visited our planet?" is a fundamentally different question, and one which I can answer just as emphatically: "Absolutely not. I have no doubts at all."

There is no evidence for interference by extraterrestrial life on Earth. No aliens building the pyramids, no UFOs creating intricate crop circles, and no secret government cover-ups. Many UFO sightings turn out to be Venus gleaming on the horizon, optical illusions or simply shaky camera work. One only needs note how UFO sightings have not increased in line with smartphone ownership and the ability to capture supposed otherworldly events. These claims belong firmly in the realm of conspiracy theories.

SETI, however, stands apart as a rigorous, science-based pursuit, almost exclusively led by radio astronomers. For SETI researchers, the question isn't whether life exists elsewhere ‪—‬ we take that as a given. We want to make contact. We want to find out where these aliens live and communicate with them across the light-years, using radio telescopes as our telephone.

Frank Drake makes the call

In 1974, Frank Drake was the director of the Arecibo Observatory. Drake lived and breathed SETI, and he had become impatient at the pace of the search. SETI is passive. It is about listening and intercepting signals that extraterrestrial life has sent, purposefully or not. Drake wanted to take the initiative, to beam a message out ourselves. And so, METI (messaging extraterrestrial intelligence) was born.

Drake decided to send his signal using the 305-meter dish's antenna as the transmitter, at a

celebration honouring the recent renovation of the dish.

The message consisted of 1,679 binary digits, each representing one of two possible values. Frank Drake envisaged encoding a picture in this way, much like a "paint by numbers" canvas. A radio tone at one wavelength would indicate a solid square, while a tone at a second wavelength would represent an empty square.

Since the message would be transmitted as a long sequence of radio bursts, the challenge for any receiving extraterrestrial intelligence would be to determine how to arrange this list into a meaningful 2D image. The image contains a wealth of information: heavily pixellated diagrams of a human and the Arecibo dish, for example, along with a representation of our Solar System, and the major chemical elements making up our DNA.

Drake selected the number 1,679 deliberately because it is a prime number and also the product of two other primes: 23 and 73. Prime numbers are significant within mathematics, and Drake hoped that any intelligent beings receiving the flow of data would experiment with reshaping the sequence in configurations involving these primes. If they did so, they would discover the intended image, unlocking the deeper meaning of the message.

Drake also converted the message into audio, allowing the audience gathered next to the dish in the Puerto Rican jungle to listen in real time as the two-toned signal was broadcast into space. For three minutes, Earth transmitted a signal 10 million times brighter than our radio sun, making us unmistakably visible to any extraterrestrial intelligence with their own Arecibo within the target area.

I've listened to the signal myself. The "Moonlight Sonata" it certainly is not, but if you close your eyes and reflect on the poignancy of us announcing our presence to the cosmos, it's deeply moving, and I can only imagine it brought a tear to the eye of more than one person in the crowd.

The message was aimed at M13, a dense cluster of stars (and presumably planets) about 21,000 light-years away, in the Hercules constellation. This system was chosen partly for the press release optics of its dense population of potential life-bearing star systems, but mostly because it was above the dish at the time of the ceremony. Awkwardly, by the time the Drake signal reaches the intended coordinates, M13 may have drifted out of the way of the tight beam of the signal. The act was symbolic but still, the first intended message is out there, and we cannot undo it now.

By the time the 1974 ceremony lunch was over, that signal had reached the orbit of Pluto, and by now it is over fifty light-years away, about as far from us as 51 Pegasi b, the first exoplanet to be discovered around a sun-like star.

"Malevolent or hungry" aliens

Drake did this all without needing anyone's permission, and many saw his act as setting a dangerous precedent. Why should the decision to contact alien life be autocratic when any risk is shared by everyone on the planet? England's Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Ryle, reacted with scathing letters to the International Astronomical Union demanding a ban on any future messages, since "for all we know, any creatures out there might be malevolent ‪—‬ or hungry,"

Drake and, by this time, the majority of SETI scientists considered the argument moot. Electromagnetic radiation has been escaping Earth's atmosphere since radio and television were invented.

Whether we're at risk of invasion depends on two things: first, whether they manage to develop interstellar travel, and second, whether they decide such an endeavour is worth the colossal energy cost. Imagine our own situation ‪—‬ would humanity, in the midst of an energy crisis, unite to devote gargantuan resources into building and launching an interstellar colonisation fleet?

In his excellent book "Is Anyone Out There?" Frank Drake makes his position clear: "If I believed the ETs would come out of the sky, I wouldn't bother. I would just sit outside in a lawn chair and wait for them to show up." I am inclined to agree.

Far more likely than any invasion is contact by radio signal. In that case, my hunch is that, once the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence is confirmed, it would then quickly settle into the background of everyday life. After all, aliens have long been a fixture of our entertainment culture ‪—‬ we are primed to accept their existence.

In addition, the news cycle relating to any "conversation" would simply be too long for it to capture the popular imagination even sporadically. TRAPPIST-1, for example, is just over forty light-years away and a message sent there today will not receive a reply for eighty years ‪—‬ more like opening a letter from your grandmother's pen pal than having a lively chat.

For decades, the value of SETI has sparked lively debate among scientists, politicians, policymakers, journalists. Yet, despite harsh budget cuts and scepticism, SETI persists. Our longing to answer the question of whether we are alone in the universe burns so brightly in some that they dedicate their lives to the search, fully aware that only future generations may uncover the truth.

Whatever form that life takes, we know how we can expect to be contacted, because the laws of physics do not vary across the galaxy. Whether that planet has a yellow-green sky, whether it has five moons, or its people five legs, radio waves will be the form of light that is used for long- distance communication.

Perhaps, forty light-years away and forty years ago, a little green person on TRAPPIST-1 e switched on a shiny radio telescope and began to send messages towards the star systems all around, crossing all twenty fingers that someone out there would hear them. Perhaps one day we'll turn our dishes towards TRAPPIST-1, and tune in just as that alien message reaches us. It could be in a hundred years. It could be tomorrow. Until that fateful day, we look at the stars, we wait and we listen.

Excerpted from "The Echoing Universe: How Radio Astronomy Helps Us See the Invisible Cosmos," by Emma Chapman. Copyright © 2026 by Emma Chapman. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group Inc.

Our species, Homo sapiens, is the most geographically diverse of all primate species, permanently living on every continent except Antarctica. We have achieved this through our unprecedented ability to develop adaptations that increase the odds of surviving and producing in different environments.

Highly localized adaptations, like those that enable people to survive at high altitude, arise when there's a sustained environmental pressure driving the need to produce new biological solutions, Herman Pontzer, a professor of evolutionary anthropology and global health at Duke University, previously told Live Science.

In his new book, "Adaptable: How Your Unique Body Really Works and Why Our Biology Unites Us" (Penguin Random House, 2025), Pontzer explores the science of this human adaptability and diversity, and why it's essential to get these facts straight. In this extract, Pontzer looks at how our throats changed to enable speech, and how different populations have adapted to survive in environments where breathing is tricky.

The sophistication and control of the heart and lungs can make the system seem like a jewel of evolutionary perfection. But evolution is a tinkerer, a junkyard mechanic solving problems with the materials at hand. Trade-offs and limitations are inevitable. Just ask Jimi Hendrix.

Hendrix was a guitarist of otherworldly talent who revolutionized rock music in the 1960s. He was also an avid participant in the recreational chemistry of the era, indulging heavily in a range of legal and illicit pharmaceuticals. On September 18, 1970, in a hotel in London, after taking roughly eighteen times the recommended dose of sleeping pills after an evening of drinking, Hendrix died. But while the drugs were certainly responsible for his death, it wasn’t the chemicals per se that killed him. Instead, having passed out and vomited from the massive overdose, Hendrix fell victim to a much more common killer. He choked.

Humans are uniquely vulnerable to choking. More than five thousand die that way each year in the U.S. alone. Other species don't have this problem, which is fundamentally a plumbing issue. Your larynx (also called a voice box) is the doorway to your lungs. It's a stiff cartilage cylinder that can be closed off at the top by two fleshy lips called vocal folds and a flapping lid called an epiglottis. The human larynx sits in a precarious position, low in the throat, practically begging to be clogged with every bite of food or gulp of water. Why would evolution favor such a dangerous position for the larynx, threatening our breathing and access to oxygen, when every other animal (including our ape relatives) has theirs sensibly tucked up high and out of the way, behind their nose?

It turns out the dumb position of our larynx is the result of evolutionary tinkering to our breathing system to produce language. The sound of your voice is produced by squeezing air through your larynx with the vocal folds pushed together. This is similar to the way a trumpet player makes a ptbtptpbptptp! noise by pushing air through their pursed lips (what I'd call a raspberry and my children insist is a fart sound). The puff puff puff of air that escapes becomes pressure waves that travel through the air, which our ears register as sound. Higher or lower notes are achieved by pulling the vocal folds tighter or relaxing them. (Testosterone thickens the vocal folds, which is why men tend to have lower voices.)

You form that sound into vowels by manipulating the shapes of your mouth and throat, and cut it into consonants with your teeth, tongue, and lips. The low position of the larynx makes this possible. If it's higher up, at the same level with the nostrils as we see in other apes, you could make noise, but the ability to shape that sound into words would be severely limited. That's why it's nearly impossible to get a dog, chimpanzee, or other mammal to form speech-like words. They can still communicate, of course, with a bark or a grunt, but the rich sonic landscape of human language is out of reach.

Our ancestors were so social, so cooperative, that the evolutionary benefits of better communication outweighed the increased risk of choking to death. Choking is the price we pay for the ability to speak.

Other adaptations to our breathing and circulatory systems come at a cost as well. When we travel into the mountains, we're faced with the challenge of extracting enough oxygen from the high-altitude air. The evolved solution is to produce more red blood cells. When the liver and kidneys sense low oxygen concentrations in the blood, they produce the hormone EPO [erythropoietin], which stimulates the bone marrow to crank out more red blood cells. (That's why some endurance athletes cheat with EPO injections — it gives them extra red blood cells and oxygen-carrying capacity.) It's a good solution, but it increases the ratio of cells to water in the blood, making it slightly thicker. That, in turn, can cause altitude sickness, which typically involves headaches and nausea, but can progress to dangerous and even fatal fluid buildup in the lungs and brain.

Native populations in the Andes, the highest mountain range in South America, live with elevated red blood cell counts their entire lives. They have larger lungs and rib cages as well, through what appears to be a combination of genetic adaptations for increased air exchange and the environmental pressures of growing up at high altitude. But while a number of genetic adaptations to altitude have been identified in Andean groups, they still struggle with altitude sickness. Approximately 15 percent of adults experience chronic mountain sickness. The physiological solution to low oxygen levels carries a steep price for many.

Intriguingly, altitude sickness isn't as much of an issue for native high-altitude communities in the Himalayan Mountains of Asia. Himalayan and Andean populations are descended from different lowland groups thousands of miles and thousands of years apart. Their movements into the mountains were completely independent, and the adaptations they evolved solved the same set of challenges, but in different ways.

Himalayan populations carry a particular allele [version] of a gene called EPAS1 that's involved in the production of red blood cells. This Himalayan allele has the effect of keeping EPO levels and red blood cell numbers low, allowing people to live with the chronic stresses of altitude without developing mountain sickness. This solution comes with its own downsides, as it also means their ability to carry oxygen is limited, but other adaptations in their vessels and breathing rate maintain oxygen delivery throughout the body.

Even more remarkable than the Himalayan EPAS1 allele is the story of how they got it. As our ancestors spread out across Africa and then Eurasia over the past two hundred thousand years or so, they encountered other closely related humanlike species, like Neanderthals in the Near East and Europe. And, like humans everywhere throughout history, some of our ancestors weren't particularly picky, and slept with them.

Our species were so genetically similar that these couplings produced fertile children, hybrids of our species and others. (Some would argue that we should consider Neanderthals and other groups human because of this ability to interbreed — a semantic argument that's fun to have over drinks with an anthropologist.) We can find the genetic evidence of these affairs scattered around our genome today, fragments of DNA from other species that allow retail genetics companies to calculate how much Neanderthal DNA you carry, for example. I'm a bit less than 2 percent Neanderthal, genomically speaking.

Most of these fragments don't have any impact on how our bodies function — they're just mementos from our ancestor's wild affairs, like misspelled tattoos from some Paleolithic spring break, and a reminder that humans will sleep with just about anything. Using the distinction we discussed in the last chapter, these alleles would be considered neutral.

The Himalayan EPAS1 allele is a clear exception. That allele appears to have entered the human gene pool through a Paleolithic tryst with a group called the Denisovans, somewhere in Asia, roughly fifty thousand years ago. For tens of thousands of years it was just there in the mix, a neutral allele that had no strong effect on survival or reproduction. But around nine thousand years ago, as some of those populations started pushing farther and farther up into the mountains, that allele proved to be advantageous. Those with the Denisovan variant for EPAS1 were free from altitude sickness, and better able to thrive and raise families in the high mountains. It went from neutral to local and became the predominant allele in Himalayan populations, the adaptive EPAS1 allele we see in virtually everyone native to the Himalayas today.

Another remarkable case of local cardiovascular adaptation was discovered just recently, in a population known as the Sama (also called the Bajau). The Sama live on houseboats in the ocean around the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, spending nearly all of their lives at sea. Theirs is a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but in the ocean: they spearfish and collect food in the depths, sometimes more than two hundred feet below the surface, swimming or using weights to hold themselves down as they walk the seafloor. Like many Indigenous groups, their lifestyle is rapidly changing, but traditionally they could spend four or five hours per day underwater, foraging. It's a lifestyle they appear to have maintained for thousands of years.

Life spent partially underwater poses similar oxygen-delivery challenges as life in the mountains. One evolutionarily ancient response to diving, common among mammals, is to contract the spleen, an organ the shape of a child's slipper tucked up high in the left side of your abdomen, beside your stomach. The spleen is a monitoring station for the immune system, a spongelike organ that checks the blood for bacteria and other nasties. Since it's normally full of blood, it's essentially a reserve tank of red blood cells. When you dive into cold water, the spleen contracts, ejecting its payload of red blood cells to help oxygenate the rest of your body. If you train breath-holding, your spleen will grow to do this job more effectively. High-mountain groups, like those in the Himalayas, have larger spleens than lowlanders, apparently from a combination of genetic adaptation and a life spent at altitude.

Natural selection has favored an allele of the PDE10A gene that increases spleen size in the Sama, with nearly double the average volume for those carrying two copies of the allele compared to those with none. Other diving-response genes appear to be under selection in this population as well. Environment still matters — all that breath-holding also helps them increase the size of their spleens. But it's a clear case of genetic adaptation, with natural selection responding to a consistent, strong, and localized challenge in the Sama population.

Excerpted from Adaptable: How Your Unique Body Really Works and Why Our Biology Unites Us (Penguin Random House, 2025)

Win-win interactions can be found across nature. These relationships, known as mutualisms, involve members of different species working together for a mutual benefit.

But relationships between two species can change over time, with those starting out as mutualistic potentially evolving into parasite-host relationships, Rob Dunn, a professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University, previously told Live Science.

In his book "The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us About How to Live Well With the Rest of Life" (Hachette Book Group, 2025), Dunn explores a common human-animal relationship that may force us to rethink mutualisms altogether: our relationship with cats. In this extract, Dunn looks at the origins of our connection to our feline friends, and why, on the face of it, cats could be considered "parasites of human societies, at least from a Darwinian perspective."

As we think about the ways we measure our mutualisms, it is worth considering cats. Domestic cats, house cats, under the table and on the table, cats are everywhere and we take them for granted, but what exactly do we get out of our partnership with them?

As far as I know, cats are no longer worshiped as gods. Yet they are also not our mutualists. Superficially they seem to be parasites of human societies, at least from a Darwinian perspective. They benefit from us at the cost of the food we provide to them. The collective weight of domestic cats exceeds that of African savannah elephants. And Americans alone give 15 billion calories' worth of food to house cats each day — much of it meat — roughly as many calories as would be consumed by humans in New York City in a day.

We feed them tuna; like royalty, they dine on the ocean's top predators. In exchange, what do we get back?

I concede in advance that I attempt to answer this question with trepidation. The conclusion I come to may require us to broaden our conception of what the terms of mutualism can be; they definitely require us to rethink what a cat is.

Today, hundreds of millions of house cats live with humans around the world. More than 70 million house cats can be found in the United States alone — 70 million meowing, purring, clawing beings — one cat for every four adult humans.

There have never before been so many felids [members of the cat family] on Earth. Globally, there are probably about half a billion cats, though no one has a great count. We have replaced nearly all the wild carnivorous felines of the world — tigers, lions, jaguars, and leopards — with domestic cats. Where once we feared jaguars, we are now confronted by beings we deign to give names like Edgar Allen Paw, Copurrnicus, and, all too often, Mr. Whiskers.

These household cats are all the descendants of the African or Libyan wildcat, Felis silvestris lybica. African wildcats are, and have long been, native to both North Africa and to the Levant. Their range bumps against that of European wildcats, Felis silvestris silvestris, in Turkey. As humans began to farm and store grain, African wildcats began to move into small agricultural human settlements. Once there, they ate mice and rats. They may also have eaten the snakes that ate those rodents (as highlighted in Egyptian art and, later, writing).

Studies led by the Italian cat geneticist Claudio Ottoni of the DNA present in the bones of cats found in archaeological sites have so far been unable to discover any evidence that the earliest African wildcats living with humans were genetically different from their wild-living ancestors and relatives. Their genes seem to have been nearly the same, or maybe simply the same.

At least early in cat-​human relationships, their bones were the same. The early village and city cats appear to have been the same African wildcat, simply living in closer proximity to humans. Species with this habit are sometimes called "synanthropes," which denotes nothing more than co‑occurrence, living with (syn) humans (anthrope). These cats living with humans had learned to act tame around humans, just as the humans had learned to act tame around them, most of the time.

"Tameness" is a vague word. Biologists use it to express a kind of mutual tolerance between a nonhuman animal species and humans. It comes from an ancient Indo-​European word meaning "to subdue." This root, though, is deceptive. Most tame species either have traits that lead them to behave tamely, as is the case in many island species long naive to large predators, or they choose to be tame, to walk into our worlds without menace. To be tame is to come in peace.

After walking into human cities, the partially or fully tame human-associated wildcats spread with agricultural societies. By 9,500 years ago, wildcats had arrived in places they could not get to without the help of humans. Wildcats are not native to Cyprus. Yet, they arrived. A 9,500-​year-​burial on the island of Cyprus includes an eight-​month-​old cat carefully prepared for the afterlife alongside a human. How? Ancient cats are unlikely to have engaged in long swims on their own (if you doubt this assertion, try to bathe a feral cat). Wild but tame cats were ushered/ferried/carried here and there by humans. It is likely that their human chauffeurs were scratched in the process.

In early settlements, cats and humans were friends with mutual benefits, regardless of whether either exerted any control over the other and whether either partner changed, evolutionarily, relative to the other. It was a mutualism at paw's length. The cats benefited from the messiness of humans and from the effects of that messiness on rodents. The humans benefited from the control cats could exert over rodent populations.

Today, most domesticated cats do not prey upon rats. But reports of early Egyptian cats suggest that they might have been larger than modern domestic cats. At least one Roman archaeological site in Egypt records a gluttonous cat with the bones of six rats in its stomach. In good years, the consumption of rodents, big and small, by cats might have been a kind of pleasantness for humans ("Ah, fewer mice"). In years when food was short, it likely saved lives. It also may have saved lives when diseases carried by rodents, or the fleas upon them, killed humans — diseases such as the plague. Later, cats also played a heightened role on ships, where mice and rats were gloriously abundant and where grain was a precious and relatively scarce commodity.

Where scholars of cat domestication — yes, there are a few, though they'd fit at a long dinner table — begin to differ is whether the predation of cats on mice, rats, and snakes continued to matter as human settlements grew ever larger. This is a subject that could be partially addressed through mathematical models.

I hypothesize that in small settlements in the ancient Levant, or, later, in Mesopotamia, cats were probably successful in reducing the abundance of mice, and maybe rats, and so, too, their negative effects. But in big urban centers, such as those that emerged with the New Kingdom period in Egypt (1600 BCE), grain was being stored in immense quantities. Where there were whole buildings full of grain, in cities practically spilling over with grain, it seems unlikely that one could keep enough cats around the grain for the cats to matter.

It would have taken hundreds or even thousands of cats milling around the granary, meowing and acting pissy. It is entirely possible, then, that as early grain-​based settlements grew, the functional role of cats in rodent and snake control decreased.

It is in this very period that cats began to appear in new forms in Egyptian art. By 3,500 years ago, cats were no longer shown hunting. Instead, they lurked under tables or chairs, often alongside powerful Egyptian women. As Claudio Ottoni pointed out to me, typically, these "under-​chair" cats were leashed, perhaps an indication that they may have been tame but not yet so docile as to pose unrestrained for an artist. The under-​chair cats seem to indicate that as the human-cat relationship persisted, new kinds of bonds were forming, bonds that no longer related simply to the role of cats in controlling pests. But why?

The technology sounds like it's been plucked from a science-fiction film — but it's all too real.

A number of companies now offer prospective parents the chance to "score" embryos fertilized through in vitro fertilization (IVF), based on the embryos' genetic profiles. This technology, called polygenic embryo selection, uses genetics to predict the likelihood that a given trait or disease will manifest in a baby-to-be. In theory, the technology could be leveraged to lower a child's risk of diseases with strong genetic components. But there are lingering questions about how well it works and whether it could deepen existing health disparities between groups.

Bioethicist Daphne Martschenko and sociologist Sam Trejo explore some of these questions in this excerpt from their book "What We Inherit: How New Technologies and Old Myths Are Shaping Our Genomic Future" (Princeton University Press, 2026).

For most traits and diseases, companies offering polygenic embryo selection are currently selling consumers little more than snake oil. However, in the coming decades, the accuracy of polygenic scores will likely improve. These improvements in accuracy will mean that a wider range of characteristics will become viable targets for polygenic embryo selection, raising a host of concerns. Among them, first and foremost is the potential exacerbation and, worse still, biological reification of structural inequality that could come from unequal access to the technology.

If the United States continues on its current path, polygenic embryo selection will only be available to those with enough money to afford IVF and will — at least for a time — be most effective in individuals of European ancestries. The high costs of IVF are prohibitively expensive for working- and middle-class Americans. A single cycle of IVF costs between $15,000 and $20,000 — and, at present, most couples undergoing IVF go through three or four cycles to be successful, with extra costs incurred to freeze embryos or use donor eggs. (However, because these couples are typically experiencing infertility, the extent to which these figures generalize the broader American population of prospective parents is uncertain.) Private health insurance coverage of IVF is typically limited and varies across states and employers. Medicaid, the public health insurance offered to low-income families in the United States, does not cover IVF at all.

Polygenic embryo selection only introduces further additional costs; Genomic Prediction, for instance, charges $1,000 per embryo analyzed, and Orchid Health charges $2,500. Heliospect charges up to $50,000 to test 100 embryos. If the status quo continues and polygenic embryo selection remains unregulated, then unequal access to the technology will cause structural inequality to grow. The racial and socioeconomic disparities of the world, both past and present, are not the result of systematic DNA differences across groups. If polygenic embryo selection continues to expand unchecked, then the frightening possibility exists that a new source of racial and economic structural inequality that is, in part, genetically produced will emerge.

As an example, consider health disparities. Because of the portability problem, polygenic embryo selection has decreased effectiveness in non-European ancestries. If, in the coming years, the use of the technology grows, those of non-European ancestries, like Pacific Islander Americans, will largely be excluded from any health benefits that embryo selection provides. Pacific Islander Americans (such as those from Guam or Samoa) are largely of Oceanian ancestries and occupy a unique portion of the Family Tree. They tend to have higher rates of diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease than White Americans — the Centers for Disease Control lists colonialism, poverty, and inadequate access to healthy foods, among other things, as key factors contributing to this disparity. However, if polygenic embryo selection continues to be less effective for Pacific Islander Americans, then this community could one day have systematically higher genetic risk for chronic health conditions than White Americans with European genetic ancestry, further worsening existing health disparities between Pacific Islander Americans and White Americans.

Imagine a similar dynamic playing out in educational settings. Today, children from working-class families are nearly twice as likely to not graduate from high school compared with children from upper-class families. Imagine how this disparity would grow if upper-class families (but not working-class families) were able to afford and utilize polygenic embryo selection to decrease the rate that their children suffered from learning disabilities, such as dyslexia and ADHD. Existing educational disparities between upper-class and lower-class American children would only worsen with disparate access to polygenic technologies.

Perhaps most concerning, if unequal access to embryo selection were to create class or racial disparities in genetic risk, then these differences would be passed onto future generations — potentially even compounding and accumulating over time. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray were dead wrong in 1994 when they wrote in "The Bell Curve" that genetic differences have naturally emerged between the American rich and poor or between White and Black Americans.

However, if care is not exercised, genetic differences between groups of people may emerge artificially through technologies like polygenic embryo selection. Troublingly, even the inaccurate and ineffective polygenic embryo selection that is occurring in the United States right now could spur the formation of new myths about group differences in genetic risk. The outsized power of genetic myths highlights how even just the perception that polygenic embryo selection has produced genetic differences between groups could become a problem in and of itself. In other words, if people believe that children born via polygenic embryo selection are materially dif­ferent from (or better than) children born without it, they may treat them differently — regardless of whether an actual difference exists. Scholars have shown that people can use the idea of genetic difference to disguise underlying racist, classist, and sexist attitudes.

Though concerns about polygenic embryo selection abound, it is important to also consider the potential upsides. Remember Sam's experiences with nerve damage and chronic pain from the previous chapter? A person's risk for chronic pain is meaningfully influenced by their DNA, and Sam's mom, Nina, has also suffered from sometimes debilitating chronic pain for most of her life. Being in pain is not a relative trait; one person hurting less is not inherently accompanied by another person hurting more. In a world where polygenic scores are accurate for individuals across the entire Family Tree, polygenic embryo selection could help reduce the rate of chronic pain in future generations. In such a world, Sam would have a hard time justifying a policy that prevented parents from accessing such a technology (and would even consider using it himself). The looming challenge is figuring out for which traits and under what circumstances polygenic embryo selection is and is not permissible.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.

In his book "One Hand Clapping: Unraveling the Mystery of the Human Mind" (Prometheus/Swift Press, 2025), New York University neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin traces the evolution of human consciousness. He starts the story with the emergence of the first DNA on Earth and then highlights key evolutionary landmarks that paved the way to us — namely, modern-day humans. In the following excerpt, Kukushkin describes the "social brain hypothesis," which posits that human intelligence arose, in part, to help us keep track of our increasingly complex social groups.

What made us human

In the past, many explanations of human uniqueness focused on what gave us the ability to become as intelligent as we are, rather than why we would want to be so intelligent. We often take it for granted that intelligence is what every animal obviously wants, and we just figured out a better evolutionary path toward it. One classic explanation for this involves, for example, walking on two legs, caused by a transition from trees to grasslands, which freed the hands from climbing and allowed us to do more complicated things. Another explanation focuses on our increasingly meat-based diet, which allowed for larger brain sizes. These factors certainly played critical roles in allowing us to become who we are. But they alone don't necessarily explain what is so good about being intelligent in the first place. We just assume that to be self-evident.

I think it's a bit of a self-serving assumption, like jellyfish wondering why no one else has managed to evolve stinging cells. We like to believe that we somehow won evolution — a notion we discussed in chapter 3 when talking about complexity and perfection. We have this image of an ape standing up, picking up a stick, and being rewarded for this achievement with a massive brain.

But the truth is, intelligence comes at a price, and for many species, the benefits just aren't worth it. A brain such as our own takes prodigious amounts of energy away from a body already burning through its fuel: a gram of brain tissue uses ten times the amount of nutrients as an average gram of the human body. Besides, a bigger brain is heavier and easier to damage. So there are considerable evolutionary costs to an enlarged brain. For any given species, these costs eventually outweigh the diminishing returns of brain enlargement. All brains have an evolutionary stage at which they are large enough. If a double-sized brain provided rhinos with a survival advantage, over millions of years their brain would have certainly doubled in size — you have to have very little awareness of evolutionary history to believe that we alone cracked some code that eluded everybody for eons. For rhinos, there wasn't any extra advantage in larger brains, so their brains turned out just as they did. The question is not why humans succeeded where others failed — as we tend to think — but why we needed supercomputers when others were fine with calculators.

There's an interesting pattern that may explain it. If you measure the size of the cerebral cortex — the brain's "machine of understanding"— in different primate species relative to the rest of their brain and plot it against the number of group members typical for each of those species, the two numbers fall on a straight line: the more members, the bigger the cortex. Humans are number one on both accounts — our cortex is the largest relative to the rest of the brain, as is our typical group size, estimated around 150 — that's the number of people in a typical hunter-gatherer society and a typical cap on the number of active social acquaintances that we moderns can maintain. For example, corporate organizations often naturally fragment into units of about 150 people.

Why would that be? This is far from a resolved question, but the proponents of the so-called social brain hypothesis say that reason is that social behavior is a uniquely demanding task, putting unprecedented strain on our brain's capacities. All mammals, to some extent, use their brain as a mirror, understanding others' behavior by modeling it inside their own mind. But primates, whose defensive groups swell into the tens and even hundreds, had to contend with tens and hundreds of these complex, interconnected models of other group members — their personalities, their emotions, their mutual relationships — which one of them did what to whom at what point and so on, a tremendous trove of complex data that we, humans, take to be as natural as eating dinner but that would befuddle even the smartest non-primate. In short, the social brain hypothesis states that social life is what pushed us to become intelligent.

The way this explanation differs from others is by offering an incentive rather than simply means to achieve it: yes, free hands, meat diet, and many other factors made our brain possible, but the reason we needed it in the first place was to remember all our friends who helped us fight monsters.

As cheesy as it sounds, I think about it all the time. There have been many different fables told about the birth of the human species: that it was work that made us human (this was the communist narrative — an ape picking up a tool) or maybe that it was violence (this is the narrative from "2001: A Space Odyssey" — an ape picking up a weapon). Those were not just scientific theories — they were origin stories, as important for a modern mind to make sense of itself as myths were to an ancient mind. An origin story is told to explain what you are really about, and in doing so, it doesn't simply describe the past but provides a template for the present. If you are about work, then work is the pillar on which your life should naturally stand. If you are about violence, then there is no sense trying to avoid it. But the more we learn about ourselves, the clearer it becomes that we are really about others. Our entire essence is to carry tens and even hundreds of peers inside our brains, to navigate the vicissitudes of their emotions and relationships, to derive both meaning and joy from living life together. It has long been recognized, for example, that happiness depends far less on individual well-being than on the richness of social contacts. Social life has a profound effect on us, and not just mentally but physically: for example, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which began in 1938 and tracked hundreds of people for several decades, famously showed that close relationships are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes. Too often, modern lives let us forget a firmly established fact: friends are worth living for. The social brain hypothesis puts an origin story behind this simple truth.

It also puts the birth of our species in a broader context. Our brains started swelling in size long before the first Homo sapiens. All primates share the relationship between group size and the cerebral cortex, which means that it always took a large brain to handle many peers.

And that, in turn, means that sooner or later, something like a human was inevitable.

When eukaryotes first started extracting energy from other organisms, this set the trajectory toward the human species — eventually there was bound to be someone who could control fire and even nuclear fission. There's something similar that the social brain hypothesis points to, at the deepest level. Once primates were swept in a drive to enlarge their groups and brains, eventually there was bound to be someone with groups large enough and with brains advanced enough to start talking to each other, inventing symbols and abstract categories — and from that, finally, there was bound to arise some form of culture, art, and civilization.

It is this final essence — an abstract, symbolic language passed from person to person by cultural transmission — that completes the design of a human being that we had seen gradually crystallize over billions of years. But to understand why language was so important for our species, we must now take a detour. Most books about human evolution begin right about here and proceed through the past few million years to the present, during which apes gradually evolved into several species of Homo, of which today only one survives — the "wise" one, or sapiens. But our quest instead takes us inward, into the human brain, into the sea of electrical signals pulsing through this astounding machine that runs our conscious minds.

A recently analyzed medieval codex covered in furry sealskin may be the oldest surviving book from Norway. The small Christian songbook was likely made around A.D. 1200 and passed down through several generations of a Norwegian farming family.

Known as the Hagenes codex after the family who owned it, the book consists of two double leaves of parchment bound in sealskin with visible traces of fur still attached, according to a statement from the National Library of Norway.

The text inside the book is written in Latin and contains eight medieval liturgical chants with musical notation; one is a song for Mary, and another celebrates All Saints' Day, a feast day that honors saints who don't have their own remembrance day. Several pages appear to be missing. According to the Hagenes family, the book likely originally belonged to a church or monastery.

The handwritten script is "unusually rustic," according to the National Library. "Its irregular execution and the simple, home-made binding point towards a Norwegian craftsman working with local materials," Chiara Palandri, a conservator at the National Library of Norway, said in the statement. Additionally, Palandri told Science Norway that the leather strap that was wrapped around the book may have been made from reindeer skin.

"This book feels incredibly authentic," Åslaug Ommundsen, a medieval Latin professor at the University of Bergen, told Science Norway. "It's the kind of thing a priest or cantor would carry to use in church."

Sealskin binding — complete with tiny hairs still sticking out — is unique in medieval Norway, according to the National Library, but it has been seen on rare occasions in other parts of Scandinavia.

For example, a recent DNA study of dozens of medieval book bindings from the 12th and 13th centuries revealed that several "hairy books" produced by Cistercian monks in France were bound in sealskin. That study also showed that the skins were from harbor, harp and bearded seals from a diverse geographic area that included Scandinavia, Denmark, Scotland, and either Greenland or Iceland. These sealskins traveled along 13th-century trading routes and ended up in England and Belgium, possibly as tithes from the Norse after the Viking Age had ended.

But the Hagenes codex looks different from these continental examples, according to Palandri, which suggests it was made locally.

While microscopic examination of the Hagenes codex revealed the book binding to be sealskin, additional analysis is planned to explore the origin of the leather and parchment and to narrow down the date the book was made, according to the National Library. These analyses will confirm whether the codex is indeed the oldest surviving book from Norway.

"If the manuscript truly was made here, it would be the only known medieval Norwegian book bound in sealskin," Palandri said. "It looks very simple, but that's exactly what makes it extraordinary — it preserves traces of early bookmaking practices that have vanished elsewhere."

Months before COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic, public health leaders were poring over the early data coming out of China and preparing for the worst.

Dr. Seth Berkley — a renowned infectious-disease epidemiologist and former CEO of Gavi, an international organization aimed at improving children's vaccine access — was among those leaders. In January 2020, Berkley and colleagues were working to establish an infrastructure so that, if and when scientists created vaccines for this novel virus, the shots wouldn't be hoarded by high-income countries and denied to poor nations.

Now, Berkley has released a new book — "Fair Doses: An Insider's Story of the Pandemic and the Global Fight for Vaccine Equity" (University of California Press, 2025) — that recounts how that initiative unfolded and what lessons were learned through the process, while underscoring why the broader fight for vaccine equity is far from finished.

On January 23, 2020, I was high up in the Swiss Alps in Davos, attending the World Economic Forum (WEF). I was at Davos as the CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, the largest purchaser of vaccines in the world and which worked to provide new and underutilized vaccines to children in developing countries — countries in which about half the world's children live. As usual, I was preoccupied with how we could do a better job protecting the world with vaccines for new and old diseases. And there were murmurs of a new epidemic of respiratory disease caused by a novel coronavirus in China on the horizon.

At the bar of the Hard Rock Hotel my wife, Cynthia [an academic physician and consultant], and I met with Richard Hatchett, CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). Over nachos and drinks, we started to talk through what was likely to happen with the new coronavirus, which would later be named COVID-19. Discussion about the disease hadn't really reached a high political level and was not formally on the Davos agenda, but concern was growing, and many people during that week asked us our opinions.

The first question we discussed was whether this was just going to be a worrisome outbreak or the Big One that epidemiologists had long warned might come. So far, we only had official confirmation of a point outbreak, spreading from animals at the Wuhan live animal market to humans. But on the nerdy LISTSERVs about infectious disease and epidemics, there was already a lot of chatter about how the virus might be spreading from person to person, which is a huge red flag in our field. We agreed that there was potential for the new virus to spread dramatically. Regardless of whether this was or was not the Big One, we needed to prepare.

Such a scenario creates a problem for all countries, even those with access to the vaccines. But to me a far bigger concern was the unfairness of high-income countries' self-interest. People in developing nations without access to vaccines were historically already the most vulnerable to disease and the most likely to suffer complications if they got sick. They already had limited access to the most basic medical treatment.

Improving the delivery of existing vaccines and building up better delivery systems is the best way to detect outbreaks early, prepare communities for outbreaks of disease, and ensure health systems aren't overwhelmed in an emergency — as well as strengthen our epidemic stockpiles.

If vaccines against the disease could be made — and at the time, we were far from certain they could be — we knew that stocks would be quickly bought up by the richest countries. The logical conclusion was that the bulk of the world's population, and most especially those in lower income, developing countries, would be locked out of these deals, and so denied timely access to whatever vaccine supplies became available.

That was where we thought we could help. So, Richard, Cynthia, and I talked through a rough outline of what would be needed to ensure equitable access to any COVID-19 vaccines that emerged and the roles that various organizations — such as CEPI, Gavi, UNICEF, and WHO — as well as the pharmaceutical companies might play to make that happen.

Imagining ourselves in the place of government decision-makers, we envisioned that they would have an incentive to participate in a mechanism that pooled risk by making advance purchase commitments for a wide variety of candidate vaccines. Their buy-in could help us pool demand, generating enough scale to incentivize increasing production and to negotiate the best prices on everyone's behalf. We wanted to promote solidarity, to publicize and meet lower-income country needs, and to create an early, strong global movement for equitable access.

Richard went from Davos back to London and talked with the CEPI team, I went back to Geneva to talk to the Gavi team and our Alliance partners WHO and UNICEF, and we started our collaboration. That joint effort became COVAX [COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access, an initiative to ensure equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines].

Our small team working on COVAX undertook what I believe was the most ambitious public health effort of the 21st century so far. The first COVAX dose was delivered to a COVAX-supported country 39 days after the first jab in the United Kingdom. Due to the time required for WHO to prequalify the vaccine, 43 days later the first doses were administered in Africa, in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. Forty-two days later, COVAX vaccines had been distributed to 100 countries. There were many delays due to export bans, vaccine nationalism, and manufacturing delays. But by the end of 2021, close to 1 billion doses had been distributed; by the end of 2022, COVAX had delivered more than 1.6 billion doses to people in the world's poorest countries and was estimated to have averted 2.7 million deaths in those countries. That's the fastest rollout of vaccines to developing countries ever.

WHO estimates that some 16 million people died during the first two years of the pandemic; we are still counting, and that number will doubtlessly grow. And COVID-19 is by no means the only infectious risk: Currently, about one in seven deaths, accounting for more than 7 million people a year, is due to an infectious disease. Millions of people die from diseases for which we already have vaccines.

It's hard to put numbers on the deaths that have been prevented by vaccines, but some estimates say that vaccines have saved more than half a billion lives over the past 70 years, the time period they have been routinely available. And this only covers the 30 or so vaccines we have against the more than 300 infectious diseases known to plague humanity.

More and better vaccines need to be developed, particularly for major killers such as tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV, and, hopefully, more cancers. And in the meantime, the risks for infectious diseases are shifting.

Even those of us who had been working in the field for years were surprised at how poorly prepared the world was for an emergency of this magnitude. What's more, we faced the perils of vaccine nationalism, vaccine diplomacy, and the sometimes-selfish behaviors of manufacturers and world leaders. It was clear from the start that we wouldn't be able to do this work perfectly. But we did our best, and I've sought to set down both what we did and what I wish we could have done differently so that we can learn from our history.

As the world continues to recover from the worst of the pandemic years, we may not relish thinking about another pandemic ahead. We face complacency, fatigue, and a growing distrust of both science and institutions, fed by intentional disinformation that spreads rapidly online. But we also have an opportunity to harness what we've learned to do better next time — and there is epidemiologic certainty that a next time will come. When it does, we need to have robust public health systems in place, and ideally, vaccines.

Reprinted from Fair Doses: An Insider's Story of the Pandemic and the Global Fight for Vaccine Equity by Seth Berkley, MD, courtesy of University of California Press. Copyright 2025.

The COVID-19 pandemic altered life as we know it and claimed millions of lives in the process, and yet, the next pandemic might be even worse. A new book, called "The Big One: How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics" (Little Brown Spark, 2025), describes a theoretical-but-plausible scenario in which a new and deadlier coronavirus emerges and quickly spreads around the world, despite public health officials' best efforts to stop it.

In the text, Michael Osterholm, founding director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota, and award-winning author Mark Olshaker discuss lessons we should take away from past pandemics in order to mitigate the harms that a "SARS-3" could wreck on the global population. The following is an excerpt from the book.

Even if you are lucky enough not to contract the airborne virus, someone you know and care about most likely will. But even beyond that, a pandemic would so severely affect the global supply chain that both ordinary and durable goods, food, medicine, and the staples of everyday life would be in short supply or not available. There would be major shortages in all countries of a wide range of commodities, not only food, but also soap, paper, light bulbs, and gasoline, as well as parts for cars, airplanes, trains, military equipment, municipal water pumps, and electrical generation plants. Even coffins to bury the dead would be in short supply. With Covid, we saw just how connected the world's economies are.

The message here: When it comes to fighting microbes, America First only goes so far. In the United States, most of our critical and, in many cases, lifesaving generic drugs come from China and India, both of which would be prime targets for viral spread, resulting in shutdown of manufacturing plants. We have been advocating for years for this type of pharmaceutical manufacturing to be reestablished in the United States and other countries we can count on, as a matter of national security. But that would necessarily involve some form of government subsidy, since the profit margin on most generics is extremely thin, and even overseas, companies are getting out of the business. This means that as consolidation in China and India has occurred, it has created a gaping vulnerability for the United States and the Western world.

The truism that no one is completely safe until everyone is safe is a truism because it happens to be true. In the words of the late Nobel laureate Dr. Joshua Lederberg, whom we quoted at the beginning of Chapter One, "Bacteria and viruses know nothing of national sovereignties. . . . No matter how selfish our motives, we can no longer be indifferent to the suffering of others. The microbe that felled one child in a distant continent yesterday can reach yours today and seed a global pandemic tomorrow."

Or, as the poet John Donne wrote, "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

Accordingly, in preparing for the Big One, we must not let the same thing happen that occurred with Covid, where high-income nations ended up with plenty of vaccine — often more than they could use — while low- and middle-income countries had very little, despite COVAX's [a global initiative aimed at ensuring equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines] good intentions. Not only must we develop new and effective vaccines; we must also, by international agreement and cooperation, plan for a means to scale up manufacturing to meet global need, along with an efficient system to transport and distribute them, even if a cold chain requirement is involved. We will need an international approach to public funding that will pay for the excess production capacity required during a pandemic.

Unlike many fields these days, ethics remains a vital and integral component of medicine and public health, and thus there is compelling reason to regard the rest of the world with the same compassion and empathy we feel for our own people. But on a practical level, there is nothing particularly altruistic about sharing vaccine with low- and middle-income countries in sufficient quantities to protect their populations. It is simply self-interest. Now that the globe can be circumnavigated in less than 48 hours, distance provides no protection from infectious diseases. While someone in a remote village in the Western Pacific or sub-Saharan Africa is sick with a novel airborne respiratory virus, people on the other side of the world may be in imminent danger, a fundamental fact of nature in our modern world.

We realize how unlikely this level of global cooperation is in reality, given the state of international relations and each country's natural tendency to keep critical drugs and vaccines for its own people. That probability, however, doesn't make this any less important. Manufacturing countries must have the capability and capacity to turn out vaccine stocks for the rest of the world, and there should be international dialogue and planning for the mechanics of how vaccine stocks would be allocated.

Even in the United States, there will not be sufficient antivirals to meet the need for at least several months. Assuming effective antivirals even exist for whatever the pandemic virus turns out to be, we will have to figure out who gets priority among those who are seriously ill. Healthcare workers and first responders? Political and business leaders? The elderly and immunocompromised? Essential workers and drivers? Each cohort will have its advocates. It is far better to struggle with the ethical issues involved in determining such priorities now, in a public forum, rather than waiting until the crisis occurs.

Another issue is that while SARS-CoV-2 [the virus behind COVID-19] primarily affected the elderly and immunocompromised with severe disease, that wouldn't necessarily be true of the next pandemic. Keep in mind that in the 1918 influenza [pandemic], more than half the people killed were 18 to 40 years old and largely healthy. These deaths were likely caused by a virus-induced response of the victim's immune system — a cytokine storm, as we described in Chapter Four — that led to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). In other words, in the process of fighting the disease, these healthy individuals' robust immune systems overreacted, severely damaging the lungs and resulting in death. Today, the medical establishment around the world is not much better prepared to treat tens of millions of cases of ARDS than it was more than a century ago.

And even though the SARS coronavirus, for example, infected only about 8,000 people in 2003 before it was brought to a halt, about 10% of them died, showing that our thought experiment for SARS-3 is not far-fetched.

In medieval Europe, some handcrafted books were bound with skin from an unexpected source: seals.

A new analysis of ancient DNA found in medieval books from European abbeys reveals that these seals came from the northwestern Atlantic Ocean, where they were hunted in the 12th and 13th centuries for their skins. The sealskins were then traded by the Norse descendants of the Vikings before ending up as book covers.

In the study, published Wednesday (April 9) in the journal Royal Society Open Science, a team of researchers subjected 32 medieval books to biocodicological analyses — a series of methods aimed at revealing biological information preserved in codex-style books.

Medieval codices were written on pieces of parchment made of animal skin, that were bound together with wood, leather, cord or thread. Some also had a second protective cover, called a chemise, which was often made from boar or deer skin.

But the new study revealed that some chemises were actually made from seals instead.

The researchers began their investigation at the Library of Clairvaux Abbey in Champagne, France, which holds 1,450 medieval books produced by scribes at this Cistercian abbey, part of a Catholic religious order. Focusing on 19 books created between 1140 and 1275, the experts used mass spectrometry, a technique that can reveal the chemical makeup of an object, and ancient DNA analysis to reveal that they were all bound with skin from pinnipeds, a group that includes seals.

Related: People in Scandinavia may have used boats made of animal skins to hunt and trade 5,000 years ago

The researchers identified an additional 13 "hairy books" from "daughter abbeys" in France, England and Belgium dated to between 1150 and 1250 that were also bound in sealskin.

The ancient DNA analysis helped the researchers narrow down which pinniped species eight of the skins came from, pinpointing harbor, harp and bearded seals. Additionally, they were able to tell that the seals came from a surprisingly diverse geographic area, including Scandinavia, Denmark, Scotland and either Greenland or Iceland.

"The skins were either obtained through trade or as part of the church tithe," study lead author Élodie Lévêque, an expert in book conservation at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, told Live Science in an email. "It is doubtful," she said, that these bindings "would have existed without the availability of sealskins from Norse sources."

All of the sealskin books were made in abbeys located along known 13th-century European trading routes, the researchers noted in their study; these were also Norse trading routes. In particular, the Norse traded walrus ivory and furs from Greenland to mainland Europe, and historical records suggest they used sealskins to pay tithes to the Catholic church in the 13th century.

"The Cistercians had a particular preference for white and discreet forms of luxury, which aligns well with the aesthetic qualities of sealskin," Lévêque said. Another well-known sect, the Benedictines, favored darker hues.

However, the monks may not have known that their prized book-binding skins were actually from seals, she said, since there was no term for the animal in the French language at the time.

The widespread use of sealskins in medieval libraries has challenged previous assumptions about which species were used to bind books, the researchers wrote in their study. It has also revealed that the trade network between the Norse in Greenland and abbeys in France was extensive and robust.

But there is no obvious correlation between the actual contents of the books and the use of sealskin covers, and no written explanation for the use of sealskins in book-binding survives, the researchers noted in their study.

"The distinctive white, furry bindings may therefore have been appreciated solely for their visual and environmental qualities – they're waterproof – rather than for any knowledge of their zoological and geographical origin," Lévêque said.

The United States officially launched its "war on cancer" by signing the National Cancer Act of 1971. Broadly, the intention was to spur research into the biology of cancer to better treat — and potentially cure — the disease. However, the nation has now been embroiled in this "war" for over 50 years, and we are nowhere closer to victory, argues Nafis Hasan, a cancer scientist and associate faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

In a new book called Metastasis: The Rise of the Cancer-Industrial Complex and the Horizons of Care (Common Notions, 2025), Hasan writes that cancer research has hyperfocused on finding treatments for individuals at the expense of driving down cancer rates overall. For example, in the passage below, he describes how a fixation on "somatic mutation theory" — which states that mutations in specific genes are the primary drivers of cancer — ignores the dangers of environmental carcinogens and the benefits of public health efforts in curbing cancer incidence and mortality.

Related: The 10 deadliest cancers, and why there's no cure

The idea that cancer may be a hereditary disease can be traced back to the early twentieth century. Around 1900, the biologists Theodor Boveri and Walter Sutton rediscovered Gregor Mendel's laws of biological inheritance and proposed that chromosomes were responsible for inheriting biological traits. Boveri later proposed that a tumor cell arose when cell division went wrong and chromosomes were improperly distributed. In Boveri's view, "the problem of tumors is a cell problem." This was perhaps the first conceptualization of the "cancer cell," a lone culprit that could wreak havoc in the body.

The first experimental proof that cancer was potentially heritable came from Harvard scientist Ernest E. Tyzzer, who showed that the selective breeding of cancerous mice resulted in a disproportionately high rate of tumor incidence across generations.

The idea of cancer as a genetic disease was also advanced by the eugenics movement, which performed cancer research to assure racial "purity" in the twenties and thirties. For example, the widely used Pap smear test for cervical cancer was first presented at the Third Race Betterment Conference of 1928. Nazi Germany's research on smoking and lung cancer claimed that differential cancer rates between Jews and "Aryans" was due to blood (not workplace chemical exposures). The U.S. private sector also held exclusionary views, with DuPont refusing to hire workers with a family history of cancer, given the high rates of bladder cancer among dye workers. The scientist Carl Weller, following his discovery of retinoblastoma (a tumor of the eyes) in children, advocated that parents of children with retinoblastoma be sterilized. As late as 1956, Wilhelm Hueper, the first Director of the Environmental Cancer Section of the NCI [National Cancer Institute], suggested that Black workers would be most suitable to workplaces where exposures to carcinogenic chemicals were unavoidable given their alleged resistance to the carcinogenic action of coal tar, UV radiation, and petroleum derivatives.

Other scientists pushed back on these narratives of racial traits and cancer incidence. For instance, the notion that West Africans were racially predisposed to higher rates of liver cancer lost credibility when Japanese immigrants to the U.S. suffered the same type of cancer — the cause turned out to be aflatoxins [toxins produced by fungi that can end up on various crops] in their diets.

The discovery of DNA's double helix structure in the fifties generated momentum for molecular biology, but the field did not concern itself with the cancer problem until the late seventies. Many molecular biologists were skeptical of government-sponsored research and worried they would lose their independence and be pushed to find cancer-causing viruses. Ironically, institutional support from the Special Virus Cancer Program (SVCP) later laid the foundations for the resurgence of a molecular theory of carcinogenesis.

This resurgence was driven by the SVCP director, Robert Huebner. Huebner was inspired by French studies showing that bacterial genes could remain in a repressed state and proposed the "oncogene theory" of carcinogenesis. In short, he believed there were cancer-causing genes that just needed to be identified. He previously confirmed that certain viruses gave rise to tumors in hamsters but wanted to dive deeper into how this happened. He suspected that viral genes were responsible for initiating tumors in the hamsters and, as the manager of SVCP's annual $10 million budget, he had the resources and authority to pour money into molecular cancer research.

In the early seventies, Huebner awarded millions of dollars to both private contractors and public institutions to study the molecular actions of viruses suspected of causing cancers in humans. However, by 1974, the White House's proposed budget for the NIH [National Institutes of Health] included three times as much funding for private contractors as for traditional research grants. The use of contract work was so extensive that by 1976, SVCP project officers worked in private contractor buildings (e.g., at Meloy Laboratories, Microbiological Associates, and Flow Laboratories). Huebner's largesse towards private contractors became a focal point of attack by molecular biologists suffering from financial precarity.

James Watson (of Watson and Crick fame) established a virus cancer laboratory in 1968 and was appointed to the National Cancer Advisory Board in 1972, despite his objections to the War on Cancer. Molecular biologists like Watson posed an "anti-communist critique" of the War on Cancer by contending that government meddling in their disciplines stifled their freedom. Watson wanted to make molecular biology a major recipient of NIH and NCI funding, but without the government directing the research. He advocated for his friend, Norton Zinder, to lead a committee to investigate the work of the VCP in 1974. [The Special Virus Cancer Program (SVCP) was later called just the Virus Cancer Program (VCP).]

The subsequent Zinder Report was the nail in the coffin for the VCP, which was already under pressure from Congress for its inability to produce results about cancer-causing viruses or vaccines to fight them. While Watson and other molecular biologists decried the use of contracts and the VCP's goals, they readily used VCP funds and infrastructure to continue their own research. In fact, VCP infrastructure supported oncogene theory all the way to its final iteration, the somatic mutation theory (SMT).

SMT postulates that cancer is caused by mutations that either permanently activate or repress genes. The first validation came in 1976 with the discovery of gene src in normal human cells. Continued VCP support allowed researchers at the University of California, San Francisco to grow, develop, and hone the technique of molecular hybridization, which would be instrumental in detecting the src gene in human cells. By the late seventies, molecular biologists and viral cancer researchers had cataloged several viral genes suspected of causing human cancers. However, absolute proof of human gene involvement in carcinogenesis was still missing.

It was not until 1982 that Robert Weinberg would find the missing link — using hybridization probes, he showed the presence of v-ras in a human bladder cancer tissue specimen. In 1983, SMT was further boosted by the discovery of proteins involved in carcinogenesis. All these discoveries and advancements — hybridization probes, viral gene catalogs, and purified proteins from viruses — were products of the VCP's financial and material infrastructure.

SMT eventually surpassed viral carcinogenesis theory as the leading theory of carcinogenesis and gained social and institutional acceptance (e.g., the prestigious Lasker Awards went to oncogene researchers in 1982). Vincent DeVita, the Director of the NCI under Reagan, recommitted the Institute's budget to genetic research and further cut the environmental carcinogen testing program. The discovery of oncogenes and related proteins also opened a new arena for cancer therapies and fueled pharmaceutical industry interest in collaborations with universities.

Most scientific retellings of this history suggest that the shift from environmental carcinogens to viruses and, ultimately, to individuals' genes happened in the vacuum of universal knowledge creation. Nevertheless, a confluence of neoliberalism, libertarian ideology, and government policy cemented the idea that genes are responsible for cancer.

Somewhat problematically, experimental evidence indisputably determined that genetic fragments found in cancerous cells are also found in normal cells. However, the explanation for this fact was constructed by social and political forces. As early as 1975, the American Business Cancer Research Foundation, funded largely by the chemical industry, tried to shift the focus away from prevention and towards identifying the "underlying mechanism." The Reagan administration was more than happy to advance these efforts.

Molecular biologists, who once decried the VCP's use of contracts, were more than happy to participate in private-public collaborations that directed money to their labs. Some had even publicly cautioned against environmental regulations when the NCI, under the previous Carter administration, moved to increase funding for environmental carcinogenesis research.

SMT renewed the biomedical settlement — a commitment to treating diseases instead of preventing them. It also facilitated the real subsumption of academic research under capitalism and, consequently, an explosive growth of the cancer drug market and capital accumulation by the biotech and pharma industry.

However, this line of attack in the War on Cancer has had few meaningful outcomes for cancer patients. After more than four decades since the discovery of the first oncogene, Robert Weinberg candidly reflected on his discovery of ras: "The greatest decreases in cancer-associated mortality have come from reductions in disease incidence [prevention] rather than treatment, such as the therapies that some anticipated would flow directly from RAS research."

In this excerpt from "Matter: The Magnificent Illusion" (Polity, 2025, translated by Edward Williams), author and physicist Guido Tonelli delves into the discovery of dark energy, and the multiple attempts to explain this strange phenomenon that appears to be driving the ever increasing expansion of the universe.

The discovery of dark energy was a real surprise for everyone, including those working on it. When it happened, in 1998, the astronomers who were the first to find themselves in the presence of such surprising data, couldn't believe their eyes. And yet the results left no doubt.

The velocity at which the universe had expanded was not constant; on the contrary, for quite some time now it had been increasing significantly. Everything was moving away from everything at an increasingly frenetic rhythm.

What scientists were seeing contradicted what they were expecting; the idea of the accelerated expansion of the universe was counterintuitive. Everyone expected that the attraction exerted by gravity would slowly reduce the expansion velocity of space-time, whereas the exact opposite was happening.

For many years, different teams of scientists tried to understand whether what the data was pointing to was real or whether, on the other hand, errors had been made in the measurements. In the end, they gave in to the evidence. There was no doubt that a new natural phenomenon was being observed, however completely unexpected it was. In the end even the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm recognized the importance of the work of Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess, the three astronomers who had carried out the early research, rewarding their discovery with the 2011 Nobel Prize.

Right from the earliest moments, in an attempt to explain this strange phenomenon, the expression dark energy was coined, indicating the complete ignorance of the mechanism that produced it: an absolutely unknown form of energy seemingly pushing everything away from everything else and growing as the dimensions of the universe grow.

Some imagined a kind of anti-gravity, an extremely strange behaviour of gravity which from being attractive, as we know it, becomes repulsive over great distances. Others imagined a kind of vacuum energy, a positive energy, which creates a kind of negative pressure, thereby pushing everything towards dilation.

The idea that the void contains positive energy which makes it expand goes back many years. And Albert Einstein was the first to come up with it. To make the universe static, that is to counterbalance the effect of gravity, which, acting alone, would sooner or later make everything collapse into one point, Einstein added a positive constant, called the "cosmological constant" into his equations by hand, that is to say arbitrarily. This classification served to build a balance; making the universe expand countered the effects of gravity and made it stable.

Later, when it was discovered that everything had had a turbulent beginning and that galaxies were still moving apart from one another, Einstein regretted this choice, to the extent of referring to it as one of the worst blunders of his life. In fact, with a universe arising from an ultra-dense and super-incandescent singularity, there was no need for this further impetus to expansion to produce a condition of equilibrium. The curious thing is that nobody, least of all Einstein, could predict that by the end of the 20th-century, the discoveries made by Perlmutter, Schmidt and Riess would bring his cosmological constant back into vogue. And so, it seems as if nature will always end up proving Einstein right, even when the great scientist is convinced that he's clearly wrong.

In this case, too, precious information about the presence and distribution of dark energy can be extracted by analyzing the tiniest inhomogeneity in cosmic background radiation and the gravitational lens effects produced by galaxies and clusters. It's curious to discover that it is still light which allows us to take a look at this shady side of the cosmos.

The distribution of dark energy in the cosmos is very homogeneous. It behaves quite differently from matter, whether ordinary matter or dark matter. These latter material substances have reticular distributions with high- density nodes and filaments alternating with broad empty spaces. On the contrary, dark energy is distributed uniformly throughout space and seems to occupy the entire volume of the universe quite happily, exerting a repulsive force on everything.

In an attempt to understand the origin of this mysterious form of energy, scientists have ascertained whether the expansion velocity is the same, over a given period, for all the different regions of the universe. They also realized that this phenomenon has only become dominant in the last billions of years. For a long period, the universe expanded following a very different rhythm from the current one.

Various hypotheses have been tested, including the idea that we are dealing with a new fundamental force or an anomalous behaviour of gravity or even the presence in the fabric of spacetime of very particular structures, similar to defects in its regular pattern. But, as yet, nobody has managed to understand what gives rise to this strange phenomenon, and explaining dark energy remains one of the most formidable challenges of modern science.

While the mystery surrounding its origins remains, the precise measurements taken of the effects of dark energy on the geometry of the universe and on the spatial fluctuations in the density of matter have made it possible to quantify the weight of this component in the material composition of the universe.

The result is sensational; dark energy contributes around 68% of the total mass. Around two-thirds of the universe is made up of this most mysterious of components. Totalling up the contribution of dark energy, we obtain a frankly embarrassing result. Despite the great progress made by contemporary science, we are forced to admit that we don't know anything about 95% of everything that surrounds us.

Reprinted with permission from Matter: The Magnificent Illusion by Guido Tonelli, available from Polity

We often joke that our attention spans have dropped significantly in recent years with the rise of digital technologies and screen-centric entertainment, but there is sound science to back up this observation. In fact, a shorter attention span is simply one side effect of a recent explosion of screen distractions, as neurologist and author Richard E. Cytowic argues in his new book, "Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age: Coping with Digital Distraction and Sensory Overload" (MIT Press, 2024).

In his book, Cytowic discusses how the human brain has not changed significantly since the Stone Age, which leaves us poorly equipped to handle the influence and allure of modern technologies — particularly those propagated by big tech companies. In this excerpt, Cytowic highlights how our brains struggle to keep up with the lightning-fast pace at which modern technology, culture and society are changing.

From an engineering perspective, the brain has fixed energy limits that dictate how much work it can handle at a given time. Feeling overloaded leads to stress. Stress leads to distraction. Distraction then leads to error. The obvious solutions are either to staunch the incoming stream or alleviate the stress.

Hans Selye, the Hungarian endocrinologist who developed the concept of stress, said that stress "is not what happens to you, but how you react to it." The trait that allows us to handle stress successfully is resilience. Resilience is a welcome trait to have because all demands that pull you away from homeostasis (the biological tendency in all organisms to maintain a stable internal milieu) lead to stress.

Screen distractions are a prime candidate for disturbing homeostatic equilibrium. Long before the advent of personal computers and the internet, Alvin Toffler popularized the term “information overload” in his 1970 bestseller, Future Shock. He promoted the bleak idea of eventual human dependence on technology. By 2011, before most people had smartphones, Americans took in five times as much information on a typical day as they had twenty-five years earlier. And now even today’s digital natives complain how stressed their constantly present tech is making them.

Visual overload is more likely a problem than auditory overload because today, eye-to-brain connections anatomically outnumber ear-to-brain connections by about a factor of three. Auditory perception mattered more to our earliest ancestors, but vision gradually took prominence. It could bring what-if scenarios to mind. Vision also prioritized simultaneous input over sequential ones, meaning that there is always a delay from the time sound waves hit your eardrums before the brain can understand what you are hearing. Vision’s simultaneous input means that the only lag in grasping it is the one-tenth second it takes to travel from the retina to the primary visual cortex, V1.

Smartphones easily win out over conventional telephones for anatomical, physiological, and evolutionary reasons. The limit to what I call digital screen input is how much the lens in each eye can transfer information to the retina, the lateral geniculate, and thence to V1, the primary visual cortex. The modern quandary into which we have engineered ourselves hinges on flux, the flow of radiant energy that bombards our senses from far and near. For eons, the only flux human sense receptors had to transform into perception involved sights, sounds, and tastes from the natural world. From that time to the present we have been able to detect only the tiniest sliver of the total electromagnetic radiation that instruments tell us is objectively there. Cosmic particles, radio waves, and cellphone signals pass through us unnoticed because we lack the biological sensors to detect them. But we are sensitive, and highly so, to the manufactured flux that started in the twentieth century and lies on top of the natural background flux.

Our self-created digital glut hits us incessantly, and we cannot help but notice and be distracted by it. Smartphone storage is measured in tens of gigabytes and the hard drive of a computer in terabytes (1,000 gigabytes), while data volumes are calculated in petabytes (1,000 terabytes), zettabytes (1,000,000,000,000 gigabytes), and beyond. Yet humans still have the same physical brain as our Stone Age ancestors. True, our physical biology is amazingly adaptive, and we inhabit every niche on the planet. But it cannot possibly keep up with the breathtaking speed at which modern technology, culture, and society are changing. Attention spans figure prominently in debates about how much screen exposure we can handle, but no one considers the energy cost involved.

A much-cited study conducted by Microsoft Research Canada claims that attention spans have dwindled to below eight seconds — less than that of a goldfish — and this supposedly explains why our ability to focus has gone to hell. But that study has shortcomings, and “attention span” is a colloquial term rather than a scientific one. After all, some people’s Stone Age brains have the capacity to compose a symphony, monitor the data stream from a nuclear reactor or the space station, or work out heretofore unsolvable problems in mathematics. Individual differences exist in the capacity and ability to cope with stressful events. To give California its due, Gloria Mark at the University of California, Irvine, and her colleagues at Microsoft measured attention spans in everyday environments. In 2004, people averaged 150 seconds before switching from one screen to another. By 2012 that time had fallen to 47 seconds. Other studies have replicated these results. We are determined to be interrupted, says Mark, if not by others, then by ourselves. The drain on our switching is "like having a gas tank that leaks." She found that a simple chart or digital timer that prompts people to take periodic breaks helps a lot.

Neuroscience distinguishes sustained attention, selective attention, and alternating attention. Sustained attention is the ability to focus on something for an extended period. Selective attention speaks to the aptitude for filtering out competing distractions to stick with the task at hand. Alternating attention is the capacity to switch from one task to another and back again to where you left off. In terms of the energy cost incurred by repeatedly shifting attention throughout the day, I fear we have hit the brain’s Stone Age limit. Exceeding it results in foggy thinking, reduced focus, thought blocking, memory lapse or precision calipers, any tool quickly comes to feel like an extension of oneself. The same applies to smart devices. Two centuries ago when the first steam locomotives reached a blistering speed of thirty miles per hour, alarmists warned that the human body could not withstand such speeds. Since then ever-faster cars, communication methods, jet planes, and electronics have diffused into the culture and become absorbed into daily life. In earlier times fewer new technologies appeared per decade, fewer people were alive, and society was much less connected than it is today.

By contrast, the invention, proliferation, and evolution of digital technology have put the status quo in constant flux. Unlike analog counterparts such as a landline telephone or a turntable, smart devices repeatedly demand and command our attention. We have conditioned ourselves to respond to texts and incoming calls the moment they arrive. Admittedly, sometimes jobs and livelihoods do depend on an immediate response. Yet we pay a price in terms of energy cost incurred by constantly shifting and refocusing attention.

This excerpt has been edited for style and length. Reprinted with permission from "Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age: Coping with Digital Distraction and Sensory Overload" by Richard E. Cytowic, published by MIT Press. All rights reserved.

One of the key areas that artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to disrupt is human creativity — and the rise of generative AI has certainly thrown art into the spotlight. While fears remain that AI may replace human input and agency across society, a different approach suggests humans will meld with AI in some capacity — with the new technologies augmenting us rather than undermining us.

In "Centaur Art: The Future of Art in the Age of Generative AI" (Springer, 2024), computer scientist Remo Pareschi explores the notion of "centauric intelligence" — an integration of human and computing intelligence — and its impact on the future of art. In this excerpt, Pareschi explains how our primal fears are misguided and argues that the rise of AI may, in fact, help human creative endeavors transcend to new heights.

As we revisit our initial, most pressing concern — will artificial intelligence surpass human creativity in artistic endeavors? — it's crucial to recognize that the question, as commonly posed, is somewhat misdirected. Unlike games such as chess or Go, art cannot be measured by a simple win-lose metric. The fear, however, is similar: could humans be supplanted in artistic production as they have been in high-level chess?

Our analysis, grounded in cognitive considerations and carried out in the pages to come, suggests a nuanced answer. At the pinnacle of creativity — where inspiration, conception and originality reign — AI is an enhancer, aiding in realizing powerful and original works. In such contexts, the human artist's role remains paramount, with AI serving as a tool to augment their creative vision. Conversely, AI's role can become more structured or repetitive. It can automate the production of routine outputs such as certain types of commercial illustrations, brochures, or video game characters. This automation significantly impacts professionals in these fields, who may rely on such work for their livelihood. Consequently, these individuals may view the advent of AI technologies with apprehension and concern.

Economic and legal implications

The economic threat of generative platforms is closely intertwined with concerns about copyright infringement. A notable legal action in this arena occurred in January 2023, when a group of artists filed a class-action lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt. The lawsuit centered on the alleged unauthorized use of artists' works to train AI tools, sparking a debate over the legal and ethical boundaries of AI in art.

The highlighted lawsuit underscores the ongoing tension between AI’s innovative potential in art and individual artists’ rights. Plaintiffs in the case argued that AI tools were creating derivative works based on their styles without proper authorization or compensation. In contrast, the AI art companies defended their actions, asserting that the AI-generated images were transformative and original, thus not violating any laws. In a significant development in October 2023, a US judge dismissed most of these claims due to a lack of direct infringement evidence.

On the other hand, to complicate matters further, the US Copyright Office in September 2023 rejected copyright protection for Theatre D’opera Spatial, an artwork predominantly created by AI and crafted by artist Jason Allen. This artwork had previously won an art contest, but the Copyright Office’s decision was based on the lack of significant human intervention in its creation. This stance contrasts with the position of Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor and a renowned expert on Internet and law issues. Lessig advocates for the recognition of copyright in prompt-generated artworks, arguing that they are original and creative, embodying the human input of the prompter. He believes these works should be treated on par with other technologically aided art forms and that they have the potential to invigorate the art world by inspiring current artists and drawing in new audiences interested in AI's artistic capabilities.

Interestingly, international perspectives on this issue vary. In November 2023, a Chinese court ruled that AI-generated content could be protected under copyright law, which starkly contrasts with the human authorship requirement under U.S. copyright law.

Thus, despite these legal battles, the issue of copyright infringement in AI art remains unresolved, with the potential for future challenges and changes in various jurisdictions. This uncertainty underscores the evolving nature of art in the digital age and the need for a balanced approach that respects both innovation and artists’ rights.

A striking example of the social impact of generative platforms is the publication of Sunyata by Eris Edizioni, an Italian graphic novel authored by philosopher and digital artist Francesco D'Isla that combines AI-generated images with traditional text. The novel ignited controversy among artists and comic book creators, who criticized its use of AI as undermining artistic integrity and economic fairness. The author and publisher defended their work as a legitimate artistic endeavor, emphasizing their careful use of prompts and adherence to a Creative Commons license.

This case exemplifies the broader debate surrounding AI in art: balancing technological innovation with ethical considerations and the economic interests of human artists. As generative platforms continue to evolve, these discussions will likely intensify, shaping the future of art in the digital era. And yet, we might say that this is nothing new, with history repeating itself — the intersection of technology and art has always been a crucible of innovation and controversy.

Exploring new artistic avenues

Indeed, throughout history, technological advancements, from ink and paper to the development of cameras and computers, have continually opened new avenues for artistic expression. Yet, each technological leap has also brought ethical and social challenges, echoing today’s tensions between generativity and control, authenticity and originality, and the impact of digital platforms on the art market.

Historically, resistance to new art forms and technologies is not a novel phenomenon but a recurring pattern. For instance, the advent of photography in the 19th century was initially met with skepticism by some critics and artists, who viewed it as a mechanical, uncreative process threatening traditional art forms. Similarly, introducing sound and color in cinema faced opposition, with concerns about diminishing the artistic value of silent and black-and-white films. Just as photography and color cinema once disrupted artistic norms, today’s generative platforms like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and MidJourney are provoking similar debates in the art world.

To navigate this complex landscape, the insights of Walter Benjamin and John Maynard Keynes offer valuable perspectives. Benjamin was concerned about losing aura due to the mechanical reproduction of the work of art, but also recognized its democratizing potential. Generative platforms like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and MidJourney take this democratization one step further, making artistic creation more accessible and fostering a sense of community and creativity. Allowing users to generate and share art potentially fulfills Benjamin's social role in art.

While Benjamin's insights shed light on the cultural implications of technological advancements in art, John Maynard Keynes's concept of technological unemployment offers a crucial economic perspective. Among his many contributions to economic theory, Keynes, a prominent economist of the 20th century, explored the job loss caused by technological advancements, a form of structural unemployment that he viewed as a ‘temporary phase of maladjustment'. This perspective is particularly relevant when considering the fears among artists about AI-powered generative platforms. While some artists worry about the potential for AI to diminish the demand for human-made art, thus impacting their livelihoods, it's crucial to recognize that technological changes can also create new job opportunities and artistic avenues.

Keynes' insights remind us that, despite initial disruptions, technological advancements often lead to the emergence of new roles and industries. In the context of art, generative AI might challenge traditional practices and pave the way for novel forms of artistic expression and collaboration. This evolution necessitates a redefinition of art and its creators, a task we aim to address in this book.

This excerpt has been edited for style and length. Reprinted with permission from "Centaur Art: The Future of Art in the Age of Generative AI" by Remo Pareschi, published by Springer. All rights reserved.

Whether they are a young Marie Curie or Albert Einstein, a budding botanist, cuckoo for chemistry or simply looking for something new and exciting to read over the summer vacation, if there is one thing we know about our young Live Science readers, it's that they love a good science book.

With the help of our sister magazine "How It Works," we've pulled together some of the best science books for kids of all ages, which should keep their young minds fizzing with ideas long into the future.

To make things easier, we've grouped them into two sections: one featuring books for children under 10 years old, and the other books for older children and young adults. They are all books that have been released recently, but if there are any that you think we have missed then please let us know on social media (here's where you can find us), or ping us an email at community@livescience.com.

Best science books for kids under 10 years old

Katherine Johnson (Little People, Big Dreams)

A pioneer of space exploration, Katherine Johnson has been rightly added to a list of influential people whose life story has been told in the successful book series, "Little People, Big Dreams". Known as a 'human calculator,' Johnson calculated the trajectories of the spacecraft that carried Neil Armstrong to the Moon on the historic Apollo 11 mission and ensured that he landed safely.

In this vibrantly illustrated children's book, you follow a young Johnson from her early education to her time at NASA, which was then a newly-established space agency. Her story is one of triumph in the face of adversity and is filled with extraordinary accomplishments that influenced the way humans explore space. Many girls and boys are sure to be inspired by Johnson's story and it may even propel them into a career in space exploration.

Related: Amazing Black scientists

I Am Vape

Tackling the issue head-on, the U.S. National Center for Youth Issues has published this informative picture book to show families the dangers of vaping by children. Following a cartoon criminal called 'Vape,' you learn about the many side effects and harmful consequences that come with vaping, including raising stress levels, lung damage and health concerns such as the role of highly addictive substances like nicotine.

Urging children not to follow the crowd or attempt to "fit in" when it comes to vaping, this book acknowledges the pressure on young people to pick up a vape but also supplies them with the knowledge they need to make an informed decision about their health. "I Am Vape" is a conversation starter for families looking to discuss vaping or a creative way to warn children of its risks.

Oh No They Aren't: Nature

This vibrant book transports you into a bustling natural habitat on every page. From meeting curious desert creatures to exploring a marine metropolis of complex coral colonies, this is an unexpected and eye-opening adventure. During this journey, you also learn about prehistoric life, uncover facts about incredible creepy crawlies and are even introduced to flying fish.

Part of a series, "Oh No They Aren’t: Nature" tackles many of the common misconceptions about animals. For example 'all sharks are fearsome predators' and 'insects are the only pollinators'. Each time an illustrated character exclaims "Oh no they aren’t," insightful information is revealed by creatures such as a friendly giant whale shark or a bat describing its nighttime pollination antics. The quirky drawings will intrigue young readers, introducing them to worlds in the sea and sky, underground and overground, for a whirlwind tour of Earth’s diverse environments and inhabitants.

Spin to Survive: Deep Space Danger

Some older readers will have fond memories of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" or "Fighting Fantasy" series of game books — their popularity boomed in the 1980s and 1990s. Each title placed you at the center of the story and agency over its telling, with options at the end of each section. For example, should you go left or right? Do you want to fight that hobgoblin? If so, turn to page 10, otherwise turn to page 12 to run away. The age of game books has passed but the concept has longevity because gamifying STEM subjects is still a great way of learning.

"Deep Space Danger" is the fourth in the Spin to Survive series. It puts you in the role of a cadet bound for Mars when your spacecraft is hit by meteoroids that tear a hole in the service module. The rest of your crew are sucked into space or manage to escape in the crew transfer module, leaving you alone in a sealed part of the spacecraft with a series of life-or-death decisions to make. Do you continue the mission to Mars, attempt a return to Earth, or seek help from a nearby asteroid mining station? The book includes a circular dial that pops out of the front cover. For certain scenarios, you’ll need to place the dial over a circle on the page and spin the arrow to decide one of three outcomes: whether you survive, spin again, or succumb to one of the many perilous situations you can encounter.

Space writer Giles Sparrow has put together a scientifically accurate cosmic adventure for school children, taking them across a variety of extraterrestrial environments, from the barren lands of the Red Planet to the surface of a comet. The story comes complete with explainer boxes containing informative text to put the minds of game-wary parents and teachers at ease. There’s plenty of replayability in "Deep Space Danger" so adults can leave kids alone for long periods, safe in the knowledge that they’re being entertained and educated at the same time.

In Our Solar System

This children’s book introduces scenes from the solar system by personifying celestial objects. Planetary craters are illustrated as yawning faces, for example to explain exactly which parts each of the facial features represent. A rhythmic poem that flows through the entire book makes information about elements of the complex solar system much easier for young readers to engage with.

Colorful artwork takes center stage, complementing the narrative and setting each scene beautifully, while curious facts help piece together each element of the illustration. As you explore outer space, you experience everything from realistically drawn worlds to more abstract yet mesmerizing solar storms. By the end of "In Our Solar System" you'll have a broad overview of much of what we know about our 4.5 billion-year-old star system. This book will leave you wondering what secrets lurk beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, and what astronomers will discover next.

Related: The solar system: Facts about our cosmic neighborhood

Don't Squish a Slug

This engaging book leaves no leaf unturned when it comes to revealing the amazing world of "minibeasts." In each chapter, you learn about an assortment of captivating creatures. Can you spot the masters of disguise, such as the lanky stick insect and the speckled peppered moth? In a chapter on evolution, rare animals you may never have encountered before are brought to life through intricate illustrations. The giraffe weevil, for example, is a beetle with a disproportionately long neck that males use to fight each other, just as in actual giraffes.

Not all creatures on our planet can be seen with the naked eye but, with the help of a magnifying glass, we humans can observe the hardy tardigrade and its uniquely plump physique. From brutal critter defense tactics to extreme insect record breakers, "Don’t Squish a Slug" proves that there is a large amount to discover about those so little in size.

Almost Underwear

Muslin is a type of plain-woven cotton fabric that has a broad range of uses depending on its quality and weight. It can be used to make fine, floaty dresses suitable for a period drama, for example, to staunch blood flow on open wounds, or to mop up baby vomit. But much bigger things were in store for one bolt of muslin cloth purchased in a store in Ohio, in 1903. It was bought by Orville and Wilbur Wright, and used to cover the wings of the glider that made the world’s first successful crewed flight on December 17 the same year. That’s probably the biggest claim to fame any bit of fabric could have made at the time — but swatches of muslim from the Wright Flyer’s wings had an even greater destiny.

"Almost Underwear" follows the journey of the muslin used on the Wright brothers’ famous aircraft in a step-by-step fashion, from the wings of the Wright Flyer to a museum, to space, to the moon, and eventually to Mars, becoming a passenger on the first flight on another planet. Author and Illustrator Jonathan Roth anthropomorphises the little swatches of muslin in his inspirational story, referring almost affectionately to them in the text. He uses real photos that were taken over a century of flight, from the Wright brothers’ escapades near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to the flight of the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars. Then he overlays them with charming drawings of the muslin, with expressive little faces, smiling with pleasure at floating around in the Apollo capsule, or in open-mouthed surprise on the top of launching Atlas V rocket.

It’s a short but quirky and endearing history of spaceflight from a totally leftfield perspective. "Almost Underwear" will bring a smile to your face, whatever your age and your interests.

One Thousand Things: Learn your first words with Little Mouse

Like it says on the cover, "One Thousand Things" contains 1,000 things for young readers to name, with quirky geometric drawings that detail what they are and where they exist in the world. These items include body parts, things in nature, household items and assorted space stuff.

The simple illustrations combine to fill entire pages with dynamic scenes. The book is intended for children who are first being introduced to the names of animals, occupations, utensils, electronic devices and modes of transport. A tiny mouse follows the reader through the book, providing a “Where’s Waldo?”-style challenge to find the character on every page.

Despite the simple concept, categorising 1,000 things gives children an insight into many aspects of the world and provokes questions, from the differing skill sets that can shape a person’s job to the changing seasons, diverse landscapes and the technology that helps you navigate them. For any young person first learning about the world around them, "One Thousand Things" is a gentle and entertaining start.

The Big Aquarium Adventure

After schoolboy Stephen visits an aquarium with his family, his inquisitive friend Alex questions him about all the animals and the antics that went on there. From truck-sized fish tanks to scary-looking skates, Alex finds out all about this aquatic wonderland.

The first part of "The Big Aquarium Adventure" is written in a dialogue style, making it very conversational and easy for kids to follow. As Alex learns, the reader will explore new species and the logistics of the aquarium, while observing how children can learn from others their own age. The book has interactive elements, asking the reader questions about their own experiences at aquariums, or questions they may have about the events Alex talked about.

In the second half of "The Big Aquarium Adventure", the reader is introduced to another friend, who is inspired by the visit to research the animals found there. The results of this research are illustrated with diagrams of different species and fun facts about aquarium animals. Finally, the friends write a story about the trip to the aquarium and the book reveals top tips about turning any exciting experience into a flowing narrative.

"The Big Aquarium Adventure" is unique in providing young readers with scientific knowledge, as well as the English language skills needed to produce their own stories and interviews.

Related: 32 truly bizarre deep-sea creatures

Beat This Book

The challenge begins right out of the gate: the eponymous "Book" speaks to the reader in a tone that approaches that of the comic book supervillain, telling them that they cannot possibly beat the challenges it sets — though that shouldn’t put them off and they will certainly have fun trying.

Book’s super-confident demeanor lasts all of three pages, after which it gives the reader a slow-clap for spotting the smallest dog among a tightly packed spread of cartoon pooches. It’s downhill for Book from here, as it lines up one game after another only for its self-belief to waver as it assumes the reader beats every challenge. Challenges like, which is the longest of five slippery creatures that include a worm, a boa constrictor and a deep sea siphonophore. And, find the hole among all the spots on several different creatures — it’s an actual hole in the page of the book, as if someone had used a hole-punch on it.

Other types of challenge include those of the physical variety, like the one where the reader has to bend their body into certain shapes, lateral thinking puzzles and really silly stuff, like when Book challenges the reader to make a noise like an otter.

There’s a loose educational aspect to it, of course. Book throws the reader a curious animal fact here and there, but "Beat This Book" is largely about encouraging younger children to think outside the box — outside the book, even. It’s silly, it’s fun, it’s original, and it’s a great way for young readers and their parents to read and play together at the same time.

How to Explain Climate Science to a Grown-Up

In the latest installment in the "How to Explain" book series, children tackle the topic of our climate, and more importantly how humans affect it. In its typically charming way of turning the tables on who's teaching who,the book gives children all the information they need to explain climate science to adults. It includes how to explain the differences between weather and climate, why our climate is changing and what we can do to help stop things from getting worse.

Its humor and handy 'pro tips' on how to keep adults engaged while they learn are a brilliant way to teach young readers how to articulate what's going on in the world. It’s yet another great edition in this series that's helping children learn through teaching adults. "How to Explain Climate Science to a Grown-up" is a must-read for inquisitive children who love to tell you what they have learned in school.

Related: 3 bold ways cities are already adapting to climate change

Immune heroes: protectors of the wound

After a young boy named Mayu tumbles from a bicycle and scrapes his knee, an army of immune cells, led by Captain T, leaps into action to tackle the infection and heal the wound. In a brilliant blend of storytelling and science, this playful kids' book showcases how the immune system works to heal a wound.

The battle-plan narrative of the story sees a variety of real-life immune cells playfully transformed into cartoon heroes, each with their part to play. From the neutrophil first responders that reduce swelling to the glutinous macrophage cells that devour bacteria invaders, there's a whole host of immune cells to discover and watch as they fight off intruders that seek to wreak havoc.

By the end of this charming story, children will not only be entertained but will walk away with a better understanding of how the body heals.

Related: Why are scabs so itchy?

They Work: Honey bees, nature’s pollinators

The busy lives of honeybees are usually concealed inside their complex hives. But in "They Work" you can uncover the goings-on in and around their honeycombed homes. Through detailed and varied illustrations, this book clearly shows how bees work together to store food, serve their queen, reproduce and clean the rooms of their homes. There may be more roles than you realized, from nannies that care for young larvae to construction workers, engineers and the queen’s ladies in waiting.

This colorful book covers complex instinctual behaviors and mesmerizing map-making skills that bees have learned in the form of a sophisticated dance. In addition, biological cutaways show the honey stomachs of honeybees, which they fill with nectar and water from flowers around the hive. This separate stomach enables them to carry their gathered supplies back to their bases.

These animals are unique communicators who have developed an elaborate workforce and family that you will meet throughout "They Work".

Related: Do bees have knees?

Body Detective!

"Body Detective!" walks the reader through some of the basic functions of the human body and how our bodies communicate its needs to us. To use a simple example from the opening pages: "My tummy is making funny noises… my body signals tell me that I am feeling HUNGRY!"

The rest of the book continues in this vein, describing a spectrum of biological and emotional signals that include anxiety, tiredness, pain, the need to urinate and others. It’s appended by a detailed description of what "interoception" is — the sense or "feeling" of what's happening in your body — before asking the reader to focus on various parts of their body to gauge any sensation coming from it, however big or small that feeling may be.

Author Janet Krauthamer’s words are complemented by Christiane Engel’s appropriately fun, childlike illustrations, with paper flaps and panels that flip up or slide across to reveal words and pictures. The whole package is pithy, yet very effective at communicating its message on several levels.

As adults, we tend to take the signals generated by our bodily functions and primal emotions for granted, eating whenever we like or need to, putting up with persistent physical aches and pains, or pushing the stresses of life into a place where we feel we can cope with them — even if it’s not healthy for us to do so. But for young children, these signals — whether they feel positive or negative — are fresh and sometimes overwhelming. "Body Detective!" seeks to help children to understand and name what they’re feeling, and empower them.

There are lessons for any adults reading this book, as this form of mindfulness is every bit as applicable to them as it is to their children. "Body Detective!" leaves the reader with a poignant thought, that “There are no 'good' or 'bad' sensory signals" — they all serve a purpose that ultimately means we can take better care of ourselves, if only we listened to them more often.

Related: 10 body parts that are useless in humans (or maybe not)

On Track

All aboard the most spectacular trains in the history of the world! In this enthralling book of locomotive discovery, readers will travel along the railways that saw the invention of steam propulsion, suspended sky trains and the driverless trains of the future. You'll discover the fastest, heaviest and longest trains on Earth, along with a few 'oddballs' along the way.

This charming book is bursting with tales of trains from around the world, brought to life with wonderfully vibrant illustrations and informative diagrams. There are also several brief biographies of important people that propelled the evolution of trains, such as George Westinghouse, inventor of the air brake and Mary Elizabeth Walton, a pioneer of the railroads. Whether you're a young train enthusiast or have an interest in historical events, “On Track” is a must-read.

Fun with Outer Space

As part of the "Fun with…" series, this latest edition journeys beyond Earth to discover outer space through fun facts and activities. From cosmic crosswords to deep space dot-to-dots, there's a whole universe of different puzzles and cognitive workouts for future space scientists to enjoy.

You'll take a full tour around the cosmos and discover black holes, supernovae and nebulas, as well as the scientific instruments that study them. Each page is packed with illustrations of planets, stars and satellites, with orbital nuggets of easy-to-understand information to keep its young readers engaged and looking to learn more.

Targeted at a pre-teen audience, "Fun with Outer Space" is a great way to spend an afternoon for those with a passion for all things space. It brilliantly blends fun activities with fascinating facts that are out of this world.

Related: 25 gorgeous nebula photos that capture the beauty of the universe

Unlocking the Universe

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is one of the most advanced space telescopes ever created. Since 2022, it has been orbiting the sun, capturing distant celestial objects and peering deep into the darkness of space. "Unlocking the Universe" reveals some of the JWST's most awe-inspiring imagery and mesmerizing discoveries so far.

However, the road to Webb's launch was long and not without its hurdles. Within this insightful book, you'll discover the telescope's journey to space, the vast amount of technology that made its launch possible and the scientists who worked tirelessly to construct it.

The JWST is also packed with technology and scientific instruments that are revealed in the book as brilliantly annotated illustrations. No doubt, the James Webb Space Telescope will have uncovered much more about the universe by the time you've read this book, however, "Unlocking the Universe" acts as a written time capsule of its early achievements to look back on.

Related: The James Webb telescope has broken cosmology. Can it be fixed?

Volcano Atlas

This engaging and varied tour of the world’s volcanoes introduces young readers to the mightiest mounds and the geological events that cause volcanic eruptions. Beginning with the basics, the clear illustrations transport you underground to observe the magma flowing beneath us and the route it takes to emerge above the ground.

Each page is bustling with enticing information, while sporting a simplistic layout that doesn’t overwhelm, exploring volcano types, unique features, record breakers, and the mesmerizing patterns of mud pots.

For each noteworthy volcano from around the world, the reader is provided with a map and fact file to compare key statistics, historic stories such as the infamous Roman-era eruption of Vesuvius, and information about surrounding sites and communities. For example, did you know the active Mount Ruapehu volcano in New Zealand hosts three ski resorts on its slopes?

From the long-dormant to the most active and feared, this book is here to show you that no two volcanoes are the same.

Related: Antarctica is covered in volcanoes, could they erupt?

Akeem Keeps Bees!

In this book, Akeem invites you onto his family’s farm to teach you all about bees and how he looks after them. The story is written by Akeem’s father, but is presented from the boy’s point of view, helping young readers understand and relate to the content. The happy character gives you a tour of Sankofa Farms, NC, with expressive and detailed illustrations immersing the reader every step of the way. Akeem helps out with a lot of activities on the farm, but his firm favorite is raising the honeybees.

With a combination of comic-style imagery and factual diagrams, this book is an ideal blend of entertaining and informative. Akeem’s enthusiasm accompanies his father’s words of wisdom to guide the reader through the stages of the honeybees’ lifecycle, while creating a space for young readers to share in Akeem’s passion. The processes of looking after bees are presented in imaginative ways, from humorous bee dialogue to detailed diagrams of equipment.

You will discover the roles of each member of the bee colony, explore what it takes to harvest honey and learn how to care for bees all year round. At the end of the book you meet the real characters of the book in a gallery of photographs of the family and farm.

Related: Do bees really die if they sting you?

How to Explain Robotics to a Grown-up

Part of the "How To Explain" book series, this latest installment teaches children how to explain the mechanical world of robotics to their parents. The book follows a confident young boy and his curious mother, as he explains the basic components and principles that make a robot.

The inquisitive duo go on a journey of discovery through their home to a robotic expo, to uncover the science behind different robots and understand how they use technology to complete tasks. The story outlines the three main principles of robotic coding: Sense, Compute and Act, and delves into how the three work together to create a robot.

A charming feature of this book series are the handy 'pro tips' on how to help adults understand the subject, while simultaneously imparting learning skills to the young reader. For example, "Unlike robots, humans sometimes need a break! A snack and a little humor may be just what your grown-up needs to stay focused and ready to learn."

Related: Check out the best laptops for coding and programming you can get right now

Pet selector!

In this charismatic guide to pets, comedian turned pet detective Russell Kane lends a comedic helping hand to those looking to bring a new furry friend into the family. Focusing mostly on breeds across the feline and canine kingdoms, Kane introduces his young readers to the various personalities and behaviors of commonly considered pets. He uses a handy key to rate their qualities, such as intelligence, playfulness and neediness.

Helpful advice aside, Kane has also explored the origins of our furry friends, which some readers may find surprising. For example, French bulldogs, not from France, were bred by British lace-makers in the 1800s to ward off pests, and Shih Tzu or 'little lions' were Buddhist monks’ companions, who sometimes slept in their sleeves.

Although cats and dogs are featured heavily in the book, there is also a menagerie of other animals such as rabbits, rodents and reptiles to consider. Along with being helpful and humorous, this book is full of entertaining illustrations that bring each pet's personality to life, from easy-going Persian cats to ball-crazed Jack Russell terriers.

Related: Do any animals keep pets like humans do?

Our Earth

The declining state of the natural world is dire, making it an essential issue for us to be knowledgeable about. But the future of Earth doesn’t have to be a negative one. This rhyming children’s book contains vibrant and cheerful illustrations as it explains the planet we live on.

By providing ideas for ways in which we can all look after Earth in a conversational and child-friendly manner, "Our Earth" is the perfect book for budding environmentalists or indeed any member of the next generation. The delightful illustrations and memorable rhymes make the underlying message in this book a simple one, and children ages three to eight will enjoy reading it.

Whether you choose to walk and ride your bike to school, or you’re sorting your rubbish into recyclable materials, "Our Earth" teaches the reader that we can all play a part in shaping the future of the planet, no matter how small the action or how young the person.

Stomp, Soar, Dino Roar

In an immersive short story for young readers, the dinosaurs of the Cretaceous period are introduced through colorful cartoons and sounds. You will explore the world in this ancient era with newborn Triceratops Terri, as she encounters new species for the first time, too.

Each illustration enables the reader to visualise how every dinosaur would engage with its surroundings and — most importantly in "Stomp, Soar, Dino Roar" — its echoing sounds. The text’s size, shape and design helps readers to recreate the style of each sound, and phonetic spellings break down the complicated dinosaur names beneath the main text.

Hear from dunking, water-loving dinosaurs and dueling competitors as the rhymes become an entertaining and fast-paced tour. At the end of "Stomp, Soar, Dino Roar," you get more information about each dinosaur mentioned, with useful fact files and illustrations to show the size of each in comparison to a human. More thorough information about how we know what each dinosaur may have sounded like — through fossils and the analysis of living relatives — is included at the back of the book, as well as a timeline to visualise how long ago animals like Terri graced the Earth.

Read more: A brief history of dinosaurs

A Kid's Guide to the Night Sky

The night sky is filled with countless cosmic objects to explore and this book does its best to introduce a whole heap of them to the next generation of astronomers. From the little bear to the mighty dragon, there are many glinting constellations and bright stars to identify with the help of "A Kid's Guide to the Night Sky."

However, this book offers so much more for science-minded stargazers. The life cycle of stars, conjunctions and light pollution are just a few of the topics that his book introduces to its audience. It also takes a deep dive into each of the solar system's planets and some of the amazing technology that's working to find out more about them.

With so many constellations, satellites and comets to discover, this easy-to-follow guide offers helpful tips and tricks to make sense of what's in space.

Read more: Best telescopes for beginners and advanced scopes for stars, galaxies and nebulas

Doodle with Duddle: How to Draw Dinosaurs

Would you like to be able to draw cartoon dinosaurs? Draw them really well? If you put in a lot of practice with the lessons that Jonny Duddle teaches, you could!

The author and illustrator of "How to Draw Dinosaurs" is a self-proclaimed "doodler," which is a very modest way of saying he’s a cartoon artist — and a very good one, at that. Duddle begins to take the reader through his dinosaur-drawing methods by listing the basic equipment: "just a pencil to start," although he does have his favorite tools of the trade that include a sketchbook and a ballpoint pen — not an advisable drawing implement for mistake-prone beginners.

He then introduces us to a quartet of his own, made-up dinosaur-like characters who assist in the lessons, and then readers get to start drawing some (mostly) real dinosaurs.

Duddle alternates between pages of dinosaur facts with finished dinosaur illustrations, and step-by-step lessons on how to draw them in his style. It’s often a case of building layers on top of a basic shape — such as the ellipse that forms the body of a diplodocus. The section on dinosaur skeletons, which includes a step-by-step illustration of how fossils form, is a particularly vibrant chapter that gives the budding artist a sense of the internal structure of a dinosaur and some shapes that they can start to build their own dinosaur drawings around.

Finally, for those who have advanced in their dino-doodling and have the confidence to go it alone, there’s space in the back of the book to draw their own fantasy dinosaur and a comic strip of their own doodles.

But even if the reader has no interest in trying any of Duddle’s drawing lessons, "How to Draw Dinosaurs" is a fun read for school-aged students, accompanied by captivating cartoon dinosaurs. At the very least, it’s a good drawing reference for a future school dinosaur project or art homework.

Related: If birds are dinosaurs, why aren't they cold-blooded?

The Ultimate Kids’ Guide to Dogs

If you have a pet dog, or if you call yourself a "dog person," this book is the ideal introduction to their history, biology, behaviour and communication. The author’s engaging style guides young readers through all aspects of this popular pet, from their animal ancestors to the emergence of dogs 14,200 years ago.

Across each page are vibrant illustrations showing uplifting scenes of human-dog interaction. The timeline details how dogs have been helping humans for thousands of years — how humans have mistreated them, but also how work has been carried out to keep dogs protected.

Throughout "The Ultimate Kids’ Guide to Dogs" you will learn about the many jobs dogs have been selectively bred for, as well as the biology and behaviors of different breeds in the dog fact files. If you have a new puppy in your family, this is the perfect way to get to know them better. A visual timeline of a dog’s growth details what to expect from your new best friend, while the body language guide will explain what your pet is trying to tell you.

"The Ultimate Kids’ Guide to Dogs" is a brilliant blend of information and interaction. After absorbing the facts, use the dog training guide to test new tricks on your dog and — at the end of the book — test your knowledge in the ultimate dog quiz.

Related: Do any animals keep pets like humans do?

The World’s First Rollercoaster and Other Amazing Inventions

You can’t go far wrong with cool facts and funny comic strips, so author/illustrator dream team Mike Barfield and Franziska Höllbacher are off to a pretty good start with "The World’s First Rollercoaster and Other Amazing Inventions." It charts the greatest inventions from the last century or so — but when we say "greatest," we don’t necessarily mean the inventions that have significantly furthered our species.

Instead, fun inventions like the rollercoaster, the hamburger, skateboards and video games take precedence over the likes of electric vehicles and smartphones. This is where Mike and Franziska can have the most fun. There’s a full-page comic strip for every item on the contents page, giving a potted history of the people behind the invention and their world-famous ideas.

ome of those ideas are a little more out-there — like the "invention" of the dog, which was domesticated over the course of the last 10,000 years or so, the history of which has been distilled into a single silly, yet informative, comic strip. But even the more conventional inventions have been injected with good humor and an interesting angle.

For instance, instead of telling us how Carl Friedrich Benz built the world’s first petrol-drive automobile in 1885, Barfield veers slightly off that course to talk about Benz’s wife, Bertha, who achieved her own world-firsts with Carl’s invention and without whom we wouldn’t even know the name “Benz” in the world of motoring.

If you want to learn more about that, you’ll just have to read the book — we promise you it’s well worth it. "The World’s First Rollercoaster and Other Amazing Inventions" is as amusing as it will be interesting to anyone of any age, and by the end you’ll be sure to have learned a thing or two about some of your favorite inventions.

Related: 32 weird technologies that never took off

Your Sustainable World

It's safe to say that children have never been more aware of the impact that climate change is having on the world — and with that awareness come countless questions about how families can play their part in protecting the planet. In this simple guide to sustainable living, children will learn about different climate challenges, as well as some of the small ways in which we can help reduce our negative impact on the environment.

Along with well-known concepts in sustainability such as "the five R's" (reduce, reuse, recycle, repurpose and refuse), there are new ways of being greener to explore, such as "green fashion" and "smart eating." Packed with helpful tips and advice, "Your Sustainable World" is sure to inspire children to make more environmentally friendly choices.

Related: 15 unexpected effects of climate change

Respect the Insect

In this amusing, factual and engaging book, young readers are introduced to the insect world in a visual way, to help understand each creature’s importance.

Each insect is personified by a cartoon character who will explain their daily role in the environment. Let the critters welcome you into their home for a grand tour, detailing how they built their homes and some of the ways their actions are misunderstood.

From plastic problem-solving wax moth caterpillars to earth-moving termites and honey-making bees, each page will show you a new animal in action. One section reveals the prevalence of insects around the globe, from desert dwellers to the insects that need to live in conditions so cold that if you touched them, they would die from exposure to your body heat.

Wherever you live in the world, this book ensures that the next time you come across one of these species, you will have more respect for the insect.

Related: How do insects know which flowers have pollen?

Best science books for older children and young adults

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact

Throughout the history of science fiction, exotic planets orbiting suns beyond our solar system have played host to some of the greatest tales in the genre. Yet it was more than 25 years after we first heard of the Starship Enterprise's mission to explore strange new worlds that we discovered an exoplanet orbiting a distant star. Since then, astronomers have discovered more than 5,000 of them, so it’s reasonable to ask how these real-life planets stack up against their sci-fi counterparts. That’s the question Keith Cooper addresses in this fascinating book.

It turns out that many of the various planetary types imagined in fiction have a chance of existing somewhere in the galaxy: from Dune’s desert-covered Arrakis, to frozen 'snowball worlds' like the planet Hoth in the "Star Wars" universe. There are also some genuine oddities, like worlds with two or more suns, or planets where there's perpetual daylight in one hemisphere and endless night in the other. What’s particularly exciting is the possibility of discovering a planet that’s been massively engineered by an advanced civilization, similar to the globe-spanning city of Coruscant from "Star Wars". Such an 'ecumenopolis' has not yet been discovered by astronomers, nor have they found evidence of life anywhere except Earth, so these things are still strictly confined to the realm of sci-fi.

Despite dealing with some cutting-edge science, Cooper’s book isn’t too technical, focusing instead on the wonder and excitement of the subject. He draws heavily on his interviews with exoplanet scientists, discussing their techniques, discoveries and plans for the future. Comparisons with the fictional planets of movies, TV shows and novels run like a thread throughout the book, and support the old saying that the "truth is stranger than fiction." While most fictional planets are at least vaguely Earth-like, real-life exoplanets are amazingly diverse.

Related: 11 sci-fi concepts that are possible (in theory)

Eatopedia: The Wild World of Animal Digestion

Every animal has to eat and now you can find out exactly how some of the world's largest, smallest and strangest creatures chow down. Filled with fun facts, this book takes a brief look into the favorite foods of a variety of animals, as well as how their bodies are designed to digest those meals.

The big draw for "Eatopedia" has to be its cookbook-like style and anatomical illustrations. Whether or not you're interested in reading about how a blue whale or hagfish consumes its food, you’ll feel compelled to turn the page just to see another visual explanation. While flipping-through, you’ll consider questions you might not otherwise have asked yourself, such as "How long is an anteater's esophagus?" and "What does a chicken's gizzard do?"

The design makes this a coffee table that you’ll occasionally pick up and peruse, despite the niche subject matter. But if you're an animal lover who wants to know more about eating habits in the wild, then you may well consume the whole of "Eatopedia" in one sitting.

Related: Cannibal animals: 12 creatures that gobble up their own kind

Bridges

Whether you walk, drive or get pulled across them, bridges share a common purpose — they connect our planet's dramatic and undulating landscapes. This book is far more than a typical encyclopedia, it spans vast categories of bridge architecture in an attractive and informative manner, while gripping you with historical accounts. "Bridges" doesn’t just cover the typical form you may initially conjure up in your mind, it describes a diverse range of natural bridges, folding bridges, lifting bridges and armored vehicles that extend their arms to lay a bridge on demand.

Annotated sketches complement picturesque drawings, providing key details along with imaginative depictions. You learn more about the world’s most famous bridges and marvel at record-breaking structures. Many of the bridges we use today were built a long time ago, and this book covers their construction, step-by-step, to show how they came to be. The tales in this book document the innovative methods, environmental issues and years of manual labor involved in building bridges, which serves as a great reminder of the effort and dedication undertaken to simplify our journeys.

Related: Why are there no bridges over the Amazon River?

Crystals, Rocks, and Gemstones: Exploring Earth's Treasures

Peer through a jeweler’s loupe to magnify the world's most tough and vibrant minerals in this charming guide. From birthstones to basalt, this illustrated encyclopedia delves into the fascinating characteristics of rocks, minerals and crystals found around the globe. Author Kelsey Oseid brilliantly blends the science of geology with the art of lapidary — shaping stones or gems — while taking readers from Earth's crust to the jewelry studio. This tour is accompanied by attractive illustrations that showcase the form each mineral takes, as well as the sparkle of diamonds and the iridescence of labradorite.

Tackling more than just true minerals, "Crystals, Rocks, and Gemstones" also includes nature's organic minerals, such as pearls and amber, along with some other 'mineral oddities,' such as lightning-forged fulgurite and washed-up sea glass. As a reference book, this is a great one to thumb through and find out more about where your favorite gems come from.

Related: The best rock tumblers for beginners, hobbyists, and professionals

Nature at Night

What goes on in the wild while we're all asleep? Naturalist and wildlife photographer Charles Hood shares some of his nocturnal adventures in this witty and insightful book. From forest owls hunting between trees, to bioluminescent squid in the ocean depths, Charles Hood takes readers on a journey around the globe to shine light on the animals that rely on and thrive under the cover of darkness.

Along with Hood's fascinating tales, the book includes more than 240 amazing images of the weird and wonderful animals that come out at night, and some breathtaking views of the auroras, moonbows and red sprites that you might spot if you were to step out into the night. It is a must-read for wildlife lovers and those curious about what goes on in the dark.

Related: Are all owls actually night owls?

There's No Such Thing as a Silly Question

Fact checked by the world-leading experts in their fields at the University of Cambridge, "There's No Such Thing as a Silly Question" answers many of those curious questions you and your little ones have been thinking about.

Do bees sting other bees? What is fire made of? Why are aeroplane toilets so loud? Those are a small sample of the sort of science and history questions that this light-hearted and fun, but informative children's book has to offer. Even if the question hasn't crossed your mind before, be assured that flicking through its pages is sure to have you tilting your head and wondering, "Who did invent time zones?" or "Can an elephant even jump, let alone to any significant height?".

As well as being jam-packed with information you didn't know you needed to know, each page erupts with humorous illustrations that make "There's No Such Thing as a Silly Question" a joy to read.

Discover more fascinating questions with Life's Little Mysteries

Boats: Steamers, Icebreakers, and Ghost Ships

This visually entertaining book sails you straight into the maritime world to explore the technology invented for traversing the seas. As you navigate the pages, you will learn how to communicate in Morse code, use a sextant and understand the science behind a submarine.

The scientific diagrams dispersed through "Boats" are subtle enough that they blend into creative and charismatic ocean scenes while teaching the basic physics behind floating boats, surging ships, radar reception and many more marine mechanics. "Boats" does exactly what its title claims, but what is surprising is the great array of water-borne machines that have been produced throughout the history of human exploration, and the diverse onboard devices that have evolved alongside them.

From intricate engineering to long-told maritime superstitions, you are sure to find something in "Boats" that will intrigue you.

The Tiny Farm Planner

Have you ever wanted to grow your own produce at home, but don’t know where to start? This book is the perfect way to keep your home farm on track, plan its layout and log its progress. Filled with essential information to consider and useful tips for producing the right plants and quantities for your needs, "The Tiny Farm Planner" will help to keep your garden growing healthily.

Chapters include trackers for chores, seed-starting schedules, disease trackers, seasonal reviews and expense logs. In between each season’s log, the author has written friendly reminders about the best practice for gardening, as well as extensive information about how the garden is changing throughout the year — and what you may not have considered as you approach a new season. Its advice draws on personal experiences from author Jill Ragan and there are relevant, inspirational quotes from famous individuals throughout.

This wealth of information and tracking prompts makes "The Tiny Farm Planner" a great gardening companion — and the task of producing a tiny farm that much less daunting.

Related: Who were the first farmers?

Up, Up High

It can be difficult to understand any environment beyond Earth’s. With this book, the reader is introduced to the solar system and the many worlds "Up, Up High". It’s written in a storybook style that takes you soaring through the skies and out of Earth’s atmosphere in a rocket.

From the astronauts who regularly venture into space, to electrical phenomena like nothing seen on our planet, any hard science and fascinating facts are explained in pop-up text boxes. This admirably combines smooth-flowing, lyrical language without missing out any crucial information that might answer children’s questions.

Katie Rewse’s illustrations show accurate representations of planets, phenomena and space technology, while introducing friendly faced characters, simplified space imagery and stimulating works of art for young readers to enjoy.

Overall, this short story covers a vast range of topics without feeling crammed. By the end, with the assistance of clear diagrams and an immersive storyline, the reader can begin to visualize the space beyond our sky.

Survival Gardening

During a time when people are more aware than ever of the importance of food sustainability, this gardening guide is a must-read for anyone looking to grow their food.

From fast five-week grows to establishing gardens for the long haul, this complete guide to at-home agriculture is overflowing with helpful information and instructions. There are also several DIY projects that tackle some of the equipment you'll need to create your survival garden, such as water filtration systems, compost, and "humanure" making.

Along with abundant advice on the practicalities of growing your food, there is also a great deal of nutritional insight to discover, such as fat-rich seeds and protein-loaded chickpeas. One of the most important aspects of this survival guide is that it teaches how to preserve and store the fruits of your labor, including how to dehydrate and how to build a root cellar in your garden. So whether you're a nature novice or a green-thumbed gardener, there's heaps of knowledge to harvest from "Survival Gardening".

Space: From Sputnik to the International Space Station

The story of humankind’s ventures into space, from unmanned spacecraft and our first tentative test flights in the 1950s to today’s International Space Station missions, is replete with incredible tales of technological feats and individual heroism.

Take the story of John Stapp, for example, which sets the standard for "Space," the latest transport book by writer and illustrator Jan van der Veken. Stapp was a test pilot who built a rocket sled to assess the effects of sudden, massive acceleration and deceleration on the human body. He was strapped into his sled by assistants before he hit the ignition button and went from zero to 620 miles per hour in just five seconds, then back to zero in an even snappier 1.4 seconds. Dozens of these human test runs left him with broken ribs, broken wrists and bruised eye sockets, but Stapp survived and the data from these experiments were invaluable to the safety systems incorporated into future space missions.

From one double-page spread to the next, "Space" takes us through some of the biggest milestones in space travel. Following on from Stapp’s exploits, we head into the first human spaceflight, the Moon landings, Skylab (the first US space station) and the Space Shuttle program. Between these historical waypoints, van der Veken explains the technology that got us there — the rockets, space suits and ground vehicles without which future astronauts would have been left to stare dreamily into the sky — and more incredible stories of human endeavor, such as the time Sergei Krikalev was stranded on the Russian space station Mir for six months, after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Like the other books in his transport series, "Space" is also gorgeously illustrated by van der Veken, and the retro, Tintin-style drawings of astronauts and ground crew in action around iconic spacecraft suit this book to a tee: Hergé would be proud. "Space" is recommended for ages 10 and upwards, but we think its eye-candy alone would appeal to just about anyone.

Amazing Jellyfish

Take the plunge into the marine world with this engaging and interactive guide to the mysterious lives and environment of jellyfish. "Amazing Jellyfish" is expertly written for 8- to 12-year-olds but contains plenty of impressive facts and statistics that would amaze much older readers.

The first-person style from the author helps to maintain the attention of young readers, by including personal anecdotes and avoiding packed pages of overwhelming text. There is a perfect balance of information and visual elements for confident readers, as each section is split into sophisticated sketches and a mixture of writing styles. The book also contains fact files of some of the most poisonous animals, a list of jellyfish-themed jokes, an interactive maze through marine litter and detailed life cycle illustrations.

Even if you have an idea of what life as a jellyfish might look like before reading this book, "Amazing Jellyfish" may introduce you to a much more fascinating and highly diverse world of the jellies.

Related: 13 of the most venomous sea creatures lurking in the water

Astrophysics for Supervillains

Taking plenty of cues from the bestselling "Horrible Histories" series, "Astrophysics for Supervillains" is a children’s book of space facts that moves space education beyond what a typical 9-year-old might learn in their classroom. And as long as there’s other stuff on the school curriculum, like English or Geography, there’s no chance of the teacher finding time to derail the learnings of a supervillain-in-training.

Author and astronomer Dr. Matt Bothwell steps up to the role of evil genius and takes us through six meaty chapters of space facts, from the relatively ordinary confines of our own solar system to the end of a star’s life, the heat death of the universe and, our favorite, "How to Destroy the Earth" — a list of the various cosmic fates to which Earth may finally succumb, however unlikely those might be.

Every chapter can effectively be split into a series of questions that might typically be asked by a school student of a certain age, such as "How long could you survive on Pluto?", "What is inside a black hole?" and "If the universe is growing, what is it expanding into?". These questions are comprehensively answered by Dr. Bothwell in his best supervillain professor voice, reveling in the extreme dangers posed by the space beyond our little bubble of atmosphere, and the apocalyptic scenarios that we might encounter if we could travel millions of light years from Earth and live a few billion years or more.

Dr. Bothwell is the public astronomer at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, so engaging a school-age audience is all in a day’s work — and "Astrophysics for Supervillains" is no exception. It cleverly weaves around tough answers that might require an actual PhD to unpick, coupling them with plenty of cartoon illustrations and the kind of choice typography that makes a good comic strip.

All told, this is a really fun insight into the cosmos that could inspire future generations of astronomers.

Cloudspotting for Beginners

If the ever-changing sky and shape-shifting patterns of clouds have ever piqued your interest, this is the book for you. Those fluffy objects floating in the atmosphere are immensely complex, and each form of cloud has a specific classification, produces intriguing phenomena and exists only at favourable altitudes. "Cloudspotting for Beginners" introduces you to each type of cloud, often giving them a poetic personality to remember them by.

Just like the act of skywatching itself, reading this book has a calming effect, as each cloud type and phenomenon is presented with elegant sketches that beautifully capture the intricacies and moods of different skies. You will learn about the 10 main cloud types, positioned on the page at the altitudes where you can spot them. Artistic graphs detail the science of cloud formation, the anatomy of rainbows, halos formed by clouds’ crystals and the appearance of clouds on other planets.

How were clouds named, which weather pattern is each cloud type linked to and what clouds capture a sunset? The answers to all these questions and more are revealed in "Cloudspotting for Beginners."

A Brief History of Stuff

DK has selected a truly eclectic list of "stuff" for inclusion in this curiously put-together book. From baby bottles to ballpoint pens, there isn't much of a logical path or timeline — which, oddly, is part of what makes it a brilliant reference for kids of all ages.

Casting your eye over the contents page and seeing a list of everyday items such as a thimble or a fridge magnet, you're left realising there's a gap in your knowledge about how all these things came to be. Luckily, "A Brief History of Stuff" has all the information you need about their origins and impact on society.

Packed with bitesize facts, before you know it you'll be reciting the history of "stuff" to your friends and family.

Read more: 20 inventions that changed the world

The Pocket Calculator Story

These days, calculators have mostly been relegated to a smartphone or desktop app. However, this piece of electronic math wizardry has a history that is long and varied, as will become abundantly clear to readers of "The Pocket Calculator Story."

From the key invention of the transistor in the 1960s, you'll follow the evolutionary journey of the humble pocket calculator and watch it transform into a feature-packed mini-computer, capable of making short work of complex equations. You'll also discover the many weird and wonderful calculators that broke the mold, such as the calculator-pen hybrid, the credit card calculator and the iconic calculator watch that dominated the 1980s.

Offering a dose of tech nostalgia, this makes an excellent reference book for any personal electronics enthusiast.

Related: Best laptops for students 2024: Get the perfect laptop for college

What If Fungi Win?

Arturo Casadevall is a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and the author of "What if Fungi Win?" — an insightful look at how fungi facilitated evolution and benefited the global biome, but how they could also be the downfall of civilization.

Drawing on his own research and experience, Casadevall describes the fascinating biology behind fungi, including their amazing powers of radiation resistance and healing abilities. There's an important cautionary tale in "What If Fungi Win?", too: In a post-Covid world, Casadevall shares the importance of tackling infectious fungi and warns about the rise of drug-resistant species.

By the time you've finished this fascinating and eye-opening book, you'll surely have gained a new appreciation for fungi — along with a cautious side-eye.

50 Women in Technology

In a celebration of the female pioneers that have helped advance technology throughout history, "50 Women in Technology" is sure to inspire the next generation of brilliant scientists. Along with some of the more recognisable names such as Katherine Johnson or Marie Curie, there are many unsung heroes of science to discover, such as Vera Rubin, whose work led to the discovery of dark matter.

In part, this reference book acts as a reminder of the great women whose work paved the way for modern minds. For example, Stephanie Willerth, a professor at the University of Victoria in Canada, oversees research to engineer treatments for central nervous system disorders, while data scientist Rumman Chowdhury is tackling solutions for ethical artificial intelligence. These are just some of the minds that you'll meet through a series of interview-based biographies that reveal the motivations of women who are making strides in technology.

Related: 25 amazing women in science and math

Radar and the Raft

The story of radar, its inventors and contributing scientists are combined in this true story about the technology’s emergence and lifesaving uses. Written for readers around the ages of 10 to 13, "Radar and the Raft" is for those with an interest in history and technology.

Unlike many technology-based non-fiction books, this story largely focuses on the people and families behind the technology, as well as life during World War II. The book includes a combination of character storylines and multiple scientific discoveries, intriguing the reader as to how they will connect together. Toward the end of the book, these stories and inventions meet in a dramatic scene that demonstrates the lifesaving potential of science.

"Radar and the Raft" grips readers through both personal stories and the evolution of technology. By connecting the story of the Bell family’s near-death experience at sea during World War II with the story of radar’s discovery, the author has produced an engaging and informative storyline. This is a great read that explores the direct consequences of scientific discoveries.

Read more: How radar works: The technology made famous by war

The sun's solar cycles were once around three years shorter than they are today, a new analysis of centuries-old Korean chronicles reveals. This previously unknown anomaly occurred during a mysterious solar epoch known as the "Maunder Minimum," more than 300 years ago. 

The sun is constantly in a state of flux. Our home star cycles through periods of increased activity, known as solar maximum, when solar storms become more frequent and powerful, as well as spells of reduced activity, known as solar minimum, when solar storms almost completely disappear.

It currently takes about 11 years for the sun to complete a solar cycle, from minimum to maximum and back again. Scientists can track the sun's progress through a solar cycle by counting the number of sunspots on the star's surface, which appear more frequently in the lead-up to and during solar maximum.

But just as the sun fluctuates within individual cycles, historical sunspot records show that over longer periods, spanning decades or centuries, the overall output of solar cycles can also rise and fall.

The Maunder Minimum, sometimes referred to as the Grand Solar Minimum, was a period of greatly reduced solar activity between 1645 and 1715 when sunspots "effectively disappeared," Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado who was not involved in the recent research, told Live Science in an email.

Related: 15 dazzling images of the sun 

During this time, the sun's output was so low that average global temperatures also dropped, in what scientists have dubbed a "mini ice age," according to NASA — though it was also likely linked to high levels of volcanic eruptions at the time.

Sunspot records paint a general picture of the Maunder Minimum, which is named after the English astronomer Edward Walter Maunder. But there is still much about the period that scientists don't know. 

In the new study, published Oct. 3 in the journal AGU Advances, researchers analyzed historic auroral records from Korea and found that solar cycles during the Maunder Minimum were only eight years long on average — three years shorter than modern cycles.

The aurora records were part of three separate books, or chronicles, written on behalf of Korean kings that contained detailed daily reports of royal business, state affairs, weather and astronomical phenomena that occurred within the Korean peninsula between 918 and 1910, according to the 2021 study that first described them.

The astronomical sections of the chronicles frequently speak of "red vapors" or "vapors like firelight." The researchers believe these descriptions refer to the West Pacific Anomaly (WPA) — an area above Korea that produces regular red auroras despite being far from the magnetic poles. Like other auroras, the WPA occurs when solar radiation collides with Earth's magnetic shield. But unlike other auroras at the time, these lightshows persisted despite a decrease in solar activity because the Earth's magnetic field is thinner in this region, which makes them a great proxy for solar cycle progression, the researchers wrote. 

The dates when these auroras occurred show that solar radiation from the sun followed an eight-year cycle.

Scientists don't know what causes long-term solar cycle trends like the Maunder Minimum, McIntosh said. There are "many things" that could influence solar activity over such long periods, he added. It is also unclear why the solar cycles shortened during that time. But the new findings could provide "pivotal clues" in understanding this mysterious epoch in greater detail, researchers wrote in the paper.

Over the last few solar cycles, solar activity has decreased slightly, and there have been some slight fluctuations in cycle length. This led some experts to predict that we were entering a new epoch of reduced solar activity.

However, the progression of the current solar cycle, which has been very active and is fast approaching solar maximum, suggests this is not the case.

The deep sea, which encompasses waters below 660 feet (200 meters), is home to roughly a million species that have adapted to their extreme surroundings with equally extreme solutions to one of life's greatest trials: finding a mate. In the excerpt below from "Deep Sea: 10 Things You Should Know," ocean explorer Jon Copley takes a deep dive into the astonishing sex lives of animals living in the darkest corners of our planet. 

All animals face similar trials in life: searching for food, avoiding being eaten, finding a mate and rearing their offspring, and then those offspring finding a home. And just as deep-sea animals overcome the challenge of finding food in lots of different ways, the same is true for those other challenges.

Populations of deep-sea animals often become sparse where food is scarce in the deep sea, which can make it difficult to meet a member of the opposite sex for reproduction. As a result, some deep-sea animals take an opportunistic, "have-a-go" approach to mating. In several species of deep-sea squids and octopuses, for example, males try to mate with any potential partner that they meet, regardless of their sex or even their species.

Mating in squids involves the male passing a spearlike packet of sperm down a groove in one of their arms to stick on to a female's body, ready to release its contents when she produces her eggs. But male squid collected in nets from the deep sometimes have sperm spears stuck on their bodies too, in places where the jabs can't have been self-inflicted, indicating attempted mating by another male. Attempted interspecies mating has also been observed: in 1994 scientists diving in a Human-Occupied Vehicle filmed two male octopuses of different species trying to mate with each other, 2,500 meters (8,200 feet) down on the ocean floor of the eastern Pacific Ocean.

Related: Barreleye fish: The deep-sea weirdo with rotating eyes and a see-through head

As an alternative to indiscriminate mating, some deep-sea animals stay with a partner once they've met them. The sea cucumber Paroriza pallens looks like a moldy banana and spends its adult life crawling across the abyssal plains, leaving a track that can be seen in photographs of the seafloor. Sometimes the single track of a Paroriza meets another, and then the two trails continue side-by-side like a railway line. At the end of those tell-tale twin tracks there's a pair of Paroriza, now wandering across the abyssal plain together.

Paroriza sea cucumbers are hermaphrodites that develop male and female sex organs at the same time, but they can't self-fertilize. Instead, the sperm produced by each partner fertilizes the eggs produced by the other partner. Staying together means that one partner is always available to fertilize the other's eggs whenever they produce them — and the story of their encounter and subsequent fidelity is recorded in their trails on the soft mud of the abyssal plain.

When it comes to keeping a male handy for fertilizing eggs, several deep-sea animals have evolved a more extreme solution. Wood-eating clams, bone-eating "zombie" worms, and some species of anglerfishes have tiny males that attach themselves to a female once they've found her, acting as standby "accessory males" to fertilize the female's eggs when needed. In some species of bone-eating worms, for example, one female can have a harem of a dozen or more males, each about a hundred times smaller than the female, hanging on to her with microscopic hooks.

About two dozen species of anglerfish that live in the deep sea also have accessory males to varying degrees. In some species, the smaller male attaches temporarily to a female, but he can swim off and hook up with another female. In other species, however, the male fuses his mouth onto the female's body in a kiss that lasts the rest of his life. The male's blood supply joins up with hers through his lips, and he can no longer leave her or feed himself: he becomes a parasitic provider of sperm on-tap, nourished by the female through their shared circulation as she continues to feed. In some species, only one male forms this lifelong union with a female, but in others, one female can have several accessory males dangling off her at any one time.

But there's a complication in such a permanent pairing. Fish have an immune system with two main parts like ours. The "innate" immune system produces general defenses to fight off infections, while the "adaptive" immune system recognizes and attacks any "foreign" substances, including cells that are genetically different to the rest of the body. That adaptive immune system is great for tackling would-be invaders, such as disease-causing bacteria, but is a problem when sharing a blood supply with a partner. 

If we were to join our blood supply to that of another person, our adaptive immune systems would attack each other through the shared circulation, unless we were closely related genetically. It's similar to how organ transplants have to be carefully chosen and treated to reduce the risk of being rejected — so how do these deep-sea anglerfish avoid rejecting their partner in the same way?

The anglerfish species with males that attach permanently to females lack several genes that enable their adaptive immune system to recognise cells that are not their own. This means that their adaptive immune systems don't attack each other when they pair up — but it also implies that they may be less able to fight off infections than other fish. It's possible, however, that the innate immune system of those anglerfish species may compensate by producing better general defenses to fight off infection. Further research into how those anglerfish manage without a normal adaptive immune system might even reveal new ways to treat infections in humans.

Text from Deep Sea: 10 Things You Should Know. Reprinted by permission of Orion Publishing.

If you are itching to know more about what lies deep beneath the waves, you can read an interview with Jon Copley here, in which he told Live Science about new discoveries and the biggest myths about the deep sea. 

A first edition of Nicolaus Copernicus' groundbreaking work, in which the Polish astronomer proposed that the Earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa, will be going up for sale next month. It is expected to fetch $2.5 million.

Titled "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium," Latin for "On the revolutions of the heavenly spheres," Copernicus' tome was published in 1543 and paved the way for future scientists, including Galileo Galilei, and helped revolutionize the field of astronomy. 

The book was considered highly controversial at the time, as it created a new heliocentric model of the universe in which the sun was at the center of the solar system and the planets revolved around it. The new model went against the widely accepted Catholic Church doctrine that the Earth was at the center. 

About 277 known first-editions exist worldwide (of 500 originally printed, which the Vatican swiftly banned), however most are the property of museums, libraries and other institutions. Only a handful belong to private owners, making this sale especially rare. (In 2008, a similar copy sold at auction for $2.2 million," according to Christie's.)

Related: Best science books: Popular science books to feed your imagination

"This book only comes up for auction once in a while," Christian Westergaard, the founder of Sophia Rare Books who is handling the sale, told Live Science. "It's rare to find one in this condition. It's a completely perfect copy."

The only real notable change to the leather-bound book is the binding, which Westergaard estimates was replaced sometime during the 18th century. Often copies that come on the market have been tampered with and include institutional stamps removed, pages chemically washed and other restoration work. None of that is present here, Westergaard said.

"Book collecting is a lot like car collecting," Westergaard said. "Collectors want the original."

The manuscript also contains several handwritten annotations, including two early names scrawled onto the title page that can be seen only under UV light. They include the words "Brugiere" and "Jacobi Du Roure." 

"Unfortunately, we do not know anything about the two early owners and probable annotators," Westergaard said. "They seem to have been lost in the haze of time. But maybe one day someone will succeed in shedding light on these."

Westergaard plans to exhibit the manuscript during the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair that will be held April 27 through 30.

The best science book will not just educate; it will also enlighten and entertain. It has the power to transform a dry subject that you dreaded in school into a mind-boggling and captivating story. And it will give you a different perspective on the world around you.

£e have curated a list of the best science books that you should not miss out on — from captivating accounts of the history of the planet and universe, to illuminating insights into the human mind and body. These books make science accessible to all and we think that the list will have something for everyone.

If you’re after some more specific science knowledge, then our guides to the best physics books and best astronomy books will enlighten you. Or, if you fancy some fiction, then peruse our list of the best sci-fi books.

Best science books

How did it all begin? And how did we get here? Combining history and science, A Short History of Nearly Everything offers a comprehensive yet entertaining answer to these questions. Written out of dissatisfaction with his own scientific knowledge, Bill Bryson takes the reader on a dazzling journey through the greatest scientific discoveries in history.

Armed with his poignant wit and dry humor, Bryson infuses dry topics with color by telling the stories of discovery through the lives of the scientists who made them. Those quirky, eccentric, competitive, sometimes tragic, but resilient scientists bring the story to life.

Even if you are not interested in science, this book will evoke a sense of wonder about the universe, encourage you to think big, and make you marvel at the incredible world we live in. This book is for anyone eager to learn more about our world and how it came to be.

How do helicopters work? Or elevators? Or cells? Randall Munroe, the creator of the XKCD webcomic, explains how things work using illustrations and only the most common 1,000 words in the English language. Washing machines become “boxes that make clothes smell better,” airplanes are “sky boats,” and microwaves are “food-heating radio boxes”.

Thing Explainer is an informative and entertaining guide to the science and technology that surrounds us, devoid of confusing jargon. This book will shift your perspective and approach to explanation. So, next time you’ll try to explain how something works rather than merely calling it by its name. A fun must-read for the curious minds who are wondering how things actually work and why.

Best physics books

In The God Equation, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku writes about his lifelong mission to find the “Holy Grail of physics:” a theory of everything. A theory to explain everything from the start to the end of the universe, unifying all forces at play.

Sounds like too heavy of a read before bedtime? Rest assured, Kaku writes about this mind-boggling topic in an understandable and engaging way. You’ll get a great historic overview of the major milestones in theoretical physics: both the scientists and the technologies that ultimately led to the development of the string theory — the concept that our universe is made up of tiny threads whose vibrations produce all physical phenomena.

Along the way, Kaku doesn’t lose sight of the practicalities of everyday life and explains how the scientific ideas he presents apply to our daily lives.

What does it feel like to fly into space? How do you prepare for it? And what is it like to return back to Earth? In his book, astronaut Tim Peake answers all the questions you never knew you had about going into space. Using an engaging Q&A format, he answers the questions he has most frequently been asked since returning back to Earth after his Principia mission on the International Space Station (ISS) back in 2015-16. The book gives insights into the cutting-edge science, as well as the practicalities and day-to-day life on board of the ISS. The format of the book lends itself to both extensive reading from beginning to end or just a quick read of only a couple of questions and answers. The accompanying illustrations, diagrams, and photos, paired with Peak’s humor and wit, makes this book a great read for armchair astronauts.

Published posthumously, Stephen Hawking’s book tackles 10 of the biggest questions in the universe, for example: Is time travel possible? Is there a God? Will we survive on Earth? The book is the final project of the physicist, who sparked curiosity and fascination for physics among the general public with his best selling books, most notably A Brief History of Time.

Completed after Hawking’s death with the help of his family, friends, and academic colleagues, this book draws on the physicist’s personal archive of essays, lectures, and speeches. It covers big physics concepts such as gravitational waves, the Big Bang, and general relativity, but also doesn’t shy away from addressing topics concerning the future of humanity.

Brief Answers to the Big Questions is a must read for the inquisitive mind curious about the grand questions of the universe. And it certainly instils a sense of wonder and curiosity — to say it in Hawking’s own words: “So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up. Unleash your imagination. Shape the future.”

Best biology books

Oncologist and 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner Siddhartha Mukherjee distills the complex history of genetics into a gripping and comprehensible narrative. The author takes us on a whirlwind tour describing how the mystery of the gene was slowly unraveled. Starting from the discovery of the gene as the individual unit of heritability thanks to the garden pea experiments of the monk Gregor Mendel, right through to the most recent revolution in biotechnology, genomics, and gene-editing technologies.

The author laces the history of human genes with his personal history of how hereditary illnesses have affected his own family, staying true to his promise of an “intimate” history. Looking towards the future of the human race, Mukherjee questions the implications of our technical capabilities and cautions to keep the ethical implications of the newly emerging technologies in mind. This thought-provoking read is for anyone interested in learning more about the history, biology, and ethics of the units that form the basis of ourselves — our genes.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks takes us on a journey into the devastating, yet fascinating world of neurological conditions. In this collection of medical case reports, considered by some to be Sacks’ finest work, the author recounts the stories of patients with striking neurological conditions affecting their perceptions, emotions, memories, and actions: A musician who has lost the ability to recognize faces or familiar objects; a sailor whose mind is permanently stuck in the year 1945 and cannot form new memories; A woman who has lost the ability to sense the relative position of her extremities.

Rather than portraying his patients merely as interesting cases, Sacks’ paints them as deeply human through his poetic prose and vivid imagery. His storytelling is both compassionate and informative. These essays are more than just neurological case histories, they are, in Sacks’ own words, “clinical tales.” If you enjoy exploring the wonders of the human mind, then this collection of essays is for you!

Dr. Camilla Pang, who has a PhD in computational biology from UCL, was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at the age of eight and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder at 26. As a kid struggling to understand the world around her, Pang asked her mother for an instruction manual to explain humans in order to help her understand and fit in. In a way, she created her own manual on how to human with this book, which won the Royal Society’s science book of the year award in 2020.

In her book, Pang shares how viewing the world through a scientific lens helped her understand and interpret human behavior. Each chapter draws analogies from a different field of science to explain the complexities of human nature, covering a variety of scientific concepts — machine learning, biochemistry, thermodynamics, quantum physics, and game theory. For example, Pang compares emotions to chemical bonds and reflects on how our relationships — just like chemical bonds — go through changes.

Part-memoir, part-manual, the book is an enlightening and insightful guide to understanding the world around us. A must-read for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of humans.

Best paleontology books

Our planet is ancient. 4.5 billion years old, to be precise. An unimaginable period of time. Riley Black, a science writer specializing in paleontology, takes us on a journey through the geological events that have shaped our planet, making those years palpable and at the same time underscoring the impressive age of our planet.

This book shows the story of our world as we know it, presented in a chronological and visually appealing way. The magnificent photos are supported by bite-sized, easily digestible explanations of key historical moments, like the dawn of the dinosaurs. But this book doesn’t just cover fossils. It also expands on key concepts in geology (the formation of the Grand Canyon), astronomy (the Hubble Deep Field), or biology (mitochondria or evolution).

Deep Time shines light on the traces and artifacts of ancient times that we can still find today, all around us. An informative and beautiful coffee book table to be dipped into rather than devoured in one sitting.

At least six different human species inhabited Earth 100,000 years ago. Today, there is only one — homo sapiens. How did this happen? In his number one international bestseller, history professor Yuval Noah Harari takes us on a journey through the history of homo sapiens.

Harari approaches the mammoth task of telling the history of our species with an engaging and oftentimes provocative narrative and draws on knowledge from history, anthropology, and evolutionary biology. Harari concludes with a skeptical look towards the future, considering our current scientific and technological advances in fields such as genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, which might blur the definition of “human.” While you may not agree with every statement and causal connection inferred, the book will certainly spark thoughts, questions, and reflection on humanities’ past, present, and future.

The best physics books can help us answer some of the biggest questions: What is our place in the universe? How do we explain what happens around us?

Physics can be a dense and detailed study, with complicated theories and exploration of ideas that can be difficult for anyone to fully comprehend. The best physics books explain these concepts in ways that are approachable and will continue your journey of understanding our physical world.

We’ve collected the best physics books written by some of the world’s most renowned scientists, including Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, and Richard Feynman. If you're looking for physics books that specifically deal with the cosmos, then you can check out our guide to the best astronomy books.

Written by one of the world’s most renowned string theorists, The Elegant Universe takes complex topics and makes them easily accessible to any reader – with or without a science background! Greene creates an impactful and visual reading experience as he navigates through the mysteries of the universe. This international bestseller inspired a major Nova special and leans into Green’s expertise in superstring theory.

The Elegant Universe brings thoughtful discussion surrounding special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics, paving the way towards an explanation of all forces and matter. Simple analogies and footnotes break down heavier topics with a dash of humor. Readers will be delighted by the approachable way in which Greene ties in string theory to help our understanding of the vast universe.

Unmissable content for any student – and those eager to learn more about this expansive field – who wants a foundational introduction to physics written by beloved Nobel laureate, Richard P. Feynman. The Feynman Lectures on Physics is a collection of his most profound lectures, reprinted and corrected in collaboration with CalTech. Inside this three-book box set, you’ll find the basic principles of Newtonian physics through more complex topics such as general relativity, quantum mechanics, and beyond.

Feynman's lectures are accessible without sacrificing relevant information. His passion is evident throughout the pages, never shying away from asking the tougher questions and challenging his audience to expand their thinking. This is a box set designed for each generation, setting up the future for emerging scientists.

Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum is the second book in the Theoretical Minimum series. If you’re a reader with some knowledge of linear algebra and calculus who wants to dive deeper into the world of quantum mechanics, this is for you. Susskind and Friedman make it easy to follow along with the subject matter, getting to logical explanations quickly. Susskind deploys notations in earnest, condensing information into manageable symbols.

It’ll get you thinking about the information differently, trying out a new way to speculate and approach complicated topics. This book will connect the dots, build the bridges between each concept presented, and explain all the core ideas of theory coherently.

Gamow possesses an engaging, entertaining way of presenting the very basics of quantum physics and its progression over the span of three decades. As Gamow was personally acquainted with the scientists presented in this book – Bohr, Pauli, Dirac, and Heisenberg… just to name a few – the result is a level of humanity and personality behind the origins of some of physics' most complex theories and equations.

This is a book about how science has changed and developed in the last century, and Gamow writes this in a way that is accessible to a general audience. Covering prominent events between 1900-1930, you’ll get the inside story on the course that shaped modern physics.

Written by the late Stephen Hawking – one of the most renowned scientists of this century – A Brief History of Time delves into topics such as black holes, wormholes, uncertainty principle, space and time, expansion of the universe, time travel, and so much more.

Hawking manages to be accessible, while still speaking to those with years of scientific experience under their belts. It’s quick and to the point, providing clarity around some of the most complex mechanics of how our universe works. Logically organized, humorous at times, and immersive, you’ll be taken on a journey that spans from our world’s earliest astronomers to the latest on the future of the universe.

Carlo Rovelli is a widely respected and renowned theoretical physicist who introduces you to the modern world of physics. It’s a short book, with the paperback only coming in at 81 pages, but it’s packed with playful and entertaining takes on our world and the role we play in it. Moving quickly through Einstein’s general relativity, quantum mechanics, and other complexities of our known universe, Seven Brief Lessons outlines how physics arrived to where it is now.

Written confidently and in a way that is accessible to any reader, the intricacies of this book is written with vivid clarity. Beautifully written, and almost lyrical in its presentation of Newton, Bohr, and Einstein, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics is not one to miss.

Fans of pop culture will delight in the insights presented in this engaging and humorous book. Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist and bestselling author, explores the possibilities of teleportation, force fields, interstellar spaceships, and other future technologies you’ve seen only in science fiction. Are they truly as impossible to achieve as it seems?

In this informative yet widely imaginative look at the universe and the laws of physics, the very topic of scientific possibility is on full display. Kaku looks into the several branches of physics – from Newtonian mechanics up to relativity and quantum mechanisms of the 20th century. Sci-fi technologies are broken down into accessible ideas as Kaku explores the possibilities of building starships, time travel, and invisibility.

Famous for popularizing science with his other works, Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist presenting another engaging question for his audience: How do we fit within the universe? Astrophysics for People in a Hurry is exactly what the name promises – this is for readers who want simplified, understandable, and manageable information on the nature of space and time.

Tyson’s passion and wit leap off the page as he guides through the concepts of the forces that make up our universe. A short, palpable read for those who want something easy to digest in one or two sittings. This is an easy, fun-to-read book that will get you thinking about the world around you.

Carl Sagan’s Cosmos is a treat for the eyes with its illustrated chapters. Not only that, The Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, is a 13-part television series meant to accompany the book as you’re taken along a journey through cosmic evolution. Covering a wide variety of topics – from the astronomical to the historical – Cosmos will trigger a deeper way of thinking about our existence and our roles in the universe.

This is for the endlessly curious and those who want to know how we came to be and where we’re headed. Sagan makes the complex simple, while never losing the grand scale and drama that is the nature of the cosmos.

John Gribbin tells the story of how Schrodinger’s Cat came to be - of how quantum mechanics emerged. With a thorough look at the scientists who developed quantum theory, Gribbin explores topics such as radiation, time travel, and the birth of life. This is a delightful, thought-provoking introduction to quantum physics. Gribbin makes a complicated topic easily accessible for the average reader. This is perfect for those we want to confront the understanding of how the world works.

In Search of Schrodinger's Cat is a scientific lesson in quantum physics without feeling like you’re reading from a textbook. Extensive and well-written, you’ll be presented with a modern view of quantum physics without feeling overwhelmed.

Have you ever wondered about your pet's prehistoric relatives? Before cats, dogs and birds became our companions, they had wild ancestors that were fierce and huge.

In the new book "Prehistoric Pets" (Candlewick Press, 2021), to be released Tuesday (Sept. 7) in the U.S., paleontologist Dean Lomax dives into the family trees of our most beloved pets and finds the bizarre beasts that preceded them. 

But don't take our word for it! Join Live Science at 12:30 p.m. EDT (9:30 a.m. PDT) on Tuesday for a live conversation with Lomax and a chance to win a free copy of "Prehistoric Pets." Once our interview begins, you'll be able to find the livestream on our Facebook, Twitter or YouTube pages, where you can also ask Lomax questions about ancient animals.

To enter to win a free copy of "Prehistoric Pets," wait for our trivia question and then correctly answer it in the Facebook comments. We'll randomly pick three winners. (See the terms and conditions below).

Related: Photos: These animals used to be giants 

Lomax, a paleontologist and visiting scientist at the University of Manchester in England, remembers finding his first fossil at age 8: a piece of 350 million-year-old fossilized coral in Yorkshire, in the United Kingdom. Since then, he's traveled the world, digging up the remains of ancient animals. He even helped discover and scientifically describe five new species of ichthyosaur, a prehistoric marine reptile that resembled modern-day dolphins. One of them, Ichthyosaurus anningae, is named in honor of Mary Anning, the first female paleontologist and the person who found the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton on record. 

Lomax's new book doesn't include an ichthyosaurus, but he does dive into the family trees of guinea pigs, birds, snakes, cats, fish, dogs and horses. Lomax gives a smattering of facts about creatures from both modern and prehistoric times. 

For instance, the guinea pig is a rodent that has a pair of ever-growing incisors, meaning they have to constantly gnaw on things to wear down these teeth. A much earlier and much bigger rodent, the prehistoric Josephoartigasia, was an extinct giant that lived between 4 million and 2 million years ago in what is now Uruguay. It too had spectacular tusk-like teeth that enabled it to grind plants and fruits. And Palaeocastor, a prehistoric burrowing beaver, used its incisors to dig corkscrew-shaped burrows when it lived in North America 20 million years ago.

"You might be surprised to know that a guinea pig's prehistoric relative looked very different to the fluffy pet we're familiar with," Lomax writes in the book. "By looking at fossils — the remains of animals preserved in rock — we're able to trace our pets back to animals that lived millions of years ago."

One of the best parts of "Prehistoric Pets," illustrated by Mike Love, are the colorful and amazing pop-ups of the ancient animals. This includes the feathered Velociraptor (a relative of today's parakeets) and the 45-foot-long (14 meters) Titanoboa, a fearsome serpent that lived about 60 million years ago in what is now Colombia.

This book targets 5 to 9 year olds, but kids (and adults) of any age will enjoy seeing familiar animals (like seahorses and zebras) and reading about their ancient relatives, such as the Jurassic period Leedsichthys, the largest ray-finned fish on record, and Epicyon, a grizzly bear-size canid that lived in North American about 12 million years ago.

In other words, "have you ever wondered what your pet's great, great, great, great, GREAT, grandparents looked like?" Lomax asks in the book. You'll have to read it to find out.

"Prehistoric Pets" giveaway

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Originally published on Live Science.

Below is an excerpt of "The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird" by Joshua Hammer, published by Simon & Schuster on Feb. 11, 2020. 

Read more about the amazing true story of the man who spent decades smuggling and selling wild falcons, some of which commanded prices in the tens and thousands of dollars.

The man had been in there far too long, John Struczynski thought. Twenty minutes had elapsed since he had entered the shower facility in the Emirates Lounge for business and first-class passengers at Birmingham International Airport, in the West Midlands region of England, 113 miles north of London. Now Struczynski stood in the corridor outside the shower room, a stack of fresh towels in the cart beside him, a mop, a pail, and a pair of caution wet floor signs at his feet. The janitor was impatient to clean the place. 

The man and a female companion had been the first ones that day to enter the lounge, a warmly decorated room with butterscotch armchairs, a powder-blue carpet, dark wood columns, glass coffee tables, and black-shaded Chinese porcelain lamps. It was Monday, May 3, 2010—a bank holiday in the United Kingdom—and the lounge had opened at noon to accommodate passengers booked on the 2:40 p.m. Emirates direct flight to Dubai. The couple had settled into an alcove with a television near the reception desk. Minutes later the man had stood up and headed for the shower, carrying a shoulder bag and two small suitcases. That had struck Struczynski as strange. Who brings all of his luggage into the business-and-first-class shower room? And now he had been in there two or three times longer than any normal passenger. 

A tall, lean man in his forties with short-cropped graying hair and a brush mustache, Struczynski had spent a decade monitoring 130 closed-circuit television cameras on the night shift at a Birmingham shopping mall, a job that “gave me a background in watching people,” he would later say. That February, after the security firm laid him off, a management company had hired him to clean the Emirates Lounge. The first week he was there, the contractor enrolled him in an on-site training course to identify potential terrorist threats. The course, he would later say, heightened his normal state of suspicion. 

As Struczynski puttered around the hallway, the shower room door opened, and the passenger—a balding, slender, middle-aged white man of average height—stepped out. He slipped past Struczynski without looking at him. 

The cleaner opened the shower facility door and looked around the room. 

My goodness, he thought. What do we have here? 

The shower floor and glass partition surrounding it were both bone-dry. All the towels remained stacked and neatly folded. The toilet for the disabled hadn’t been used. The washbasin didn’t have a drop of water in it. Though the man had been inside the room for twenty minutes, he didn’t appear to have touched anything. 

Struczynski recalled the terrorism workshop that he had taken three months earlier, the exhortations from the instructor to watch out for odd looks and unusual behavior. This passenger was up to something. He knew it. Not sure what he was looking for, he rifled through the towels and facecloths, rummaged beneath the complimentary toothpaste tubes and other toiletries, checked the rubbish bin. He mounted a footstool and dislodged two ceiling tiles, wedging his hand into the hollow space just above them. Nothing. 

He shifted his attention to the baby-changing area. In the corner of the alcove stood a plastic waist-high diaper bin with a round flip lid. Struczynski removed the top and looked inside. He noticed something sitting on the bottom: a green cardboard egg carton. 

In one of the middle slots sat a single egg, dyed blood-red. 

He stared at it, touched it gently. What could it mean? 

He recalled the recent arrest at Heathrow Airport outside London of a man trying to smuggle rare Indian box turtles in egg cartons. But that seemed so odd. More likely this passenger was moving narcotics—like the gangsters in Liverpool who wedged packets of heroin and cocaine inside plastic Kinder Egg containers. That’s it, he thought. It must have something to do with drugs. 

Struczynski approached the reception area, a few steps from where the man and his traveling companion were sitting, and spoke softly to the two women working at the front desk. We may have a problem, he murmured, describing what he had just observed. He suggested that they call airport security, then returned to the shower and locked the door so that no one could disturb the evidence. Soon two uniformed security men entered the lounge, interviewed Struczynski, and examined the shower. The facility couldn’t be seen from the alcove in which the passengers were sitting, and so, absorbed in conversation, the couple failed to notice the sudden activity. 

The security guards summoned a pair of airport-based plainclothes officers from the West Midlands Counter Terrorism Unit. Formed in 2007 in the wake of the London bus-and-underground bombings, the unit had grown from seventy to nearly five hundred officers, and was chiefly concerned with combating Islamist extremism. Counterterrorism forces had recently arrested a gang that had conspired to kidnap and behead a British officer and post the footage online, and had helped foil a plot by a Birmingham-born terrorist to blow up transatlantic airliners using liquid explosives. These men, too, questioned Struczynski, examined the egg box in the diaper bin, and asked the janitor to point out the passenger. They flashed the badges attached to lanyards around their necks, and chatted with him and his companion politely. Struczynski watched discreetly as the pair stood up and, flanked by the police, exited the lounge.

Excerpt from THE FALCON THIEF by Joshua Hammer

Copyright © 2020 by Joshua Hammer. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc, NY.

Originally published on Live Science.

Two grinning men pose for a video camera in front of a helicopter: "We're going on a tour," one of them says and laughs. But what they were about to do was no joyride; it was both dangerous and illegal. They were attempting to steal the eggs of rare falcons from the birds' nests, on a perilously steep cliff in Nunavik territory in northern Quebec.

Another clip shows one of the men, Jeffrey Lendrum, dangling from a harness, a pouch at the ready for holding stolen eggs. Recorded in 2000, the footage was found in Lendrum's luggage when he was arrested in May 2010 in the United Kingdom on suspicion of smuggling 14 peregrine falcon eggs out of the country, the BBC reported that year.

Lendrum pled guilty to that crime in August 2010, but the conviction wasn't his first — nor would it be his last. Over four decades, Lendrum steadily built a reputation as a master smuggler of endangered falcon eggs, stealing them from locations around the world and selling them to private collectors for tens of thousands of dollars apiece. His remarkable tale comes together piece by astonishing piece in the book "The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird" (Simon & Schuster) by Joshua Hammer, published today (Feb. 11).

Related: See gorgeous photos of birds of prey

Falcons are swift and graceful birds of prey, and people have trained and bred these raptors as hunters for thousands of years across the Middle East, where falcons are still highly valued, Hammer told Live Science. 

Breeding captive falcons for collectors is a tightly regulated and extremely profitable business. Healthy adult peregrines (Falco peregrinus) may fetch as much as $25,000 from eager collectors in Qatar, while the Arctic gyrfalcon (Falco rusticolus), the largest of all falcons, can command a price of up to $250,000, Forbes reported in 2015. 

"Some Arab sheiks are willing to pay $400,000 for a single white gyrfalcon, which is considered the most beautiful and rarest of birds," Hammer said.

In fact, demand across the Persian Gulf for wild falcons is so high that opportunities abound for people like Lendrum, who steal and sell the protected birds and their eggs. Research into Lendrum's underworld network revealed just a glimpse of an extensive black market for illegal falcons, Hammer added.

"Lendrum's not the only one who would go off to remote corners of Russia or Pakistan or any place you find wild raptors, and catch these birds and then smuggle them," he said. 

When writing "The Falcon Thief," Hammer tracked down the camera operator who shot the Quebec helicopter footage, an associate of Lendrum's named Paul Mullin. That story became one of the centerpieces of Hammer's book, and the "outlandish, expensive operation, apparently financed by the sheiks," marked the pinnacle of Lendrum's criminal career, according to Hammer.

"It was kind of all downhill from there," he said.

Multiple arrests

Though Lendrum is but a single player in the illegal falcon trade, he's arguably the best-known of these egg thieves, due to the spectacle of his airport arrests over the past 10 years. His capture in May 2010 at Birmingham Airport airport in the U.K. made headlines, and was accompanied by a photo of Lendrum wearing 14 swaddled peregrine eggs taped to his body in a custom sling to keep them warm, according to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). 

But Lendrum insisted that they were duck eggs, and that he was wearing them on his doctor's recommendation to help with back pain, Hammer wrote in the book. That excuse didn't fly with the judge, who sentenced Lendrum to 30 months in jail, the RSPB reported.

Related: World's fastest animals: The peregrine falcon and other speedsters

Lendrum was arrested again in October 2015 at Sao Paulo International Airport in Brazil, as he was trying to board a plane with an incubator holding four eggs he had stolen in Chile; those eggs were thought to belong to the rare peregrine subspecies Falco peregrinus cassini, or Cassini falcon, the UK National Wildlife Crime Unit (NWCU) reported. Chicks from these eggs would have commanded up to $80,000 each on the black market, according to the NWCU.

In January 2016, a Brazilian judge sentenced Lendrum to 4.5 years in jail, but Lendrum had already skipped bail and left the country (he is currently facing extradition to Brazil, The Guardian reported).

However, Brazilian officials will have to wait for Lendrum to first finish serving yet another sentence in the U.K. He was arrested in June 2018 arriving at Heathrow Airport from Johannesburg, South Africa, and he was carrying a substantial payload of purloined avian wildlife, a U.K. Border Control representative said in a statement.

"During a full search, he was found to be wearing a body belt concealing 19 bird eggs as well as 2 newly-hatched chicks," according to the statement. 

At the trial, Lendrum told the court that "his intention was to rescue the eggs after he encountered some men chopping down trees containing their nests." But wildlife experts overturned his story when they identified the eggs as originating from nests on cliffs, and on Jan. 10, Lendrum was sentenced to 3 years and 1 month in prison. 

"He can't stop lying"

For some people, serving a string of jail terms in multiple countries might be a deterrent to future crimes, perhaps encouraging them to rethink their thieving ways. However, that was clearly not the case with Lendrum, who to this day downplays the seriousness of his acts and continues to spin fabulous fabrications about his intentions for the eggs that he has stolen, Hammer said. 

"He can't stop lying," Hammer said. "I saw the interrogation tapes when he was on trial in Brazil; he'll tell these incredibly outlandish lies one after another, which the judge basically laughed at before sentencing him to five years in prison."

Lendrum's convoluted and fantastic explanations for his so-called conservation activities, along with his utter lack of remorse, likely also contributed to the length of his latest prison sentence in the U.K., Hammer added. 

"He was very opaque — sort of a self-deluding liar — and he remained in total denial about everything that he had done, even though the evidence was just so overwhelming," Hammer said.

As Lendrum himself said in an interview with Hammer: "I honestly didn't think that there would be a problem if I were caught."

Read an excerpt from "The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird."

• In Photos: Birds of Prey
• Birds of a Feather: Photos of Hummingbirds, Hawks & Jays
• Bird Cam Shows Hawks Hatching

Originally published on Live Science.

NEW YORK — Have you ever wondered how to predict the weather, land an airplane onto a moving train, or knock a drone out of the sky with sports equipment? Randall Munroe, creator of the popular science webcomic xkcd, has a new book that presents outrageous solutions for a broad range of problems, from the mundane to the unusual. 

In "How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems" (Penguin Random House, 2019), Munroe tackles challenges that are often a part of everyday life. He shared highlights from the book with a rapt audience at New York Comic Con on Oct. 3.

Be forewarned: None of his suggestions is easy — in fact, they're about as convoluted and complicated as possible. Let's say you want to cross a river, which you could accomplish by simply swimming across. Munroe offers interesting but less practical options: jumping the river in a car; freezing the water or boiling it away; and flying from bank to bank on a string of kites. And he uses science to explain how each of these options might be possible (if not necessarily practical).

Related: 25 Weird Things Humans Do Every Day, and Why

"I'm one of those people who always comes up with impractical solutions to things — but usually, I'm not trying to come up with an impractical solution," Munroe told Live Science. Rather, he's looking for timesavers for tasks that are boring and repetitive "something that would take a little while now to get set up, but once I did it could actually save me time in the long run," he explained. 

"And whenever I find myself thinking 'save me time in the long run,' I know I'm about to do something that will definitely take up more time than it could possibly save," he said.

Do you need to move to a new home? You could hire a moving truck and pack everything into bags and boxes. But perhaps you'd rather not pack, and you'd prefer to just move your entire house? In that case, you might try lifting your home with a quadcopter — four helicopters fixed to a rigid frame — an engineering challenge that was actually investigated by the U.S. military during the Cold War, Munroe wrote.

What if you were on an airplane, and you needed to make an emergency landing? Munroe turned to retired Canadian astronaut Col. Chris Hadfield for answers; Hadfield is also a test pilot who has flown about 100 different types of aircraft for the Canadian and U.S. militaries, Munroe told the audience at Comic Con. 

Naturally, Munroe came up with the weirdest emergency-landing scenarios that he could think of, with every question just a little more ridiculous than the one before: from landing a plane on a ski jump ("you'd have to time it just right") to landing the International Space Station ("odds are slim to none").

"The joke was on me, because he [Hadfield] just answered all of them immediately," Munroe told Live Science. "And a lot of the answers were, 'Oh yeah, I've done that.'"

Related: 'Star Wars' Tech: 8 Sci-Fi Inventions and Their Real-Life Counterparts

Munroe also enlisted the help of an expert to investigate the best way to knock a drone out of the sky, calling on tennis champion Serena Williams to lend a hand (and a racket) when he couldn't find good data about the accuracy of hitting targets with a tennis serve. Williams obliged, striking a drone from a distance of 40 feet (12 meters) on her third try.

However, even Williams agreed that just because it was physically possible for her to disable a drone with a tennis serve, it probably wouldn't be her go-to method should the situation ever arise, Munroe told the Comic Con audience.

"I asked her, 'What do you think of this idea as a way of shooting down drones?' She said, 'I think it's a pretty bad idea,'" Munroe said.

Then again, sometimes so-called bad ideas get the job done. Consider the prospect of gently lowering a rover onto the surface of Mars with a hovering space-crane; though this initially sounded ludicrous, NASA successfully used this method to send Curiosity to Mars in August 2012, Munroe told Live Science.

"With NASA's discussion of their Curiosity rover, they said, 'No one's ever tried this before, and it did seem crazy to us when we thought of it. But every other idea had some fatal flaw and this one didn't,'" he said.

"It was neat seeing them admit they thought this was just as weird as we did — but they had done the math, and it looked like a good idea, and then it actually worked! So, sometimes these ideas do work out," Munroe said.

"How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems" is available to buy online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other booksellers.

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Originally published on Live Science.

Animals can do amazing things, many of which are, admittedly, a little disgusting (OK, maybe more than a little). Some eat their young's poop or chew their way out of their mothers' bodies. Others battle prospective mates with their genitals or attack enemies with slime jets shot from their faces.

But there are also weird tales about animal achievements that are more myth than fact, such as the idea that earthworms grow into two new individual worms when they're cut in half, or that camels store water in their humps.

Clearly, there are plenty of odd animal stories that are ripe for cataloging or debunking. And who better to do that than Nick Caruso and Dani Rabaiotti, biologist authors of the lighthearted science bestseller "Does It Fart?" (Hachette Books, 2018). In their new book "True or Poo? The Definitive Field Guide to Filthy Animal Facts and Falsehoods" (Hachette Books, Oct. 23, 2018), they explore a wider range of riveting animal repulsiveness. [8 Bizarre Animal Surprises From 'True or Poo' — Can You Tell Fact From Myth?]

In "Does It Fart?" Caruso and Rabaiotti tackled burning questions about animals and the gas they pass, charmingly illustrated by Ethan Kocak. The runaway success of the book surprised them, but it also demonstrated that there was an audience for their humorous perspective on animals' most disgusting habits, while at the same time addressing common misconceptions about animals, Rabaiotti told Live Science.

"We were thinking, 'People really like farts, and people really like gross animal stories.' We kind of realized there was a big appetite for that," she said.

The new book, also illustrated by Kocak, takes on gross facts and unbelievable claims, clarifying if they are "true" or "poo." Rabaiotti and Caruso compiled a list of myths and facts from scientists on Twitter; researchers shared the strangest and nastiest traits and habits in the animals they studied, and also noted widespread mistakes about animals that were ripe for debunking.

Along the way, the authors learned a few things that stood out as exceptionally bizarre.

"One that really weirded me out is that platypuses don't have stomachs," Rabaiotti said. "I was not aware of that!"

Caruso was similarly surprised by the discovery that carnivorous pitcher plants, which can trap and digest small mammals, are used by certain types of shrews as a toilet.

While there's no shortage of humor in "True or Poo?" there are also important lessons about the wide range of odd adaptations that enable animals to survive. Many readers will likely pick up the book for the gross-outs, but they may come away from it with a new appreciation for unusual animals — even if they think those animals are "scary or weird," Caruso said.

"I'd also like people to realize that some of the really cute animals do really gross stuff, and some of the animals that we think are gross do some really cute stuff," Rabaiotti said.

Originally published on Live Science.

Beneath the soil in Cologne, Germany, lies a bibliophile's dream: an ancient Roman library that once held up to 20,000 scrolls, according to news reports.

Archaeologists discovered the epic structure in 2017 while they were excavating the grounds of a Protestant church to build a new community center. Considering Cologne is one of Germany's oldest cities, founded in A.D. 50, it's no surprise that it still has structures dating back to Roman times.

However, archaeologists didn't figure out that the structure was a library until they found mysterious holes in the walls, each measuring about 31 inches by 20 inches (80 by 50 centimeters), The Guardian reported.

The niches in the wall were likely "cupboards for the scrolls," Dirk Schmitz, an archaeologist at the Roman-Germanic Museum in Cologne, told The Guardian. "They are very particular to libraries — you can see the same ones in the library at Ephesus [in Turkey]." [Photos: Centuries of History Revealed Beneath Roman Ruins]

While it's anyone's guess as to how many scrolls the library once housed, it's fair to say the number would have been "quite huge — maybe 20,000," Schmitz said. He noted that the newfound library is slightly smaller than the Celsus Library in Ephesus, which was built in A.D. 117. Even so, its discovery is "really incredible — a spectacular find," Schmitz said.

"[It] is, at a minimum, the earliest library in Germany, and perhaps in the northwest Roman provinces," he said. "Perhaps there are a lot of Roman towns that have libraries, but they haven't been excavated. If we had just found the foundations, we wouldn't have known it was a library. It was because it had walls, with the niches, that we could tell."

The ancient Romans chose a good spot for the building, he noted.

"It is in the middle of Cologne, in the marketplace, or forum: the public space in the city center," Schmitz said. "It is built of very strong materials, and such buildings, because they are so huge, were public."

During its heyday, the library was probably two stories tall and measured about 65 feet by 30 feet (20 by 9 meters), and an extension was added later, Cologne historic preservation official Marcus Trier told Deutsche Welle (DW), a German news outlet. This extension was likely an alcove where a statue of Minerva, the Roman goddess counterpart to Greece's Athena, once stood, Schmitz told The Art Newspaper.

The ancient library's remains will be integrated into the new church community center, giving access to visitors and future archaeologists, DW reported.

Original article on Live Science.

If you're shopping for that someone who loves to learn and is just curious about the world, how about a book? Here's a look at some of the best book deals on Amazon this Cyber Monday that are sure to dazzle the science lover in your life.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Picador, 2015)

Five major extinctions have taken place over the course of Earth's geologic past; each wiped out significant portions of life on the planet. Could we be heading for a sixth mass extinction, spurred by human activity? As human populations have expanded across the globe, they have taken a toll on natural resources and reshaped ecosystems on land and sea. Author Elizabeth Kolbert outlines the many ways that people have changed the planet, noting the environmental costs along the way and the number of species that have already been lost — and hinting at losses that may be yet to come, unless we take action to preserve the precious biodiversity that still remains.

Everything All at Once: How to Unleash Your Inner Nerd, Tap into Radical Curiosity and Solve Any Problem (Rodale Books, 2017)

In his new book, Bill Nye helps you to unlock your inner nerd. How? By finding that thing you're passionate about. "With his call to arms, he wants you to examine every detail of the most difficult problems that look unsolvable―that is, until you find the solution. Bill shows you how to develop critical thinking skills and create change, using his “everything all at once” approach that leaves no stone unturned," according to Amazon.

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (W. W. Norton & Company, 2017)

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson gives you the quick and dirty explanations to all things astrophysics, from the Big Bang to black holes to quarks and more. Tyson has a way with words so that you'll not only understand concepts that seem ungraspable, but you'll have fun along the way. Right now, Amazon is selling the Kindle version of the book for $3.99.

Blast Off to the Moon! (Dr. Wonderful and Her Dog) Hardcover (Two Lions, May 2, 2017)

According to Amazon, "Dr. Wonderful loves asking big questions…and using science to answer them. She and her dog, Newton, want to know why the moon changes shape in the sky every night. But how can they study the moon when it’s so far away? By blasting off into space, of course! On their amazing journey, this detective duo gathers clues to solve their lunar mystery using the powers of science, curiosity, and teamwork."

Elon Musk and the Quest for a Fantastic Future Young Readers' Edition Paperback (HarperCollins, Jan. 24, 2017)

This book was written with exclusive access to Elon Musk, founder of revolutionary spaceflight company SpaceX. The book traces Musk's journey as he matured from a kid in South Africa to a young man in the United States, through his inventions and forward-thinking companies.

According to Amazon, "This fascinating and easily accessible young readers’ adaptation of Ashlee Vance’s New York Times bestselling Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future features black-and-white photographs throughout and an epilogue. The version for adults has been praised as 'riveting' (The Financial Times), 'spirited' (The Wall Street Journal), and 'masterful' (Vice). Now younger readers can read about this innovative leader who is revolutionizing three industries at once: space, automotive, and energy."

What Color Is My World?: The Lost History of African-American Inventors Paperback (Candlewick, Dec. 10, 2013)

In this kid-friendly book, basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar reveals little-known African-American inventors, such as James West who invented the microphone in your cellphone and Fred Jones who invented the refrigerated truck that makes supermarkets possible. According to Amazon, "Offering profiles with fast facts on flaps and framed by a funny contemporary story featuring two feisty twins, here is a nod to the minds behind the gamma electric cell and the ice-cream scoop, improvements to traffic lights, open-heart surgery, and more � inventors whose ingenuity and perseverance against great odds made our world safer, better, and brighter."  

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Originally published on Live Science.

At the age of 7, Kenneth Lacovara pored through a box full of rocks and fossils at a Boy Scout meeting. He was intrigued by the fossils' shapes and colors. And "the animals trapped in stone" reminded him of the fern fossils and quartz crystals his brother had unearthed at their uncle's dairy farm in Pennsylvania.

Lacovara was captivated. His enthusiasm for fossils led to him study geology and become a paleontologist who travels the world searching for dinosaur fossils. That hard work paid off. In 2005, he discovered the remains of a colossal, long-necked dinosaur that was as large as a two-story house and weighed as much as 12 elephants. He named the beast Dreadnoughtus schrani, whose genus name means "fears nothing" in Old English.

You can read about Lacovara's adventures, as well as a compelling history of dinosaur research, in his new book, "Why Dinosaurs Matter" (Simon & Schuster/TED), published Sept. 19. [Photos: One of the World's Biggest Dinosaurs Discovered]

The book is great for young adults and curious grown-ups who never got to take that geology or Dinosaurs 101 class in college.

Lacovara, dean of the School of Earth and Environment at Rowan University in New Jersey, as well as the director of the Jean and Ric Edelman Fossil Park at the universeity, walks readers through the storied history of dinosaur research, including when scientists in the Victorian era thought the so-called "crocodile-lizards" were brutish, slow and unintelligent creatures.      

The more researchers learned about dinosaurs, the more they realized that the ancient reptiles were quite sophisticated. When the English sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins put together the world's first mounted dinosaur skeleton (this honor fell on the duck-billed dinosaur), the resulting piece wasn't exactly accurate by today's standards, but it was "bipedal, upright and appeared to be posed for action," Lacovara wrote in the book. "This was no paunchy, half-comatose crocodile-lizard. This was an alert, vigorous creature, a beast of consequence in its landscape."

Lacovara peppers his writing with dinosaur facts: Tyrannosaurus rex had up to 60 serrated teeth the size of bananas; duck-billed dinosaurs were likely speedy beasts that traveled in herds; and Ankylosaurus had a bone-crushing club at the end of its 8-foot-long (2.5 meters) tail.

But even more thrilling is the laborious excavation of Dreadnoughtus schrani from Argentine Patagonia. After discovering a fossil bone poking out of a mountainside, Lacovara and his team began digging, eventually uncovering 145 bones belonging to the newfound titanosaur species.

The study of D. schrani and other dinosaurs matters for many reasons, Lacovara writes in the book. For starters, by studying dinosaur locomotion, engineers can design contraptions today that help society prosper. Scientists can also learn how these creatures, which lived on Earth for 165 million years, dealt with a changing climate, a phenomenon the Earth is experiencing today in record time.

"Perhaps the dinosaurs' long-lasting record of success is reason for optimism," Lacovara wrote. "If they persisted through so many changes, maybe we can too. But we have to act, and we have to act fast."

Editor's note: Live Science is interviewing Kenneth Lacovara on Facebook Live at 1 p.m. EDT today (Sept. 26). Tune in! If you correctly answer a trivia question about dinosaurs in the Facebook comments within 24 hours of its posting, you could be one of five randomly chosen people to win a free copy of "Why Dinosaurs Matter." 

Original article on Live Science.

Why exactly do dinosaurs matter?

What can we learn by studying Tyrannosaurus rex's banana-size serrated teeth; or by figuring out that duck-billed dinosaurs likely traveled in herds; or by determining that Spinosaurus could swim?

Paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara answers these questions in his new book "Why Dinosaurs Matter" (Simon & Schuster/TED) released Sept. 19, and now a lucky few will be able to win a free copy of his book by answering a trivia question about dinosaurs. [Photos: One of the World's Biggest Dinosaurs Discovered]

Live Science is interviewing Lacovara — the dean of the School of Earth and Environment at Rowan University in New Jersey, as well as director of the university's Jean and Ric Edelman Fossil Park — on Facebook Live at 1 p.m. EDT on Tuesday (Sept. 26).

Related: The science websites that we read every day

We will ask a trivia question about dinosaurs at the beginning of the interview. Five people, chosen at random from all of those people who answer the question correctly in the Facebook comments, will receive a free copy of “Why Dinosaurs Matter.”

The contest rules are below. Best of luck to all our dinosaur fans out there! Don't forget to follow Live Science on Facebook and Twitter for updates on this contest and other live-video events.

Why Dinosaurs Matter Giveaway

Official Rules

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Open to legal residents of 50 U.S & DC, 18 or older. Employees, agents, officers & directors of Purch Group, Inc. ("Sponsor"), its parent, subsidiaries, affiliates & advertising & promotion agencies (collectively with Facebook, Inc., “Released Parties”) & members of their immediate family (spouse, parent, children, siblings & their respective spouses, regardless of where they reside) & persons living in the same household, whether or not related, are not eligible. Void where prohibited. Subject to all applicable federal, state & local laws.

HOW TO ENTER:  Beginning at 1:00 PM Eastern Time on Tuesday, September 26, 2017, visit theLive Science page on Facebook (the "Event Page") to view the livestream video interview of Kenneth Lacovara, author of "Why Dinosaurs Matter" (the "Video"), during which, reporter Laura Geggel will ask a trivia question: "How do you escape from a Tyrannosaurus rex?" ("Giveaway Question"). To enter the Giveaway, answer the Giveaway Question on the Live Science Facebook Page in the comments under the Video between 1:00 PM Eastern Time on September 26, 2017 and 1:00 PM Eastern Time on September 27, 2017. Winners will be chosen at random from those answering correctly. If, for whatever reason, the posting of the Video is cancelled or postponed, this giveaway will not occur.  Entries generated by script, macro or other automated means or by any means which subvert the entry process are void. Limit one (1) entry per person/Facebook ID.  Multiple entries will be void. Entries become the sole property of Sponsor. Entry must not be offensive or inappropriate, as determined by Sponsor in its sole discretion.  Sponsor reserves the right to disqualify any entry and remove any comment that it determines, in its sole discretion, is not in compliance with these Official Rules or is otherwise not in keeping with Sponsor's image. 

WINNER DETERMINATION: Five winners will be randomly selected from the eligible individuals who provide comments relevant to the discussion, as determined by Sponsor in its sole discretion.  If, by the end of the Event, no eligible comments are provided, the prize will not be awarded.  Odds of winning depend on the number of eligible entries received.  

WINNER NOTIFICATION: Potential winners will be notified via a direct Facebook message & he/she will have 24 hours from notification to respond to Sponsor. The failure to respond to such notification or the potential winner’s noncompliance with these Official Rules may result in disqualification, & at Sponsor’s sole discretion, prize may be awarded to an alternate winner.

PRIZE: "Why Dinosaurs Matter," by Kenneth Lacovara (5 prizes available).  Approximate Retail Value: $16.99. Prize is awarded "as is" with no warranty or guarantee, either express or implied.   Winner is responsible for all federal, state & local taxes. Winner may not substitute, assign or transfer prize, but Sponsor reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to substitute prize (or portion thereof) with one of comparable or greater value. Prize cannot be redeemed for cash.  All prize details are at Sponsor's sole discretion.

GRANT OF RIGHTS:  By submitting an entry, each entrant grants to Sponsor and its licensees, successors and assigns an irrevocable, perpetual, unlimited, royalty-free, fully paid-up license to reproduce, distribute, display, exhibit, exploit, perform, edit, create derivatives of, & otherwise use the entry & all elements of such entry, together with any other material, and the name, user name, city & state of residence, voice, image and/or likeness of entrant, in any & all media now known or hereafter devised, in any manner, in whole or in part, worldwide, without compensation or notification to, or permission from, entrant or any third party, for any purpose whatsoever, including without limitation, for purposes of advertising or trade. 

CONDITIONS:  By participating, each entrant agrees: (a) to abide by these Official Rules & decisions of Sponsor & judges, which shall be final & binding in all respects relating to this giveaway; and (b) to release, discharge & hold harmless Released Parties from any & all injuries, liability, losses & damages of any kind to persons, including death, or property resulting, in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, from entrant’s participation in the Giveaway or the acceptance or use of prize.  Released Parties are not responsible for (i) lost, late, incomplete, damaged, inaccurate, stolen, delayed, misdirected, undelivered or garbled entries; or (ii) errors or difficulties of any kind, whether human, mechanical, electronic, computer, network, typographical, printing or otherwise, relating to or in connection with the giveaway, including, without limitation, errors or difficulties which may occur in connection with the administration of the giveaway, the processing of entries, the announcement of the prize or in any giveaway-related materials.  Persons who tamper with or abuse any aspect of the giveaway or the Event Page, who act in an unsportsmanlike or disruptive manner or who are in violation of these Official Rules, as solely determined by Sponsor, will be disqualified & all associated entries will be void. Should any portion of the giveaway be, in Sponsor’s sole opinion, compromised by virus, worms, bugs, non-authorized human intervention or other causes which, in the sole opinion of the Sponsor, corrupt or impair the administration, security, fairness or proper play, or submission of entries, Sponsor reserves the right at its sole discretion to suspend, modify or terminate the giveaway & if terminated, at its discretion, select winner as deemed fair & appropriate by Sponsor. Information submitted in connection with this giveaway will be used in accordance with Sponsor’s Privacy Policy, available at http://purch.com/privacy-policy.  

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SPONSOR: Purch Group, Inc., 150 Fifth Avenue, 9th Floor, New York, New York 10011. This giveaway is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook. You understand that you are providing your information to Sponsor & not to Facebook.

Original article on Live Science.

What goes on behind the scenes at a zoo? Author Annette Libeskind Berkovits, retired Senior Vice President for Education at the Bronx Zoo, has plenty of stories to tell. In "Confessions of an Accidental Zoo Curator," Berkovits describes a career at the zoo that spanned three decades, during which she worked to shape the zoo's education and outreach program to help visitors learn more about the animal inhabitants, and to understand the challenges that many of them face in the wild due to human activity. At the same time, she brought the zoo's conservation messages and education initiatives to locations around the world. Below is an excerpt of "Confessions of an Accidental Zoo Curator" (Tenth Planet Press, 2017).

Excerpt from Chapter 6: "On the Way to Stardom"

When I aced my job interview, it was assumed that I either knew how to handle animals or would be a quick study. Since it wasn’t entirely clear what my duties would be, I hadn’t even thought to inquire if animal handling was a part of the job. I wasn’t about to blow my cover.

"OK," I said. "Let’s put her in a case." Inside, my guts were twisting in primeval dread.

"What case?" Kim asked.

"You know, the carrying case," I said, trying to sound like an expert.

She looked at me. "Um, how long have you been working here? You should know that snakes go out in pillow cases."

At first I thought she was pulling my leg, but I saw her rifling through a pile of linens stacked in the corner of the stainless-steel counter.

"Shit," she said, "I don’t have any of the big ones here. I just threw them into the washing machine." She pointed at the end of the building where the washer was spinning. I glanced at my watch and knew that if I didn’t go out and wait for the cab at the gate, the driver would leave, thinking he had been duped.

"I’ve got to go," I said, panicked but trying to look calm. "I’ll be late."

She opened the cage, reached in and took out Harriet, trying to balance her heft on both arms.

"Here, I have an idea," she said, and moved uncomfortably close. "Wrap her around your waist, like this." Before I could respond, she began draping the lethargic boa around my middle. "On a cold day like today she will hardly move." Kim looked like a fashion designer installing a new-fangled belt on a model. Then she said, "Perfect, your sheepskin coat will keep her cozy. It’s better than a pillow case."

I was speechless.

"There, close those coat buckles and go." She moved on to another task.

I had no choice. Gingerly, I adjusted Harriet’s smooth cool body and made sure her muscular bulk was evenly distributed around my waist. She felt nearly as heavy as my four-year-old son. For the moment, my nervousness about being late to the TV studio overshadowed my fear. I walked out toward the side entrance just as the security guard opened the metal gate and a yellow taxi skidded to a stop on the slippery entrance path.

The cabbie rolled down the window, looked me over from head to foot and whistled. "Let’s go," he said, "Before the traffic gets any worse." I got into the back seat, inhaling an unidentifiable scent of air freshener fighting to overpower the tobacco stink. I hoped the odors wouldn’t annoy Harriet, but she remained as inert as a thick brown belt. After the shock at my circumstance wore off a little, all I could think of was, if only Donna could see me here, sitting in a taxi with a huge serpent snuggled up to my belly, a regular Eve earning her daily bread.

Nah, she’d never believe it.

Unlike most New York City cabbies, this guy was not a talker. All he did was occasionally leer at me in the rear-view mirror. Our eyes met silently, and I knew better than to engage him in small talk. We drove past several of the Bronx streets that gave the otherwise lovely borough a bad name: boarded up windows, graffiti, overflowing garbage cans, seedy-looking men loitering in front of bodegas. When we got on the Sheridan Expressway, the Manhattan skyline rose before me like a mirage. Soon I’d be making my television debut. Anything was possible in this enchanted city.

I was so absorbed that I hadn’t noticed how warm the cab had become. Little beads of perspiration began to form on my forehead. Harriet stirred, a little at first, then more. I felt her undulating movements along my waist like a strange massage. It was odd, but for a while my fear had mostly abated, but then I started wondering. When was she last fed a plump rat or freshly-killed chicken dinner? Could she be hungry? I visualized a boa skull with its needle-like rows of backward-pointed teeth that would not allow the prey to escape, its stretchy mouth ligaments that could take in an animal much larger than its head. She had me in the perfect position. Like any constrictor, all she had to do was tighten her grip until my lungs could no longer expand and take in air.

"It’s very warm in here," I announced to the driver as we drove through midtown at last, getting close to my destination. "Any chance you can turn down the heat?" I asked urgently, because Harriet was now cruising around me and I worried she’d slither away. What would I do if she got stuck under the seat, or made her way into the trunk? Worse yet, she might slide up, reach my face and plunge her teeth into my cheek. The warmth had animated her; she must have thought she was in her tropical South American home again and my waist was a heck of a tree trunk. As soon as this ridiculous notion invaded my brain, I realized that I didn’t really know if she had been collected in the wild or if she was captive bred. I knew that boas raised in captivity were more docile, but Harriet’s provenance was a mystery. I began to sweat profusely and kept adjusting her around my middle. Then I noticed the driver glancing up at the rear-view mirror with a look of intense curiosity.

Finally, he asked, "Hey, lady, whatcha got there?"

In "Surviving Death," Leslie Kean reveals stunning and wide-ranging evidence suggesting that consciousness survives death. Kean explores the most compelling case studies of young children reporting verifiable details from past lives, contemporary mediums who seem to defy the boundaries of the brain and of the physical world, apparitions providing information about their lives on earth, and people who die and then come back to report journeys into another dimension. Below is an excerpt of "Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife" (Crown Archetype, 2017). 

While exploring the evidence for an afterlife, I witnessed some unbelievable things that are not supposed to be possible in our material world. Yet they were unavoidably and undeniably real. Despite my initial doubt, I came to realize that there are still aspects of Nature that are neither understood nor accepted, even though their reality has profound implications for understanding the true breadth of the human psyche and its possible continuity after death.

I was directly exposed to people capable of perception that seemed to transcend the limitations of the  physical brain; unexplainable forces, acting with apparent intelligence, able to move objects; and the delivery of obscure and accurate details by possible discarnate beings communicating through people unknown to them. I also studied numerous published papers, including those by medical doctors, describing clinically dead patients with no brain function who reported journeys to a sublime afterlife dimension.

My explorations of these and other remarkable phenomena gave rise to many questions. How can it be that an apparition returns a wave from a human observer? Or that people watch their own resuscitation from the ceiling in the operating room, aware that they have left their bodies? How about a human hand materialized by a declared disembodied survivor of death, on multiple occasions? And how could a two-year-old boy seem to remember numerous specific facts about a previous life, unknown to anyone in the family, that are later verified as accurate?

As documented within the scientific literature for over a hundred years, these and other manifestations have one aspect in common: they suggest that consciousness—or some aspect of ourself—may sur- vive physical death. In these pages I will take you on a journey into this world.

An investigation of such evidence has rarely been systematically consolidated and subjected to in-depth, rigorous scrutiny by a journalist. This task has been left primarily to a few courageous scientists, philosophers, medical doctors, psychiatrists, and other investigators usually writing about one specific area of research. My intention is to present some of the most interesting evidence from diverse sources and show how it interconnects, making it accessible for the intelligent and curious reader encountering the material for the first time. Strict journalistic protocols can be applied to any topic for which there is data, no matter how unusual or even indeterminate.

Yet, this book is far from a catalog of evidence for the survival of bodily death. It is also a very personal story for me. My narrative would have remained one-dimensional and abstract without the ex- periences and "personal experiments" that are part of it. In this sense, I have taken a step inside this investigation in a new way—through experience and first-hand examination, and not just from the perspective of a detached observer who studies data and peers into a strange world from the outside. It may be professionally risky to expose these very personal events, but I feel it is my obligation to do so. It would be dishonest to omit elements that had an impact on my thinking and my effort to come to terms with many remarkable phenomena, elements that drew me even more deeply into the material. However, I was also careful to step back from them afterward, remaining as analytical and discriminating as I was with everything else. The tricky aspect lies in the interpretation of the extraordinary events, not in their reporting.

Excerpted from SURVIVING DEATH: A JOURNALIST INVESTIGATES EVIDENCE FOR AN AFTERLIFE Copyright © 2017 by Leslie Kean. Published by Crown Archetype, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

In "Calculating the Cosmos," Ian Stewart presents an exhilarating guide to the cosmos, from our solar system to the entire universe. Beginning with the Babylonian integration of mathematics into the study of astronomy and cosmology, Stewart traces the evolution of our understanding of the cosmos: How Kepler's laws of planetary motion led Newton to formulate his theory of gravity. How, two centuries later, tiny irregularities in the motion of Mars inspired Einstein to devise his general theory of relativity. How, eighty years ago, the discovery that the universe is expanding led to the development of the Big Bang theory of its origins. How single-point origin and expansion led cosmologists to theorize new components of the universe, such as inflation, dark matter, and dark energy. But does inflation explain the structure of today's universe? Does dark matter actually exist? Could a scientific revolution that will challenge the long-held scientific orthodoxy and once again transform our understanding of the universe be on the way? Below is an excerpt from "Calculating the Cosmos: How Mathematics Unveils the Universe" (Basic Books, 2016).

These advances in space exploration and usage depend not just on clever technology, but also on a lengthy series of scientific discoveries that go back at least as far as ancient Babylon three millennia ago. Mathematics lies at the heart of these advances. Engineering is of course vital too, and discoveries in many other scientific disciplines were needed before we could make the necessary materials and assemble them into a working space probe, but I'll concentrate on how mathematics has improved our knowledge of the universe.

The story of space exploration and the story of mathematics have gone hand in hand from the earliest times. Mathematics has proved essential for understanding the Sun, Moon, planets, stars, and the vast panoply of associated objects that together form the cosmos – the universe considered on a grand scale. For thousands of years, mathematics has been our most effective method of understanding, recording, and predicting cosmic events. Indeed in some cultures, such as ancient India around 500, mathematics was a sub-branch of astronomy. Conversely, astronomical phenomena have influenced the development of mathematics for over three millennia, inspiring every- thing from Babylonian predictions of eclipses to calculus, chaos, and the curvature of spacetime.

Initially, the main astronomical role of mathematics was to record observations and perform useful calculations about phenomena such as solar eclipses, where the Moon temporarily obscures the Sun, or lunar eclipses, where the Earth’s shadow obscures the Moon. By thinking about the geometry of the solar system, astronomical pioneers realised that the Earth goes round the Sun, even though it looks the other way round from down here. The ancients also combined observations with geometry to estimate the size of the Earth and the distances to the Moon and the Sun.

Deeper astronomical patterns began to emerge around 1600, when Johannes Kepler discovered three mathematical regularities – 'laws' – in the orbits of the planets. In 1679 Isaac Newton reinterpreted Kepler’s laws to formulate an ambitious theory that described not just how the planets of the solar system move, but the motion of any system of celestial bodies. This was his theory of gravity, one of the central discoveries in his world-changing Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy). Newton's law of gravity describes how each body in the universe attracts every other body.

By combining gravity with other mathematical laws about the motion of bodies, pioneered by Galileo a century earlier, Newton explained and predicted numerous celestial phenomena. More generally, he changed how we think about the natural world, creating a scientific revolution that is still powering ahead today. Newton showed that natural phenomena are (often) governed by mathematical patterns, and by understanding these patterns we can improve our understanding of nature. In Newton's era the mathematical laws explained what was happening in the heavens, but they had no significant practical uses, other than for navigation.

***

All that changed when the USSR's Sputnik satellite went into low Earth orbit in 1957, firing the starting gun for the space race. If you watch football on satellite television – or opera or comedies or science documentaries – you're reaping a real-world benefit from Newton's insights.

Initially, his successes led to a view of the cosmos as a clockwork universe, in which everything majestically follows paths laid down at the dawn of creation. For example, it was believed that the solar system was created in pretty much its current state, with the same planets moving along the same near-circular orbits. Admittedly, everything jiggled around a bit; the period's advances in astronomical observations had made that abundantly clear. But there was a widespread belief that nothing had changed, did change, or would change in any dramatic manner over countless eons. In European religion it was unthinkable that God's perfect creation could have been different in the past. The mechanistic view of a regular, predictable cosmos persisted for three hundred years.

No longer. Recent innovations in mathematics, such as chaos theory, coupled to today's powerful computers, able to crunch the relevant numbers with unprecedented speed, have greatly changed our views of the cosmos. The clockwork model of the solar system remains valid over short periods of time, and in astronomy a million years is usually short. But our cosmic backyard is now revealed as a place where worlds did, and will, migrate from one orbit to another. Yes, there are very long periods of regular behaviour, but from time to time they are punctuated by bursts of wild activity. The immutable laws that gave rise to the notion of a clockwork universe can also cause sudden changes and highly erratic behaviour.

The scenarios that astronomers now envisage are often dramatic. During the formation of the solar system, for instance, entire worlds collided with apocalyptic consequences. One day, in the distant future, they will probably do so again: there's a small chance that either Mercury or Venus is doomed, but we don’t know which. It could be both, and they could take us with them. One such collision probably led to the formation of the Moon. It sounds like something out of science fiction, and it is ... but the best kind, 'hard' science fiction in which only the fantastic new invention goes beyond known science. Except that here there is no fantastic invention, just an unexpected mathematical discovery.

Mathematics has informed our understanding of the cosmos on every scale: the origin and motion of the Moon, the movements and form of the planets and their companion moons, the intricacies of asteroids, comets, and Kuiper belt objects, and the ponderous celestial dance of the entire solar system. It has taught us how interactions with Jupiter can fling asteroids towards Mars, and thence the Earth; why Saturn is not alone in possessing rings; how its rings formed to begin with and why they behave as they do, with braids, ripples, and strange rotating 'spokes'. It has shown us how a planet’s rings can spit out moons, one at a time.

Clockwork has given way to fireworks.

Excerpted from "Calculating the Cosmos: How Mathematics Unveils the Universe"by Ian Stewart. Copyright © 2016. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

Join Live Science as we take a seat at the table with Bill Schutt, author of "Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History" (Algonquin Books, 2018). While cannibalism in animals — including people — has been recognized for centuries, it wasn't always well-studied, and was long-thought to be a type of behavior that only appeared under conditions of extreme stress or deprivation.

However, research over the past few decades has taken a bite out of cannibalism myths and misconceptions. Scientists are taking a closer look at cannibalism in the natural world and in human societies from the not-so-distant-past, and are finding that it's more widespread and established as a behavior than was once thought.

Schutt recently joined Live Science for a Facebook Live event to talk about covering this meaty topic in his new book, and he shared some tasty science tidbits: from insects that consume their mates, to sharks that eat their siblings in utero, to our fascination with the Donner Party and fictional cannibals like Hannibal Lector.

Early works from some of the most famous scientists in history — including Leonardo da Vinci, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton — were stolen in a recent rare-book heist in London, according to news reports.

Three thieves made off with more than 160 antique books valued at about $2.5 million (2 million British pounds), The Guardian reported. The rare books were stolen from a warehouse, and the robbers avoided the storage facility's security system by boring holes into the skylight and rappelling down 40 feet (12 meters) of rope into the warehouse, evading motion-sensor alarms.

The "Mission: Impossible"-style break-in occurred sometime between Jan. 29 and 30, London's police service confirmed, according to The Guardian. Authorities are still investigating the heist, but it is likely that the were stolen for a specific collector, rather than to sell, The Guardian reported. [Lost Art: Photos of the Paintings Stolen from the Gardner Museum]

"They would be impossible to sell to any reputable dealer or auction house," a source familiar with the case told The Guardian. "We're not talking Picassos or Rembrandts or even gold bars — these books would be impossible to fence. It must be for some one specialist. There must be a collector behind it. The books belong to three different dealers working at the very top of the market, and altogether, they form a fantastic collection."

Many of the stolen works were from the 15th and 16th centuries, according to authorities. A 1566 copy of Copernicus' "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium" ("On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres," in which the scientist describes his theory that the sun is the center of the universe, and the planets revolve around the sun), was the most valuable item stolen, worth an estimated $268,000 (215,000 pounds), The Guardian reported.

Other items reported stolen were early works by Galileo, Newton and da Vinci, according to The Guardian. A 1569 edition of Dante's "Divine Comedy" was also among the books taken in the heist.

"Nothing like this has hit the rare-books trade before," Brian Lake, of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association, told The Guardian.

Anyone with information about the heist should contact London's Metropolitan police.

Original article on Live Science.

A bound copy of Sir Isaac Newton's seminal book on mathematics and science was sold for $3.7 million, making it the most expensive printed scientific book ever sold at auction, according to Christie's, the auction house that handled the sale.

The book has a Latin title — "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica," which translates to "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy," but scholars often call it the Principia. After Newton (1642-1727) wrote the book, he gave it to the English astronomer Edmond Halley (1656-1742) for editing, and it was printed and sold in London more than 300 years ago, in 1687.

The book is a pivotal piece of science and history, and theoretical physicist Albert Einstein called it "perhaps the greatest intellectual stride that it has ever been granted to any man to make." Even so, Christie's expected the goat-skin-covered book to bring in between $1 million and $1.5 million, but the unnamed bidder bought it for nearly four times that value at $3,719,500. [Creative Genius: The World's Greatest Minds]

The Principia famously elucidates Newton's three laws of motion, explaining how objects move under the influences of external forces. Physics students today still use the laws, which include:

-An object will remain in a state of inertia unless acted upon by force.

-The relationship between acceleration and applied force is force equals mass times acceleration (F=MA).

-For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

In the Principia's preface, Newton thanked Halley for encouraging him to write the book, saying, "Mr. Edmund Halley not only assisted me with his pains in correcting the press and taking care of the schemes, but it was his solicitations that its becoming public is owing; for when he had obtained of me my demonstrations of the figure of the celestial orbits, he continually pressed me to communicate the same to the Royal Society..." (translated by Andrew Motte).In a letter to the king in 1687, Halley wrote, "And I may be bold to say, that if ever Book was worthy the favourable acceptance of a Prince."

Halley also paid for the printing of the book; the Royal Society didn't have enough money at the time to cover the costs because it had just published another book, "De Historia Piscium" or "The History of Fishes" by John Ray and Francis Willughby. Luckily, Halley's contribution paid off: Newton's work was not seriously challenged until Einstein's theories of relativity and German theoretical physicist Max Planck's quantum theory were published in the 1900s. In fact, Newton's principles and methods are still used by scientists today.

Original article on Live Science.

When you think of cannibals, you may picture the headline-grabbing psychopaths who, every so often, commit horrific crimes.

But elsewhere in the animal kingdom, cannibalism might involve a self-sacrificing mother or a hungry fetus snacking down on its siblings.

Now, Bill Schutt's "Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History" (Algonquin Books, 2017) shows just how prevalent, and just how diverse, cannibalism is among animals.

In one example, Schutt tells how the black lace-weaver spider (Amaurobius ferox) feeds her offspring her own eggs — and then her own body. In "an extreme act of parental care," she lowers herself onto her hungry little progeny, who then eat her alive and drain her of bodily fluids, Schutt writes. In another saga, Schutt describes how embryonic sand tiger sharks (Carcharias taurus) chow down on their siblings while still in the womb, making this shark the only known species to consume embryos in utero.

Schutt, a biology professor at Long Island University (LIU-Post) in New York and a research associate in residence at the American Museum of Natural History, recently spoke with Live Science about nature's colorful array of cannibals and what people's fascination with such cannibals may mean. (His answers have been edited for clarity and length.)

Live Science: How did you become interested in the topic of cannibalism?

Bill Schutt: I've always had a real interest in both natural history and the macabre, which is certainly why none of my friends or relatives were surprised that, once I became a zoologist, I chose to study bats. Likewise, nobody was shocked that my first nonfiction book, "Dark Banquet" [Crown, 2008], was all about blood-feeding creatures. [Photos: Best Wild Animal Selfies]

Basically, I enjoy investigating subjects that seem horrific or disgusting (or both), then writing about them through the eyes of a zoologist. The topic of cannibalism seemed like an interesting topic to work on after blood feeding. And when I found all sorts of misinformation and an unfortunate, but understandable emphasis on sensationalism and gore, cannibalism turned out to be a perfect subject for me. 

Live Science: What surprised you the most during your research on cannibalism?

Schutt: I was surprised at how common cannibalism is across the entire animal kingdom. There are literally thousands of species, from microbes to monkeys, that consume their own kind for all sorts of reasons that make perfect evolutionary sense. This isn't abnormal behavior. It's absolutely normal, and this also holds true in some of the most infamous cases of human cannibalism — the Donner Party, for example. [The Donner Party was a group of American pioneers who traveled west by wagon in the 1840s, only to become stuck in the Sierra Nevada during the winter. They resorted to cannibalism to survive.]

Live Science: Your book aims to debunk some common myths about cannibalism. What were some of the most prevalent myths you encountered?

Schutt: That cannibalism in the animal kingdom is rare and [that] it only happens in instances where you're dealing with abnormal behaviors, such as captive conditions or a lack of food. That was the party line among scientists for a long time, until probably starting in the 1970s, when they discovered that all sorts of different animals cannibalize for many different reasons that had nothing to do with stress or a lack of food. That, to me, was really interesting.

Live Science: You mention in your book that cannibalism serves a variety of functions in animals. Could you elaborate on a few?

Schutt: Cannibalism is sometimes done as an act of parental care. There are spiders, for example, that lay eggs that have not been fertilized, called trophic eggs, just for their newly hatched spiderlings to eat. But when these run out, the mother calls her offspring to her by drumming on their web. As she hunkers down, they climb all over her body and then they eat her alive, leaving a husk-like corpse. 

Another function of cannibalism is that it helps animals survive in stressful environmental conditions. If there's suddenly a lack of alternative food options, many species will eat their young in order to survive to mate another day.

Live Science: What is the biggest difference between human and animal cannibalism?

Schutt: Western cultures, or those cultures that have been influenced by them (whether voluntarily or not), decided long ago that human cannibalism is probably the ultimate taboo. In societies where that concept wasn't determined to be a taboo or where Western rules weren't imposed on individuals, ideas about cannibalism turned out to be very different. For example, until relatively recently, there were indigenous groups in South America where people were as mortified at the concept of burying their dead as Western missionaries and anthropologists were about consuming their own departed loved ones.

In nature, there are no culture-generated rituals to either promote or fear. In many fish species, adults can be a million times larger than their own eggs. As a result, most fish exhibit about as much individual recognition of their offspring as humans do a handful of raisins. [Creative Creatures: 10 Animals That Use Tools] 

Live Science: You also investigated whether the human taboo against cannibalism was biological or social. What did you find?

Schutt: I definitely came away thinking that there are aspects of both. It's no secret that culture plays a huge part in determining whether something is permissible (and even sacred) or forbidden. But I also came away with an understanding that there may very well be strong selection pressure for humans not to eat other humans.

One selection pressure against cannibalism in humans comes from diseases called spongiform encephalopathies, such as kuru, which destroy the brain and are always fatal. As with other versions of this disease — which can infect mink, sheep and, perhaps most infamously, cows — the human form can be caused by consuming infected tissue, especially nervous system tissue.

So cannibalism may have dire consequences for humans. Some researchers have even hypothesized, using computer modeling, that cannibalism — and the spread of a kuru-like disease — may have sped up the ultimate demise of the Neanderthals. 

Live Science: Why do you think cannibalism continues to fascinate us? What does that fascination say about us?

Schutt: I think our deep fascination with the topic of cannibalism stems from the fact that, since the dawn of Western culture, we've been taught that it's arguably the worst thing that a person can do to another person. That in itself makes it both horrifying and interesting.

Add this ultimate taboo to the fact that most of us love a good scare, and you have an explanation for why Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter was voted the greatest screen villain of all time by the American Film Institute.

We're all fascinated with food as well, and with human cannibalism, I suppose many of us are dealing with the ultimate in scary food.

Really, the theme of this book is that you start off with these preconceived notions of what cannibalism is, and then when you explore it more, you find out that it is something completely different. That it makes all sorts of sense, in some ways, and that the examples that you find in the animal kingdom can be used to explain the circumstances behind some of the more infamous examples of human cannibalism. You can then look at those examples in a completely new light. That's one thing I'd like to get across.

"Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History" will be available on Feb. 14, 2017, and is available for pre-order now.

Originally published on Live Science.

Have you ever wondered what humans did before numbers existed? How they organized their lives, traded goods, or kept track of their treasures? What would your life be like without them? Numbers began as simple representations of everyday things, but mathematics rapidly took on a life of its own, occupying a parallel virtual world. In "Are Numbers Real?," Brian Clegg explores the way that math has become more and more detached from reality, and yet despite this is driving the development of modern physics. Below is an excerpt from "Are Numbers Real?" (St. Martin's Press, 2016).

Not entirely surprisingly, infinity is a topic that never fails to stimulate the mind. Thoughts about the nature and existence of infinity go back all the way to the Ancient Greeks. They were certainly aware that a sequence of numbers like the positive integers, the simple counting numbers would go on forever. If there were a biggest integer—call it max—then there surely could always be max + 1, max + 2, and so on. But the whole idea of infinity made the Greeks uncomfortable. Their word for it, apeiron, suggested chaos and disorder.

The Greek philosopher who took the definitive approach to infinity for the period (a point of view that would remain dominant for centuries to come) was Aristotle, born in 384 BC in northern Greece. Aristotle argued that infinity was both necessary and impossible. He used examples of aspects of the universe that he considered infinite. The integers, as we have seen, or the span of time—which he argued had no end. And he believed that something could be divided up an infinite set of times. But equally he came up with a range of often confusing arguments as to why infinity could not exist in the real world. For example, he pointed out that a body is defined by its boundaries. If a body were infinite it would have no boundaries, hence it could not exist.

After what was clearly a considerable mental struggle, Aristotle finally decided that infinity was a potential, rather than a concept that was fulfilled in reality. This “potential infinity” was something that could be aimed for, but could never practically be achieved. Infinity existed, but could not be made real on demand. To illustrate the concept he used the neat example of the Olympic games. The games existed—there was no doubt of that. It wasn’t a fictional concept. But generally speaking, if someone asked you to show him or her the Olympic games, you couldn’t. The games were a potential entity, rather than something you could point at and identify. Aristotle was careful to point out, though, that some potential entities were going to become actual at a point in space or time, yet this wasn’t the case with infinity.

This neutered concept of potential infinity was exactly what Newton and Leibniz (see chapter 9) were dealing with when they devised calculus. The infinity of calculus is something that we head toward—it is a limit that is never practically reached. And the target is exactly what the familiar symbol for infinity, the lemniscate (∞) represents. It is the symbol for Aristotle’s potential infinity. The lemniscate was introduced by Newton’s contemporary, John Wallis, who had written a rather dull treatise on the three-dimensional shapes known as conic sections, which are the result of cutting a pair of cones positioned point to point along various planes. (No one can accuse mathematicians of not knowing how to have fun.) Wallis just throws in a line that says “let ∞ represent infinity” without ever explaining where this symbol comes from.

For the vast majority of mathematicians, with one notable exception, this was sufficient to carry all the way through to the nineteenth century. In fact, potential infinity was generally considered to be the only respectable way to think about the infinite. For example, Carl Friedrich Gauss, the eminent nineteenth- century German mathematician definitively remarked:

I protest against the use of an infinite quantity as an actual entity; this is never allowed in mathematics. The infinite is only a manner of speaking, in which one properly speaks of limits to which certain ratios can come as near as desired, while others are permitted to increase without bound.

The exception to this blinkered thinking was the remarkable Galileo Galilei. The first thing that springs to mind when Galileo is mentioned was his championing  of  the  Copernican  theory that put the Sun rather than the Earth  at  the  center  of  the  universe, leading to his trial by the Inquisition and permanent house arrest. However, in scientific terms his most significant work was the book he published in 1638 called Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche Intorno a Due Nuove Scienze (Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Concerning Two New Sciences).  This was his masterpiece of physics, laying the ground for Newton’s triumphant completion of this work on mechanics, forces, and movement.

Like his book on Copernican theory that got him into so much trouble, this new work was structured as a conversation between three characters, a format that was very popular at the time. Written in conversational Italian rather than stuffy Latin, it remains far more readable today than the formal and often near-impenetrable work of Newton. Given his position, serving a life sentence for the publication, it was remarkable that Galileo got the book published at all. He attempted to do so originally in Venice, then proud of its independence from Rome, but there was still a requirement to get the go-ahead from the Inquisition, which had issued a blanket prohibition on printing anything that Galileo wrote.

If there was one thing that Galileo excelled in, it was stubbornness. Despite the prohibition, despite the risks of even indirectly evading it, when the Dutch publisher Lodewijk Elzevir visited Italy in 1636, Galileo managed to get a copy of his new manuscript to him. One fascinating aspect of the book as it finally came to print is the dedication. In earlier years, Galileo had always attempted to dedicate his writing to a power figure, who might as a result give him patronage. This book he dedicated to a former pupil who was now the French ambassador to Rome, Count François de Noailles. However, where previously Galileo could simply lavish as much praise as was possible (and plenty was possible in the sycophantic style of the time), here he had to be more careful, as the last thing he wanted to do was get Noailles into trouble with the Inquisition.

In the wording, Galileo combined deviousness with an apparent naïveté. It is highly unlikely that the Inquisition fell for his attempt at deception— though, in practice, they seemed to have turned a blind eye. According to Galileo:

I had decided not to publish any more of my work. And yet in order to save it from complete oblivion, it seemed wise to leave a manuscript copy in some place where it would be available at least to those who follow intelligently the subjects which I havetreated. Accordingly I chose first to place my work in your Lord- ship’s hands ...

So, on the one hand Galileo was thanking Noailles for his help. But at the same time he didn’t want to make it sound as if Noailles had been directly responsible for the publication, so he threw in some mysterious intermediaries:

I was notified by the Elzevirs that they had these works of mine in press and that I ought to decide upon a dedication and send them a reply at once. This sudden unexpected news led me to think that the eagerness of your Lordship to revive and spread my name by passing these works on to various friends was the real cause of their falling into the hands of printers who, because they had already published other works of mine, now wished to honor me with a beautiful and ornate edition of this work.

He could thank Noailles, but also managed to blame un- named friends of the ambassador for passing the manuscript to the printer. It’s clear that the idea that all this had happened without Galileo’s knowledge until the book was almost ready to print was a fiction. Not only did he ensure that Elzevir received a copy of the manuscript on his Italian visit, there was a considerable correspondence between Galileo and Elzevir over the content of the book. Galileo was the kind of author that cause publishers to tear their hair out, wanting to tweak his output to the last possible moment before going to print. This is bad enough with today’s electronic printing, but was a nightmare when each page had to be carefully set up in movable type and made into a physical printing plate. But whether the Inquisition was fooled or simply looked the other way, it did not intervene and the book was published, if unavailable for sale in Galileo’s native Italy.

The “two new sciences” in the book’s title were those of the nature of solid matter and an analysis of motion, and it was in the first section that the topic of infinity came up. In trying to understand why solid matter sticks together so effectively—why, for instance, a piece of metal is so hard to break up—one of Galileo’s protagonists suggested that it is the vacuum between the tiny particles of matter that held them together. (He was wrong, it is electromagnetism, but it wasn’t a bad idea.) This theory was queried by Simplicio, whose role in the book was to challenge new thinking, mostly sticking to Ancient Greek ideas. Simplicio argued that there could only be a tiny bit of vacuum in so small a space, which could only apply a tiny force—far smaller than the powerful force that holds a piece of metal together.

Excerpted from "Are Numbers Real?: The Uncanny Relationship of Mathematics and the Physical World" by Brian Clegg. Copyright © 2016 by the author and reprinted with permission of St. Martin's Press, LLC.

Science storytelling, comics-style

Once upon a time, comics were primarily the domain of costumed heroines and heroes preoccupied with battling evil supervillains and saving the planet. But generations of comics creators have proven that the graphic format used by comics can convey a wide range of narratives.

And a series of nonfiction graphic novels is proving that comics are terrific for telling stories about science.

Today (Nov. 16), First Second Books announced 13 upcoming titles in their "Science Comics" book series, to be released from 2017 through 2019. These nonfiction graphic novels combine engaging and vibrant artwork with characters who will introduce readers to a range of fascinating science topics: the history of drones, the evolution of the human brain, crows' intelligence, and the unexpectedly compelling life of trees.

The notion of combining graphic storytelling with science subjects made sense to First Second — in a statement, they called Science Comics an "amazing mix of two nerdy things that go excellently together." The series launched in March 2016 with two volumes: "Coral Reefs: Cities of the Ocean," and "Dinosaurs: Fossils and Feathers," followed by "Volcanoes: Fire and Life," published Nov. 15, and "Bats: Learning to Fly," which will be available Feb. 28, 2017.

Related: The science websites that we read every day

But there are many more Science Comics waiting in the wings — and First Second gave Live Science an exclusive peek. Here's a hint of what's to come. 

Brains (Tory Woollcott and Alex Graudins)

When a mad scientist and his zombie assistant kidnap a girl named Fahama to try and steal her brain, she must learn the evolution and science of the human brain as quickly as possible, in order to plan her escape.

Publish Date: Winter 2019

Cars: The Engines That Move You (Dan Zettwoch)

Writer and illustrator Dan Zettwoch takes the wheel in a road trip exploring the history of automobiles, how they're put together, and how they came to shape the world we live in today.

“I’m excited about all the brain-tingling research and high-octane art I’ll get to do for this book," Zettwoch said in a statement. "There’s gonna be so much fun stuff to learn about and then get to turn into crazy (but hopefully clear!) cartooning: weird history, complex contraptions, obscure and (mostly) lovable characters, and literally thousands of explosions."

Publish Date: Spring 2019

Computers (Penelope Spector and Perry E. Metzger)

A cast of anthropomorphic Victorian-era dinosaurs introduce readers to the basics of how computing originated, what the first computers looked like, and how they developed into the machines that can be found in nearly every corner of our lives.

"Computers really are complicated," Metzger said in a statement. But we've set out to prove that with the help of some well-mannered dinosaurs and a lot of surrealism, children — and perhaps even some particularly bright adults — can understand how these marvelous machines function."

Publish Date: Spring 2019

Crows (MK Reed and Kyla Vanderklugt)

Scientists have long known crows to be highly intelligent, capable of recognizing faces and using tools. But human fascination with these birds goes back much farther in our own cultural past, with crows playing prominent roles in different cultures' myths and legends. MK Reed and Kyla Vanderklugt investigate the history that humans and crows share, and show what researchers are just beginning to discover about their cognition and behavior.

"I've always loved watching the crows in my yard," Vanderklugt said in a statement. "They're scary clever. I'm looking forward to learning about what makes them tick in the process of making this book.”

Publish Date: Fall 2019

Polar Bears: A Survivor's Guide (Jason Viola and Zack Giallongo)

Experience the Arctic through a mother polar bear's eyes, as she teaches her young cubs what they'll need to survive in the icy polar environment.

"I love learning about how these enormous bears can thrive in such a harsh, constantly changing environment," the book's co-author Jason Viola said in a statement. "Admiring their cunning survival skills and playful personalities at this precarious time reminds us of the responsibility we have to nature and the planet."

Publish Date: Spring 2018

Robots and Drones (Mairghread Scott and Jacob Chabot)

Ready to welcome your robot overlords? Autonomous machines have actually been around longer than you might think. Mairghread Scott and Jacob Chabot provide a glimpse into some of today's most sophisticated robots, revealing how they're designed, how people operate them and what they enable us to do — on Earth and in space.

Publish Date: Mar. 27, 2018

Sharks: Apex Predator of the Sea (Joe Flood)

Sharks are fearsome and efficient predators, and as such, they play a vital role in ocean ecosystems and food webs. This book dives deeply into the sharks' biology and habits as part of a larger interconnected network of life in the sea. 

"Not only do I love the ocean, but I’ve always been fascinated by sharks," author Joe Flood said in a statement. "And this book gives me an amazing opportunity to explore both of these subjects more in depth.” 

Publish Date: Mar. 17, 2018

The complete list of 'Science Comics'

"Dogs" (Andy Hirsch) Publish Date: Oct. 31, 2017

"Robots and Drones" (Mairghread Scott, Jacob Chabot) Publish Date: Mar. 27, 2018

"Sharks" (Joe Flood) Publish Date: Apr. 17, 2018

"Polar Bears" (Zack Giallongo, Jason Viola) Publish Date: Spring 2018

"Rockets" (Jerzy Drozd, Anne Drozd) Publish Date: Spring 2018

"Cats" (Andy Hirsch) Publish Date: Fall 2018

"Weather" (MK Reed, Jonathan Hill) Publish Date: Fall 2018

"Cars" (Dan Zettwoch) Publish Date: Spring 2019

"Computers" (Perry E. Metzger, Penelope Spector, and Jerel Dye) Publish Date: Spring 2019

"Crows" (MK Reed and Kyla Vanderklugt) Publish Date: Fall 2019

"Trees" (Andy Hirsch) Publish Date: Fall 2019

"Brains" (Tory Woollcott, Alex Graudins) Publish Date: Winter 2019

"Solar Systems" (Rosemary Mosco, Jon Chad) Publish Date: Winter 2019

In "Blueprint for a Battlestar: Serious Scientific Explanations Behind Sci-Fi's Greatest Inventions," NASA insider Rod Pyle explores remarkable and memorable technologies from the world of science fiction. Each concept is explained and dissected to reveal the real science behind it. Some are temptingly within our reach — such as cyborgs and artificial intelligence — others are further off, but fast approaching reality (think bio-ports or cloaking devices). Below is an excerpt of "Blueprint for a Battlestar: Serious Scientific Explanations Behind Sci-Fi's Greatest Inventions" (Sterling, 2016).

Death from Above: Building a Death Planet

Without doubt, the technological celebrity of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope was the death Planet known as the Death Star. It was the threat that hovered above a world...the target of the heroic pilots in their X-Wing fighters and the home base that Darth Vader so tenaciously defended with his wicked Twin Ion Engine (TIE) Fighters.

Tactical Concerns

The death planet seemed so effective that it was even the subject of a public petition sent to the White House in 2012. The suggestion was that the US should build its own Death Star, presumably to maintain law and order on some planet other than Earth. The tongue-in-cheek document garnered more than 25,000 signatures, enough to warrant an equally silly response from the Obama administration. They said the cost of such a device was estimated at about $850 quadrillion (which is even larger than the US debt,) and that it would take 833,000 years to create enough metal to fabricate it. The response further elaborated that the US government did not support blowing up planets and had tactical concerns about a weapon which could be destroyed by a tiny, battered one-man fighter.

NASA may not be working on a death planet. But what would it take to actually build one? The first problem to overcome is sheer size: The death planet, as represented in the Star Wars films, is really big. Various sources have estimated its diameter at somewhere between 60–100 miles. At this size it would put most of the inhabitants of the asteroid belt to shame and, even though basically hollow, would have a small gravitational field and essentially be a mini-planet, if you will.

If something that size was placed in Low Earth Orbit—the region around our planet extending to an altitude of 60–1,200 miles—a goodly chunk of it would be hanging down into the atmosphere, dragging and heating up and rapidly reentering. It would most likely crash into the ocean.

Just getting the death planet into orbit in the first place wouldn't be easy. After spending nearly a million years to fabricate the metal, it would take an untold number of launches to get all that mass up there...enough to permanently poison the atmosphere.

There is one way around this particular problem, however. There is plenty of metallic ore in the asteroids that roam the solar system. Most of it is in the asteroid belt and the Kuiper Belt (outside of Pluto's orbit,) but there are also plenty of rogue wanderers. Grabbing a number of large ones and smelting their ores down would net many millions of tons of metal that is already up in space...no bulk launches necessary for building materials. Of course, powering the mining operation itself would require solar panels, possibly thousands of miles across.

If built on Earth getting the death planet into space would be daunting. The largest flying machine ever created was the Apollo program's Saturn V rocket, which weighed over five million pounds, when its fuel is included. It was about the size and mass of a World War II navy destroyer and, had it exploded, would have had the power of a small atomic bomb. All this explosive power was required simply to propel the tiny 12,000-lb capsule at its nose to the moon and back. Moving the death planet would require something hugely more powerful.

Supposing a death planet could actually be built and powered, it would still lack the very nasty weapon the original version had. It is never explicitly said exactly what kind of weapon the death planet used to destroy Alderaan, but some documentation refers to the weapon as a "Super Laser." Laser is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation (LASER.) This is a fancy term for 'coherent' light, a form of light in which all the waves cooperate to move essentially in unison. This can create a powerful beam that carries a lot of energy a long way, if the laser is powerful enough. Lasers have been around for about 50 years and are well understood devices, currently in use in everything from DVD players to military weapons.

Today's most powerful lasers don't even use electricity to power them. Instead they employ gases that are forced explosively through a large tube at high velocities. In the correct configuration, a gas that changes temperature rapidly enough can emit light, in this case coherent light. But you need a lot of gas, moving very quickly, to do this. The upside is that a lot of very powerful, hot light can be created for a brief time. The largest such lasers known today are the MIRACL (Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser,) made by the US Navy, and a US-Israeli collaboration called the Tactical High Energy Laser (THEL.) Lasers in this size and power range, the current upper limit, can shoot down artillery shells and small battlefield rockets up to five feet long and well under a foot in diameter. That’s a bit smaller than Alderaan.

That planet was around 7,700 miles in diameter, or about the same size as Earth (just shy of 8,000 miles.) To destroy it would take the equivalent of over a sextillion (or a billion trillion) artillery shells. The 'super laser' would need to be enormous. The Star Wars version also vaporizes the planet in just two to three seconds, far quicker than today’s battlefield lasers can destroy those artillery shells. So for a gas laser, you would need a small planet-full of gas (bigger than the death planet itself) to fire up the laser—or all the power that could be made by the combined generating stations of Earth in a few trillion years (for comparison, the entire universe is just over 12 billion years old.)

Elsewhere in the official Star Wars universe, it is mentioned that the weapon is actually powered by ‘hypermatter.’ Regardless of what powers it,
vaporizing matter gives off energy. How muchmatter would need to be flashed out of existence to create that much power? About the equivalent of the mass in Mount Everest is how much. We do have a lot of mass on Earth, enough to make many thousands of Mount Everests so as long as we're willing to dig enormous holes in our planet. The problem is to figure out a way to convert it into energy.

Bear in mind that, using this system of reference, one gram of matter contains as much energy as
 21.5 kilotons of TNT high explosive, or about the same explosive force of the plutonium atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki in the Second World War. So how many grams are in Mount Everest? The mountain contains about 365 cubic miles of mass, or about 6,399,000,000,000 metric tons. That's a huge amount of explosive energy to be released if we vaporized it, making it possibly more practical than a gas-powered death planet.

Copyright © 2016 by Rod Pyle. Used by permission of Sterling. All rights reserved.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

After years of sales growth, major publishers reported a fall in their e-book sales for the first time this year, introducing new doubts about the potential of e-books in the publishing industry. A Penguin executive even admitted recently that the e-books hype may have driven unwise investment, with the company losing too much confidence in “the power of the word on the page.”

Yet despite the increasing realization that digital and print can easily coexist in the market, the question of whether the e-book will “kill” the print book continues to surface. It doesn’t matter if the intention is to predict or dismiss this possibility; the potential disappearance of the book does not cease to stimulate our imagination.

Why is this idea so powerful? Why do we continue to question the encounter between e-books and print books in terms of a struggle, even if all evidence points to their peaceful coexistence?

The answers to these questions go beyond e-books and tell us much more about the mixture of excitement and fear we feel about innovation and change. In our research, we discuss how the idea of one medium “killing” another has often followed the unveiling of new technologies.

It’s all happened before

Even before the advent of digital technologies, critics have predicted the demise of existing media. After television was invented, many claimed radio would die. But radio ended up surviving by finding new uses; people started listening in cars, during train rides and on factory floors.

The myth of the disappearing book isn’t new, either. As early as 1894, there was speculation that the introduction of the phonograph would spell the demise of the books: They’d be replaced by what we today call audiobooks.

This happened again and again. Movies, radio, television, hyperlinks and smartphones – all conspired to destroy print books as a source of culture and entertainment. Some claimed the end of books would result in cultural regression and decline. Others envisioned utopian digital futures, overstating the advantages of e-books.

It is not by chance that the idea of the death of the book surfaces in moments of technological change. This narrative, in fact, perfectly conveys the mixture of hopes and fears that characterize our deepest reactions to technological change.

Narratives of technological change

To understand why these reactions are so common, one has to consider that we create emotional bonds with media as they become an integral part of our life. Numerous studies have shown how people develop a close relationship with objects such as books, televisions and computers. Sometimes, we even humanize them, giving a name to our car or shouting at our laptop for not working properly. As a result, the emergence of a new technology – like e-readers – doesn’t just indicate economic and social change. It also causes us to adjust our relationship with something that has become an integral part of our day-to-day life.

As a result, we find ourselves longing for what we used to know, but no longer have. And it’s why entire industries develop around retro products and older technologies. The spread of the printing press in 15th-century Europe, for example, made people seek out original manuscripts. The shift from silent to sound movie in the 1920s stimulated nostalgia for the older form. The same happened in the shift from analog to digital photography, from vinyls to CDs, or from black-and-white to color television. Not surprisingly, e-readers stimulated a new appreciation for the material quality of “old” books – and even for their often unpleasant smell.

The ones who still worry for the disappearance of print books may rest assured: Books have endured many technical revolutions, and are in the best position to survive this one.

Yet the myth of the disappearing medium will continue to provide an appealing narrative about both the transformative power of technology and our aversion to change. In fact, one of the strategies we employ in order to make sense of change is the use of narrative patterns that are available and familiar, such as narratives of death and ending. Easy to remember and to spread, the story of the death of media reflects our excitement for the future, as well as our fear of losing parts of our intimate world – and finally, of ourselves.

Simone Natale, Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies, Loughborough University and Andrea Ballatore, Lecturer, Birkbeck, University of London

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Widely considered the greatest genius of all time, Albert Einstein revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos with his general theory of relativity and helped lead us into the atomic age. Yet in the final decades of his life, he was ignored by most working scientists, and his ideas were opposed by even his closest friends. How did this happen? Einstein's imagination and self-confidence served him well when he was young. But when it came to the new field of quantum mechanics, the same traits undermined him. An intimate biography touching on the romances and rivalries of the celebrated physicist, as much as on his scientific goals, "Einstein's Greatest Mistake" reveals what we owe Einstein today — and how much more he might have achieved if not for his all-too-human flaws. Below is an excerpt from "Einstein's Greatest Mistake: A Biography" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016).

Einstein should have been happy. Revered worldwide since Eddington's confirmation of his theory in 1919, he was awarded the Nobel Prize of 1921 for his work in theoretical physics. Movie stars and royalty wanted to be near him; the mobbed appearances continued. But amidst that acclaim, amidst that fame, Einstein began to worry about one consequence of his celebrated theory—and his professional angst was also compounded by growing stress in his personal life.

His divorce from Mileva Maríc (which had finally come through in 1919) had given him freedom, but it had distanced him from his two beloved sons. He tried writing them long chatty letters, but they were in no mood to accept their father's overtures. When he got them to visit him in Berlin, he purchased a telescope and put it on his balcony for them to use, but this didn’t help either. When Einstein did travel to Switzerland to take them on the sort of walking holidays they had liked before, everything was mannered, stilted. Once, in exasperation, he wrote to the elder boy, Hans Albert, from Berlin, taking him to task for being so cold. But Hans Albert was just as angry: his father was abandoning them, so how could he expect any kindness in return? Hans Albert later remembered that he felt as if a "gloomy veil" had come over what was left of their family life.

Einstein raged at Maríc for poisoning his children's minds against him, but he must have known that he was partly responsible—and for what? Life with Elsa Lowenthal hadn’t worked out as he had hoped. He had intended to keep the liaison strictly on his terms, having written to Besso in 1915 that it was "[an] excellent and truly enjoyable relationship . . . ; its stability will be guaranteed by the avoidance of marriage." Lowenthal, however, had a different view, and in June 1919—while Eddington was still on the tropical island of Principe—they had married. Almost immediately after the wedding, something changed. Maríc may have been resentful of the way she was left out of his scientific discussions, but at least she had understood the main lines of his work. Yet although Lowenthal’s lack of scientific education had been fine when Einstein was on the rebound, now he was discovering that behind her natural ebullience lay an intellect that left much to be desired. "She is no mental brainstorm," he later remarked.

During their courtship, Lowenthal had agreed with Einstein about the pleasures of an informal life and had enjoyed his mocking of wealthy, established Berliners. But once they moved into her seven-room apartment in a building with a grand lobby and a uniformed doorman, he felt trapped among her Persian carpets, heavy furniture, and display cabinets filled with fine porcelain. Some of her friends were thoughtful, but the majority, he was coming to see, were just chattering socialites. Worst of all, she began babying him. "I recall," her daughter wrote, "that my mother often said during lunch, 'Albert, eat: don't dream!'" It was all very far from romantic.

Soon Einstein began to have affairs. His mere presence, an architect who knew him well remembered, "acted upon women as a magnet acts on iron filings." Some of these women were younger than Elsa, some richer, and some both. What they saw was one of the most famous men on the planet, yet one who was unlike the stereotype of the desiccated intellectual. He was still fit and broad-shouldered (as friends who saw him take off his shirt noted); he loved telling wry Jewish jokes, and he had a direct, Swabian use of language. Actresses such as the renowned Luise Rainer soon wished to be seen with him. He spent evenings with a wealthy widow at her villa in Berlin and accompanied another woman, a fashionable entrepreneur, to concerts or the theater, riding with her in her chauffeured limousine.

The contrast between these other women and Elsa, with her chatter and her increasingly baffled disappointment, was painful for everyone. Einstein liked to go sailing, and when he did manage to find free time would head to their country house near a lake not far from Berlin, where he kept his sailboat Tümmler (German for "porpoise"). He would go out alone in the boat for hours, dreamingly adjusting the tiller as the winds skidded him here and there. His housekeeper described one regular visitor to the summer house when Elsa was away. "The Austrian woman was younger than Frau Professor," the maid recalled, "and was very attractive, lively, and liked to laugh a lot, just like the Professor." On one memorable occasion, Elsa found another woman's "article of clothing" still on the boat, and they had an argument that, in its cold fury, continued for weeks. Men and women were not designed to be monogamous, he insisted. Elsa confided to a few close friends that living with a genius was not easy—not easy at all.

This was not the marriage either of them had wished for. In the letter Einstein wrote to Besso’s adult children, consoling them after their father's death, he concluded: "What I admired most in him as a person was the fact that he managed for many years to live with his wife not only in peace but in continuing harmony—something in which I have rather shamefully failed twice."

If this were Einstein's only failure, it might have been bearable. But he was confronting an even worse problem. Even as early as 1917, at what should have been the peak of his accomplishment, Einstein had discovered what seemed to be a catastrophic flaw in his great G=T equation, and it had been preying on him ever more as the 1920s went on.

Excerpted from "Einstein's Greatest Mistake: A Biography" by David Bodanis. Copyright © 2016 by David Bodanis. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

A scorpion, a jellyfish, and a viper don't share much of a physical resemblance, but they have one very important thing in common — they are venomous, producing a chemical compound containing neurotoxins that can incapacitate or even kill, and they inject this dangerous brew using highly specialized stingers or fangs. Nearly every group of animal life includes venomous species, and they produce a wide variety of toxins that can cause excruciating pain, delirium, partial or complete paralysis, and organ failure. Biologist and writer Christie Wilcox has encountered many venomous animals — some that live in remote corners of the planet and others that can be found in suburban backyards. In her new book, Wilcox introduces readers to many of these deadly creatures, and investigates how evolution shaped diverse types of chemical attacks — or defenses — and what makes each weapon unique to the species that wield them. Below is an excerpt from "Venomous: How Earth's Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemisty" (Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).

If you decided to create a list of the most improbable animals on the planet, the platypus is an easy first pick. The platypus is so peculiar that even the great naturalist George Shaw, who provided the first scientific description of the animal in 1799, could hardly believe it was real. “A degree of skepticism is not only pardonable, but laudable,” he wrote in the tenth volume of his Naturalist’s Miscellany, “and I ought perhaps to acknowledge that I almost doubt the testimony of my own eyes.” It is a sentiment I understand. As I sat staring at a large male platypus at the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary in Melbourne, Australia, I could hardly believe the creature in front of me was real. Even up close, it looked like some kind of masterful puppet, Jim Henson’s greatest feat.

Rebecca Bain, known as Beck, the head mammal keeper and one of the people responsible for Lone Pine’s two male platypuses, was kind enough to let me in behind the scenes to indulge my interest in the animal. As Beck wrestled the older male from his nest box, I was surprised by his beaveresque tail, duck-like bill, and ottery feet. But while these traits are all fantastically unthinkable, there is one feature of the platypus that stands out among these oddities. It was the feature that drew me to Australia, the reason I came to see the bizarre creatures in person. Beware the male platypus: of the 5,416 currently recognized species of mammals, he alone possesses a venomous sting, using toxic ankle spurs to fight over females.

We know of twelve venomous mammals; all except for the platypus deliver a venomous bite. There are four species of shrew, three vampire bats, two solenodons (long-snouted, rodent-like burrowing mammals), one mole, the slow loris, and the platypus. There’s some evidence that the slow loris may actually be four species of slow lorises, which would bump the total to fifteen, but even so, that’s still just three handfuls of venomous mammals.

Of the animal lineages, there are venomous representatives in the phyla Cnidaria, Echinodermata, Annelida, Arthropoda, Mollusca, and Chordata—the phylum that includes humans. Compared with other groups of animals, the mammals boast very few venomous members; the Cnidaria, including jellyfishes, anemones, and corals, are an entire phylum—more than nine thousand species—of venomous animals, though if we want to talk sheer numbers, the venomous arthropods, including spiders, bees and wasps, centipedes, and scorpions, undoubtedly reign supreme. There are venomous snails, venomous worms, and venomous urchins. And that’s not even including the rest of the venomous vertebrates in the Chordata. There are venomous fishes, frogs, snakes, and lizards.

The term venomous carries with it an explicit set of requirements. Many species are toxic: they possess substances that cause a substantial degree of harm in small doses (a toxin). We used to think of the terms toxic, poisonous, and venomous as interchangeable; now modern scientists distinguish between them. Both poisonous and venomous species are indeed toxic, for they produce or store toxins in their tissues. You may have heard that everything is a toxin in the right dose, but that’s not quite true. A large enough dose can make something toxic, but if it takes a lot to kill you, then a substance isn’t a toxin. Sure, you can drink enough cans of Coke for it to be fatal, but sodas are not considered toxins because the amount it takes for them to be toxic is huge (you’d have to chug liters at a time). The secretion of the anthrax bacterium, on the other hand, is a toxin because even a teeny bit can be deadly.

We can further classify species that are toxic based on how those toxins arrive in a victim. Any toxin that causes harm through ingestion, inhalation, or absorption is considered a poison. Poisonous species, like dart frogs or pufferfishes, must wait for other species to make a mistake before inflicting their toxins. Some scientists would argue there is a third subcategory of toxic, in addition to poisonous and venomous—the toxungenous animals—which are essentially poisonous with purpose: toxungenous animals are equipped with poisons, but they’re more impatient. Animals like the poison-squirting cane toads or the spitting cobras actively aim their poisons at offenders when they’re annoyed, refusing to wait to be touched or bitten, like other poisonous animals, to transmit their toxins.

To earn the prestigious descriptor of “venomous,” an organism must be more than just toxic; it must also have a specific means of delivering its dangerous goods into another animal. It has to be proactive about its toxicity. Snakes have fangs. Lionfish have spines. Jellyfish have stinging cells. Male platypuses have spurs.

The venomous spurs on the platypus aren’t hard to spot. As Beck described the animals and their care at Lone Pine, I stared at the yellow toothlike points jutting from the hind legs. At about an inch long, they are much larger than I had expected. There’s no doubt that any wound created by such impressive spurs would be terribly painful even without the venom. As I placed my hands within inches of the spurs to get a close-up photograph, I shuddered at the thought of how much it would hurt to be stung by the animal in front of me.

Platypuses are really awfully, terribly venomous. From what I’ve heard, being stung by a platypus is a life-changing experience, as any deeply traumatic event shapes who you are. Their venom causes excruciating pain for several hours, even days. In one recorded case, a fifty-seven-year-old war veteran was stung in his right hand when he stumbled on what seemed like a wounded or sick platypus while he was out hunting and, concerned for the little guy, picked it up. For his kindness, he was hospitalized for six days in excruciating agony. Over the first half hour of his treatment, doctors administered a total of 30 milligrams of morphine (the standard for patients in pain is usually 1 milligram per hour), but it had almost no effect. The veteran said the pain was far worse than the pain from the shrapnel wounds he’d gotten as a soldier. Only when the medics numbed all feeling in his hand with a nerve-blocking agent did he finally feel relief.

Even more bizarre is that the venom the platypus delivers is very different from the venoms of its mammalian relatives. Similar to the animal’s outward appearance, with its collection of body parts seemingly taken from other species, it is as if the platypus’s venom is composed of a random spattering of proteins stolen from other animals. There are eighty-three different toxin genes expressed in the platypus venom gland, some of whose products closely resemble proteins from spiders, sea stars, anemones, snakes, fish, and lizards, as if someone cut and pasted genes from the entire diversity of venomous life into the platypus’s genome. Both externally and internally, the platypus is a testament to the power of convergent evolution, the phenomenon in which similar selective pressures can lead to strikingly similar results in very different lineages. Yet they are also wonderfully unique animals, the only ones we know of that use venom primarily for masculine combat rather than for feeding or defense.

Before she placed him back in his nest box, Beck allowed the platypus to release his rage. She pulled out a towel and dangled it behind him. The animal quickly and gleefully grabbed the towel with his hind legs and began writhing vigorously. The fervor with which he envenomated the cloth was adorable and terrifying. I silently thanked the awkward animal for accommodating my presence, however unwillingly. I’m pretty sure he imagined it was my arm and not the towel he clung to.

Copyright 2016, Christie Wilcox. Reprinted with permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Live Science is hosting a book giveaway!

On Thursday (Sept. 29) at 1:00 p.m. ET, author Christie Wilcox visits Live Science to talk about her new book, "Venomous: How Earth's Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry" (Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). Join us for a Facebook Live event, during which we'll be giving away a signed copy of her book to one lucky viewer. [Tune in on Live Science's Facebook page]

Wilcox is a biologist and writer who has contributed to the New York Times, Scientific American, the Washington Post, and Popular Science, to name a few. She is also co-editor of "Science Blogging: The Essential Guide" (Yale University Press, 2016), a how-to primer for communicating science online.

In "Venomous," Wilcox escorts readers on a harrowing journey of discovery that examines the biological weapons that animals use to subdue prey, compete for mates, or protect themselves from predators.

Her book investigates some of the deadliest animals on land and sea, and delves deep into the unique circumstances and evolutionary twists and turns that enabled them to evolve chemical cocktails that can incapacitate, paralyze or kill. But these harmful compounds can also be helpful; analysis of different types of venom is helping scientists to not only understand the components that make them so deadly, but is informing efforts to develop new medicines for treating a wide range of ailments.

Details about the giveaway are below. And don't forget to follow Live Science on Facebook and Twitter for updates on this contest and other live video events!

Venomous: How Earth's Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry Giveaway

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You are reading the word "now" right now. But what does that mean? What makes the ephemeral moment "now" so special? Its enigmatic character has bedeviled philosophers, priests, and modern-day physicists from Augustine to Einstein and beyond. Einstein showed that the flow of time is affected by both velocity and gravity, yet he despaired at his failure to explain the meaning of "now." Equally puzzling: why does time flow? Some physicists have given up trying to understand, and call the flow of time an illusion, but the eminent experimentalist physicist Richard A. Muller protests. He says physics should explain reality, not deny it. In "Now: The Physics of Time," Muller does more than poke holes in past ideas; he crafts his own revolutionary theory, one that makes testable predictions. He begins by laying out a firm and remarkably clear explanation of the physics building blocks of his theory: relativity, entropy, entanglement, antimatter, and the Big Bang. With the stage then set, he reveals a startling way forward. Below is an excerpt from Muller's "Now: The Physics of Time" (W. W. Norton & Company, 2016).

Physicists are often puzzled by their own equations. It's not always easy to spot the implications, even the most dramatic ones. To help understand their own math, they look at extreme cases to see what happens. And no extreme situation is more extreme in this universe than the extreme of black holes. Looking at black holes gives us important insights into some very peculiar aspects of time.

If you orbit a small black hole (mass of the sun) from a reasonable distance—say, a thousand miles—you'll feel nothing in particular. You are in orbit about a massive object that you can't see. Since you are in orbit, you feel weightless, just as all orbiting astronauts feel. You are not getting sucked in; black holes (despite popular science fiction) do not draw you in. If you were orbiting the sun, at this close distance you'd be inside it and you'd burn to a crisp in a millionth of a second, but the black hole is dark. (Microscopic black holes radiate, but very little comes from big ones.)

The distance around your orbit is 2π times your radial coordinate value of 1,000 miles. If a friend is orbiting the hole, but on the other side, going the opposite direction, then you'll meet after you each go a quarter orbit. But when your friend is diametrically opposite you, the straight-line distance between you is infinite. There is a lot of space near the black hole.

If you fire your retrorockets, stopping your orbital motion, you will indeed be pulled into the hole, just as you would be pulled into any massive object. (The way satellites de-orbit is precisely that: firing retrorockets and then letting gravity pull them in.) Before ten minutes pass in your proper frame, before you are ten minutes older, you will reach the surface of the black hole, at the Schwarzschild radius (discussed in Chapter 3). Now for some astonishing results concerning time. When you hit that surface, ten minutes after beginning your fall, the time measured on the frame of the orbiting station will reach infinity.*[1]

That's right. It takes infinite time to fall into a black hole, measured from the frame of someone outside. From your accelerating frame falling in, it takes only ten minutes. At eleven minutes, the time outside has gone to infinity and beyond.

That's absurd! Possibly, but in classical relativity it is true. Of course, there is no way for you to experience the potential paradox, because beyond infinity is the time on the outside, and once you have entered the black hole you are there forever. There is no measurable contradiction. This is an example of what physicists call censorship. The absurdity is unobservable, so it isn’t really an absurdity.

Are you satisfied with that "beyond infinity but censored" answer? I suspect not. I find it mind-numbing. But everything about time I find mind-numbing. We'll encounter another absurd but censored result with quantum wave functions and entanglement. These examples challenge our sense of reality, and leave an unsatisfied feeling. As Nietzsche said: When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes back into you.

Black Holes Don't Suck

Let's return to my statement that black holes don't suck you in, that you orbit a black hole just as you would orbit any other mass. Suppose Mercury were orbiting a black hole that had the same mass as the sun has. How would the orbit be different? According to popular belief, the black hole would suck the tiny planet in. According to general relativity, there would be no difference in the orbit. Of course, Mercury would no longer be hot, since the intense radiation of the sun would be replaced by the cool darkness of the black hole.

Mercury currently orbits the sun at a radial distance of 36 million miles. Suppose you orbited the sun at 1 million miles from its center, just above the solar surface. Aside from the heat, and possibly drag from the solar atmosphere, you would cruise around in a circular orbit and return to your starting point in about ten hours. Now replace the sun with a solar-mass black hole. You would still orbit in ten hours. The gravity, at that distance, would be identical to that of the sun. You have to get very close to a black hole before you notice any special effects. As with any star, the closer you get, the faster you have to move to stay in a circular orbit. As a rule of thumb, you won't see much difference until you are so close that your orbiting speed is approaching the speed of light.

For the sun, the maximum gravity is at the surface, just as it is for the Earth. Go below the surface, and the mass that attracts you, the mass below you, is less than at the surface. At the very center of the sun, the gravity is zero.

For a black hole, however, the surface is close to the center. From the Schwarzschild equation I gave earlier, the radius of a solar black hole can be calculated to be about 2 miles. At a distance of 10 miles, to stay in orbit you would have to move at one-third the speed of light; your orbital period would be one-thousandth of a second. In those conditions, we have to use relativity to do the calculations.

Reaching Lightspeed and Going beyond Infinity

When you get in close to a black hole, time progresses very slowly, and even though the distance around the orbit may be small, there is a lot of space between you and the hole. The space is conventionally depicted to physics students with a diagram such as the one in Figure 7.1. Think of this diagram as representing a black hole in 2D space (the surface). The black hole itself is at the center, below where the curved space is pointing.

This is a useful diagram, but it is somewhat misleading, because it implies that space has to curve into another dimension (for this diagram, that’s the dimension that goes downward) to accommodate the enormous distances close to the black hole. In fact, no such dimension is needed; the space simply gets compressed from relativistic length shortening. The diagram is also used in popular movie depictions of black holes. When Jodie Foster falls into a wormhole in Contact, it looks very much like the diagram in Figure 7.1. (Wormholes look like two almost-black-holes connected before the Schwarzschild radius is reached; fall in one, fly out the other.)

In fact, a black hole would not look at all like the diagram. Unless other things were falling in with you, it would just look like a totally black sphere.

With that caveat, the diagram is useful. It illustrates the basic features of black holes and can be used to answer some simple questions, such as: How far is it from the outside (the relatively flat region) to the surface of the black hole? The answer is infinity. Measure along the falling surface into the hole and you go down forever. You'll hit the radius of the black hole only at the bottom, but that is infinitely far down.

If it is infinity to the surface of the black hole, what did I mean when I said you were 10 miles distant? I confess I was being misleading. I was using the conventional coordinates. The radial coordinate r is defined by saying the distance around the black hole is 2πr, just as in ordinary space. In Figure 7.1, the conventional x, y coordinates are represented by the grid lines. Note how far apart they get in the hole; the large distance between them shows that there is a lot of space in there. Physicists use these conventional coordinates in the equations, but they keep in mind that the distance between the 3-mile marker and the 4-mile marker might indeed be 1,000 miles. Because conventional geometry does not work here, we cannot calculate the distance between two points by just taking the difference in the coordinates.

Actually, There Are No Black Holes

You can find lists of suspected black holes in astrophysics books and online. The Wikipedia article "List of Black Holes" identifies more than seventy. Here's the catch: we have reason to think that none of these are actually black holes.

The way an astronomer identifies a black-hole candidate is to find an object that is very massive, typically several times that of the sun, yet is emitting little or no radiation. Some of the candidate objects emit bursts of X-rays, which are thought to indicate that a chunk of matter (a comet? a planet?) is falling in, and as it does it gets ripped apart and heated by the large differences in gravity across its own body, enough to emit X-rays. Other candidates, called supermassive black holes, contain hundreds of millions of solar masses.

One such supermassive object exists at the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy. We see stars orbiting very close to this center and moving and accelerating very rapidly, indicating the presence of a very large mass. But there is no light, so whatever is pulling these stars is not a star itself. Physics theories suggest that such a large accumulation with no emission can only be a black hole.

Why do I say that there are no true black holes on the list? Recall the calculation showing that it takes infinite time to fall into a black hole. A similar calculation shows that it takes infinite time to form a black hole, measured in our time coordinate. All that material has to fall, effectively, an infinite distance. So unless the black holes already existed at the moment the universe was created, unless they were primordial black holes, they haven’t yet reached true black-hole status; there hasn't been enough time (from our outside proper frame) for the matter to fall the infinite distance that characterizes a true black hole. And there is no reason to think that any of the objects are primordial (although some people speculate that one or more might be).

I am being somewhat pedantic. It takes forever to fall into a black hole, but you get in pretty far in just a few minutes, in your own proper time measured by your own co-falling watch. From the outside frame you’ll never reach the surface, but you’ll be turned into a crepe-like object in relatively short order. So, in some sense, it hardly matters. That may be why, in 1990, Stephen Hawking decided to pay off his 1975 bet with Kip Thorne and concede that Cygnus X-1, the X-ray source in the constellation Cygnus, was indeed a black hole. Technically, Hawking was right, not Thorne. Cygnus X-1 is 99.999 percent of the way to being a black hole, but it will take (from the reference frame of Hawking and Thorne) forever to go the rest of the way.

One particular quantum loophole might circumvent my statement that black holes don't exist. Although it takes forever for a black hole to form in Einstein's original general theory of relativity, it doesn't take too long for one to "almost" form. The time from when the falling matter reaches twice the size of the Schwarzschild radius, to when it reaches within a tiny distance at which quantum effects are big (called a Planck distance, something we'll discuss later), is less than a thousandth of a second. At that point, we don't expect the ordinary general theory of relativity to hold up.

What happens next? The fact is, we don't really know. Many people are working on the theory, but nothing yet has been observed and verified. It is interesting that Hawking paid off his bet with Thorne on whether Cygnus X-1 is truly a black hole; perhaps he felt that it is so close to being a black hole that it hardly matters, or perhaps he became persuaded that the inclusion of quantum physics throws doubt on the infinite-time calculation.

The fact that black holes don't yet really exist—at least "not yet" according to an outside frame—is a fine point, and normally not even mentioned to the nonexpert. But you might be able to win a bet using this "believe it or not" fact.

Another Lightspeed Loophole

In Chapter 5 I gave an example showing how acceleration of your proper frame at 1g could result in the distance between you and a distant object (measured in that accelerating frame) changing at a rate 2.6 times the speed of light. With the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory electron accelerator BELLA, you could change the distance to Sirius in the electron's proper frame with an equivalent speed of 8.6 billion times lightspeed. You can do even better. You can change distances with infinite speed. Here's how.

Imagine that you and I are a few feet apart, in space, nothing else around. Assume that our proper frames are identical, so in that frame we are both at rest. Now, get a small primordial (completely formed) black hole, maybe one weighing only a few pounds. Plunk it right in between you and me. The gravitational attraction of the black hole is no bigger than for any other object with the same mass, so we don't feel any unusual forces. When the black hole is in place, the straight-line distance between you and me becomes infinite. You can see this on the black-hole diagram. The distance between us has changed. Yet our locations have not.

Have we "moved"? No. Has the distance between you and me changed? Yes. Enormously. Space is fluid and flexible. It can be compressed and stretched. An infinite concentration of space can be moved about easily, since it can be light in mass. That means distances between objects can change at arbitrarily rapid rates, even light-years per second, or faster. It is as if you are moving with super speed—although, in fact, you are not moving at all.

As I mentioned earlier, these concepts will prove important when we discuss modern cosmology in later chapters. In particular, they are the basis for the theory of inflation that is used to explain the puzzling paradox that the universe is remarkably uniform, even though it is so big that it never (apparently) had time to establish such uniformity. More on that later.

Wormholes

A wormhole is a hypothetical object, similar to a black hole, but instead of the curved space reaching down to an object with huge mass, it eventually spreads out and emerges at a different location. The simplest wormhole is very similar to two not quite black holes connected near the bottom. ("Not quite" means that you can fall in and shoot back out the other side in finite time.) For that to happen, you can imagine that space is folded, so that where the wormhole comes out is across the fold (see Figure 7.2). However, there is no need to imagine that. Remember that the depth to the bottom of the black hole is, from the outside reference frame, infinite in distance. So even though a wormhole isn’t that deep, it could be deep enough to reach anywhere.

A problem with simple wormholes is that calculations show they are not stable. With no mass at the bottom to hold the curved space in place, the wormhole is expected to collapse faster than a person could shoot through it. We might be able to stabilize a wormhole (like stabilizing a coal mine by putting up columns), but current theory says that to do that, we would need something we haven't yet discovered, a kind of particle that has negative energy in its field. Such a field might be possible—at least, we can't rule it out—so science fiction is welcome to go ahead and assume that in the future we will have been able to create stable and useful wormholes.

Wormholes are the current science fiction orthodoxy for rapid travel covering distances of many light-years. Even the Star Trek term warp drive, also used in the Doctor Who series, suggests that the 4D space-time universe is bent into a fifth dimension, bringing distant objects close to each other. The same is true for the movie version of Dune, in which the Guild uses a special material known as spice to bend space. (In the novel, they simply cover distances faster than light, but the movie makes relativistic sense of that ability.)

Wormholes also fascinate science fiction fans because some physicists have argued that they would make travel backward in time possible. As we delve into the meaning of the flow of time, the meaning of now and of time travel, you’ll see why I don't agree that passing through a wormhole could accomplish backward time travel.

It is amazing to me that, although we don't know why time flows, we can talk precisely about the relative flow of time in different locations, and that such flows happen at different rates. Time stretches and shrinks, depending on physics. The next step taken in physics also didn't explain the rate of flow of time, but it did address the simpler question of its direction: Why does time flow forward rather than backward?

[1]* L. Susskind and J. Lindesay discuss this infinite fall time in An Introduction to Black Holes, Information, and the String Theory Revolution (2005), p. 22. They station “Fidos” observers along the fall path who watch the object fall and report to the outsider.  “According to this viewpoint, the particle never crosses the horizon but asymptotically approaches it.” Quantum theory could conceivably change this conclusion.

Copyright © 2016 by Richard A. Muller. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

A rich and sweeping exploration into the science and history behind the most mysterious, primal, and powerful force on earth: the tide. Half of the world's population today lives in coastal regions lapped by tidal waters. But the tide rises and falls according to rules that are a mystery to almost all of us. In "The Tide," celebrated science writer Hugh Aldersey-Williams weaves together centuries of scientific thinking with the literature and folklore the tide has inspired to explain the power and workings of this most remarkable force. Below is an excerpt from Aldersey-Williams' "The Tide" (W. W. Norton & Company, 2016).

Tide Sense

How do animals "know" what the tide will do? When scientists began to study them, they thought it unlikely that grunions, for example, could have a wholly internal mechanism by which to time their breeding run. Do they then sense the tide directly, or are they responding to other stimuli? Certain things can be deduced. It cannot be moonlight that causes the fish to run ashore, as they do this at high-water springs both on the bright full moon and in the darkness of the new moon. The fact that spawning occurs not on the very highest tides, but shortly afterward, indicates that the behavior is not directly governed by tide height either (something that the grunion might detect as increased water pressure around its body). It has recently been found that it is agitation in the sea when the next spring tide comes that stimulates the grunion eggs to release their larvae by generating enzymes that dissolve the egg membrane. But wave action cannot be the trigger for the original beaching, or else storms would disrupt the pattern of the spawning runs.

What else is left? Could the stimulus be pure gravitational attraction? Any forces felt by the fish would be minute in comparison with the changes in pressure that they tolerate when swimming at different depths, but gravity cannot be entirely discounted. Whatever triggers the behavior, it seems it is not confined to the single tide when the grunions come ashore to reproduce, since the eggs begin to mature long before they are spawned—and this, too, has been found to happen in concert with moon phases.

The author John Steinbeck writes about this conundrum in The Log from the Sea of Cortez, the record of a specimen-gathering expedition he made to the Gulf of California with his friend Ed Ricketts in 1940. (The Sea of Cortez was the name of his vessel as well as his happy hunting ground.) Ricketts—who provided Steinbeck with the model for the character of Doc in Cannery Row—later wrote a scientific guide to intertidal life based in part on what the two men collected on the trip. Tangling with mangrove roots in their motor launch at high water, and racing against time to gather specimens from the uncovered beds at low tide (like knots), they find an astounding diversity of colorful life in the warm waters: crabs and snails, and creatures with names out of horrible myth, such as the gorgonian, and others, like the serpulids, so obscure that their only name is the exotic-sounding one given to them by science. They see fish that can survive out of water, at least for the period of one tide, and minutely observe how the foreshore is graded with different kinds of life by height and by the time spent immersed in seawater.

Inevitably, they find themselves drawn into speculation on the importance of the tide to this abundance of life, especially since, in Precambrian times, when single-celled organisms began to evolve into more complex forms in the sea, the tides were far greater than they are today, because of the closer orbit of the moon. Steinbeck writes, "The moon-pull must have been the most important single environmental factor of littoral animals." Their body weight and displacement in the sea would have cycled strongly with the rotation of the earth. "Consider, then, the effect of a decrease in pressure on gonads turgid with eggs or sperm, already almost bursting and awaiting the slight extra pull to discharge." What Steinbeck finds more remarkable is that so many creatures seem to have carried forward a kind of ancestral memory of this response and fine-tuned it to the far weaker signal of tides now—an effect to which, he believes, even we are not immune. "Tidal effects are mysterious and dark in the soul, and it may well be noted that even today the effect of the tides is more valid and strong and widespread than is generally supposed."

But we are still left with the question of how it is that these creatures respond to the tides. They do not go around with tide tables; they do not superfluously relate tide to time as we do. So either they must have some kind of built-in tidal clock, or they must directly sense some primary or secondary property of the tide, which might include the pressure or rate of flow of water, or its change in temperature or salinity.

Perhaps our own removal from the tides is making the problem seem harder than it is. It is, after all, no miracle that animals are sensitive to time. We ourselves are slaves to the circadian rhythm, as our alarm clocks and news bulletins daily remind us. Why should a circatidal rhythm be any odder than a circadian one? Of course, the circadian rhythm has the obvious cues of bright sunlight alternating with utter darkness. But this is what is obvious to us. What cues might be just as obvious to marine creatures very different from ourselves? We find a twenty-four-hour cycle perfectly natural, but might not these animals find a period of twelve-and-a-bit hours just as natural, especially if their survival depends on it?

. . .

More recent research has revealed even stranger ways in which marine creatures harness the tide. A Pacific species of starfish, for example, the purple sea star, Pisaster ochraceus, has developed a water-cooling system to help it survive accidents of tidal stranding. This curious response is triggered when the animal first becomes hot as the sea leaves it behind on one low tide. This unhappy event triggers a mechanism that enables the sea star to retain some seawater when the tide next rises and then recirculate it when the tide falls once more so that it does not experience the same discomfort again.

Where survival is not at stake, the drive is often to conserve energy—the explanation of so many natural adaptations. There is an equivalence between food and energy: food provides energy, but it costs energy to find food. If the tide brings in a food supply, then that represents a saving of energy, like having groceries delivered to your door. For any sea creature, the tides are a huge source of free energy there for the taking.

This is why places where the tides are large or fast-running are often high in biodiversity. Some creatures draw an energy advantage from the movement of so much water, while others are drawn in to feed on them, building a rich ecosystem. This richness, in turn, is a large part of what gives tidal locations their strong sense of place. These places are usually on or close to the shore, but they may also occur over undersea ridges or shelves where the tide runs in such a way as to mix waters from different depths, churning nutrients and dissolving oxygen from the air. It is striking that the larvae of the eel, whose life cycle had greatly baffled naturalists since Aristotle because they could not determine the sex of the creatures and had never seen their young, were originally detected in the Strait of Messina as late as 1856, although they were at first misidentified as a new species of fish. It seemed that the mysterious larvae were drawn up from the depths by the turbulent Charybdis whirlpool, and it was presumed that the eels spawned nearby in unknown depths. It was another fifty years before the Danish biologist Johannes Schmidt established the vital importance of the Sargasso Sea in the life cycle of the eel, and showed that the Mediterranean was not a breeding ground. The young fish were perhaps drawn to the Messina Strait for its rich food supply.

The flattened variety of sea urchins known as sand dollars may be adapted to take advantage of the tide in another way. Their shells, or tests, exhibit the usual fivefold symmetry of this class of echinoderms, but they are also often pierced with elongated holes, called lunules. One species, which rejoices in the name Mellita quinquiesperforata, has five of these holes, but others may have different numbers, and in different places on the shell, not governed by the overall fivefold symmetry. The variable shape and number of these features poses a puzzle to zoologists. The lunules do not assist with feeding or offer any structural advantage to the test. In 1981, however, Malcolm Telford, a marine biologist at the University of Miami, compared the way water flowed around a perforated and a nonperforated species in a water tank, and found that when the water was flowing fast enough, the perforated sand dollar was able to channel the flow through its shell in such a way as to generate lift and stabilize its vertical displacement in the water. The lift occurs in water moving at speeds typical of tides in shallow waters, suggesting that the holes might have evolved as an energy-saving strategy, enabling the animals to ascend or descend in the running tide with no more than a slight tilt of the body.

Other marine species use the tide to hitch a ride even more blatantly. Julian Metcalfe is one of a group of scientists at the UK Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (CEFAS) interested in fish migration and its implications for the sustainable management of commercial fish stocks. The government organization is based in Lowestoft, formerly one of the biggest fishing ports on England's North Sea coast. It occupies a suitably forlorn complex of brick buildings that began life as a hotel when vacationers were still satisfied with sea views painted entirely in shades of gray. If one wanted a satirically British counterpart to the sun-soaked modernism of the Pacific-facing Scripps Institution, one could hardly do better.

One focus of Julian's research is the plaice, one of the large edible flatfish traditionally landed here. Like many species of flatfish, plaice are known to lift themselves into the tidal stream when it is running in the direction they wish to go and to drop out to lie on the seabed when the flow is unfavorable. The behavior contrasts with bigger, round fish such as cod and tuna, which are unable to burrow into the seabed to escape the tidal currents, and so usually find it more advantageous just to keep swimming. The plaice are perfectly capable of swimming too—and they do so where the waters are not strongly tidal—but they prefer to save energy where they can.

By tracking fish using imaging sonar from the CEFAS research vessel, and more recently by collecting data from electronic tags fitted to individual fish, Julian and his colleagues have been able to map the shifting populations of the fish through the seasons. It emerges that they are adept users of the tide. When the plaice are spawned, the eggs and tiny larvae of the fish are first carried helplessly by tidal currents into shallow coastal nurseries, where they are able to grow at reduced risk of predation. Fish spawned off the Thames estuary, for example, may be transported as new-hatched eggs toward the Frisian Islands off the Dutch coast. There the tide whisks them through the Texel island gate between two of the islands into the shallow and protected Waddenzee, where they grow up to 20 centimeters long. The young fish are able to stay safely within the nurseries by resting on the seabed when the tide is ebbing, and rising up into the water when it is flooding. They do this using a kind of internal tidal clock that is sensitive—or "entrained," in the jargon of the field—to changes in water pressure produced by the changing height of the tide.

When they have grown to adulthood, the plaice are able to migrate between their winter spawning grounds in the North Sea and their ocean feeding grounds, riding on the tide when it is running in a favorable direction and dropping to the bottom when it is not. They are thought to use a combination of both circatidal and circadian biological clocks to do this. The plaice can tell whether a tide is running to a high degree of accuracy, remaining on the seabed during slack water, but lifting off within minutes of its beginning to run their way. But there remain unanswered questions about this behavior: How do the fish know where to go? How do the fish sense the direction of the tide? And how, with no change in tactile or inertial sensation, do they know when the free ride is over and the tide that has been bearing them along comes to a halt, especially if it is dark and there are no visual cues?

For Julian, the plaice is a highly convenient fish to study. The technology and resources were made available for research because it is a commercially important species; plaice is third in the trio of popular fish-and-chip-shop varieties of bottom-living fish caught in the United Kingdom, after cod and haddock. But the animal has since been shown to exhibit a migratory behavior that is fascinating in its own right. Julian is convinced that similar mechanisms exist in many species. "I can't believe lots of animals don’t take account of water currents," he says. "We can now modify our environment so much, we forget the old cues, the ones that animals still use."

Solar control of the daily and yearly rhythms of life on land is relatively well understood (and of course inescapably familiar in ordinary human experience). But an explanation of the rhythmic mechanisms of marine life is only just beginning to emerge. Circadian rhythms are regulated by genes that provide chemical feedback. This means that the rhythm is maintained in a "free-running" fashion even in the absence of external stimuli such as changing light levels or temperatures. Similar free-running rhythms are seen in sea creatures, but it has been arguable whether these biological clocks are truly tide related or are versions of the circadian clock tweaked by the processes of natural adaptation to operate at a different rate.

In 2013, however, geneticists at the University of Leicester obtained evidence to suggest that a dedicated circatidal biological clock does exist. Researchers led by Charalambos Kyriacou worked with the speckled sea louse, a familiar denizen of intertidal sandy beaches that bears the deceptively alluring Linnaean name Eurydice pulchra. By disrupting the expression of genes responsible for circadian timekeeping, and showing that the animals nevertheless maintained their normal tidal behavior, they established that the tidal rhythms are driven independently by a circatidal clock. The lice have biological clocks of both kinds: a circadian clock that governs such matters as the production of pigments in the body, and the circatidal clock that regulates their swimming activity in response to the twelve-hourly cycle between successive high tides.

Perhaps many creatures have the potential to switch over to circatidal rhythm. On the walled island of North Ronaldsay, the northernmost of the Orkneys, the local sheep were excluded from grazing land in 1830 when the laird decided to use the lush grass to breed cattle. Except in the lambing season, the sheep are confined to the beach side of the coastal wall. Over the years, the animals have adapted to a diet of seaweed and a grazing timetable governed by the tides that uncover it.

As for the longer cycle of spring and neap tides (the word "circalunar" is used to distinguish this period from the circatidal response to each tide), there is new evidence to explain animal responses to this too, from similar experiments at the Max F. Perutz Laboratories of the University of Vienna. The Austrian researchers used rag worms for their subjects. This was one of the first species observed to spawn on a cycle attuned to the spring tides and is considered a living fossil, with a physiology, behavior, and habitat unchanged over millions of years. Unlike the grunion, it does not spawn on every spring tide at the right time of year, but only monthly, on the spring tides at the new moon. This behavior suggests that the animal's circalunar clock may be entrained to moonlight, or rather the absence of moonlight, and not to the hydrodynamic factors that might be important for the grunion. Biochemical reactions catalyzed by lunar light may play a role in this programming.

All known biological clocks are linked ultimately either to the sun or to the moon. The discovery of circalunar clocks in animals must surely raise the hopes of those many horticulturists and farmers who believe, scientifically or not, that their seeds are better planted and their crops are better harvested at certain phases of the moon. And what about us? The wife-and-husband team who led the Viennese research, Kristin Tessmar-Raible and Florian Raible, conclude their paper with this bold question: "Is it possibly more than sheer coincidence that the female reproductive cycle in humans lasts around a lunar month, or could this instead reflect some regulatory left-over from our evolutionary past?"

I had, of course, been entirely unaware of the dependence of the rag worm on the lunar cycle when I picked one out of the mud during my day observing the tidal cycle on the north Norfolk coast. I saw gulls and curlews come and go that day too, but I would have had to stay for many more days in order to appreciate all these animals' obeisance to the tides. It is surely a mark of how much our own lives are ruled by the black and white of day and night that we are so insensitive to these different rhythms, and it is only now that science is beginning to comprehend them.

Pooling Our Knowledge

With this abundant evidence that life depends in many ways upon the tides, we are entitled to ask whether life could have evolved on earth at all in their absence.

Charles Darwin has little to say about the tides in On the Origin of Species. He uses the word only three times—twice in a metaphor, and once in a geological argument in relation to the erosion of cliff bases. Yet by the time the book was published in 1859, and possibly for some time before that, he firmly believed that life must have had an aquatic origin. However, he forbore speculating on the matter in print, publicly saying it was "rubbish" to think of doing so, and it was only much later, in a short letter to the botanist Joseph Hooker in 1871, that he made the remark that soon became famous, imagining the "warm little pond" where the right simple chemicals might first have converged:

It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (& oh what a big if) we could conceive some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia & phosphoric salts,—light, heat, electricity, &c, present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter w^d be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.

The scenario soon captured the public imagination. In The Mikado, Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera of 1885, Pooh-Bah claims descent from "a protoplasmic primordial atomic globule."

Darwin presents in a nutshell the conundrum that still baffles scientists today. For the continuing existence of life may paradoxically be the very thing that prevents us from observing how it emerged in the first place. The fact that life is not observed spontaneously forming on the present-day earth leaves the question of its origin wide open.

The immediate context of Darwin's letter to Hooker was the fact that Louis Pasteur had shown by experiment that it was impossible to generate germs spontaneously, without there first being some other organic matter present. Darwin never expressed a view on how the first germ came about. Among the theories seriously entertained by others were and are that the necessary chemicals were delivered to this planet by comet impacts or, alternatively, that they were thrust up to the surface of the earth from deep within its crust. Several reputable scientists, including Darwin's champion Thomas Huxley, even made excited claims to have found protoplasm in mud from the bottom of the sea.

For all Darwin’s stature, a "warm little pond" is not currently regarded as the most likely stage for the emergence of life. It has been superseded—for the moment at least—by hydrothermal vents on the seabed. These vents eject heated, mineral-rich water into the deep ocean like hot springs on land. Here, hot gases and simple organic molecules might have mixed and combined in darkness to synthesize the first amino acids and other precursor compounds of life. The darkness is believed to be important because strong ultraviolet light from the sun is known to break up such delicate molecules. The Archaean ocean that covered most of the earth four billion years ago was rich in iron and other metals that might have catalyzed these early reactions, doing the job now done by the biological molecules called enzymes.

Nevertheless, the pull of the moon remains strong, and it is still easy to find scientists who cling to the idea of an origin somewhere on the tidal shores of that great ocean. Even dry textbooks occasionally betray this sentiment. David Pugh and Philip Woodworth's 2014 Sea-Level Science is one. "It is highly likely that we would not be here without the Moon and the tide," they write.

Part of the reason for this favoritism may lie with our deep psychology and the fact that water is central in so many creation myths. But it is one thing to say that life emerged on the edges of the sea, quite another to say that it was necessary for that sea to be tidal or that there had to be a moon in the sky.

In 1952, a graduate chemist named Stanley Miller and his supervising professor, Harold Urey, at the University of Chicago designed an experiment to simulate Darwin's pond. They combined a mixture of ammonia, methane, hydrogen, and water vapor—the obvious gaseous ingredients of amino acids—and provided an energetic stimulus in the form of heat and an electrical discharge in imitation of the lightning thought to have been a feature of the violent weather on the early earth. After a day of this battering, the water in their flask turned pink. By the end of the week, it was red and turbid with organic compounds, including three of the simplest amino acids.

Miller and Urey may have made "primordial soup" in 1952, but they did not consider the soup bowl. Was the crucible for this reaction supposed to be the atmosphere (they vaporized the water and mixed it with the other gases) or the turbulent ocean (the amino acids were found afterward in the liquid condensate)? In the latter case, shouldn’t the soup have been salty? Many say our earliest environment must have been rich in salts because the organisms that evolved from it can tolerate and often require high levels of salts. Yet Miller and Urey's experiment did not include the salts and minerals known to be in the sea. Might it then have been in calm tide pools warmed by the sun that these essential chemicals were able first to concentrate before being decanted at regular intervals into the protective vastness of the ocean?

Before we get carried away with this cozy picture, it is necessary to recall that the tides when the molecular precursors of life developed were very different from those we experience today. When the earthmoon system was formed around 4.5 billion years ago, the moon was held at first in the closest orbit it could be in without collapsing into the earth only a few thousand kilometers away. A little later—that is to say, a few hundred million years later—when the earth's water first condensed into rains that themselves must have lasted for millions of years, the moon’s orbit was still extremely close. The first tides would have been enormous and violent. It is in this challenging environment, riven not only by these tides, but also by volcanic eruptions and savage storms, that the first amino acids and then the complex proteins must have formed.

Aside from raising huge tides, the strong gravitational field of the moon served to stabilize the earth on its axis, which was an important factor in making life sustainable by limiting extremes of climate.

Even four or five hundred million years ago, long after the Cambrian explosion of life on earth, the moon was still significantly nearer than it is today and the tides still very high. With more than four hundred days in the year, each day was a little shorter than it is now, leaving these big tides less time to ebb and flow, so giving rise to powerful currents.

The scale of these early tides can be tentatively estimated by examining ancient rocks called tidalites, or tidal rhythmites, in which sediment layers have been built up and shaped by the regular ebb and flow of the water, although such features are thin on the ground, since they must have been raised above sea level by subsequent geological events in order not to be covered or eroded by the action of later tides. The oldest known deposit, created by tides around 750 million years ago, lies in Big Cottonwood Canyon, Utah, in which the varying force of the tides is indicated by alternating light-colored sandy layers left by strong tides able to transport sand and darker layers of mud deposited by weaker tides. The tides in this Precambrian Era may have had a range of 50 meters or more and would have run in and out at huge speeds. Beach vacations would have been challenging, but the tide pools very numerous and lively.

After his headline-grabbing synthesis of amino acids, Stanley Miller unsurprisingly made the chemistry of prebiological molecules his life's work. Scientists' ideas concerning the mix of gases and minerals available for this synthesis changed many times, but each time, Miller was able to create amino acids and other simple organic compounds. This is the easy part. Even if Miller's experiments were faithful simulations of what happened billions of years ago, nobody has been able to replicate the equally vital later stages of the process, knitting together those amino acids and other compounds to make proteins, RNA, and DNA. If anything, though, it is more likely that it is these later, more complex syntheses that require tide pools for their success. In a paper published in 1990, Miller and his coauthors speculated that DNA may first have been encapsulated in the protective fatty layers called liposomes in the intertidal zone, as also happens today. Even if this was the case, however, there is no explanation yet of how DNA was made in the first place. Was this stage, as well as the preceding one of building the proteins, accomplished in tide pools?

The answers to these questions will not only inform our knowledge of how life on earth began. They may also narrow the search for life on other planets. If a moon large enough to raise significant tides is necessary for evolution to take place—in addition to oceans and the right mix of chemicals—then the number of candidate planets we should be looking at will be greatly reduced.

Copyright © 2016 by Hugh Aldersey-Williams. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Live Science is hosting a book giveaway!

"Wild Sex: The Science Behind Mating in the Animal Kingdom" (Pegasus Books, 2016) is a new book by biologist and writer Carin Bondar, who is also the current lead presenter for Discovery World's "Brave New World with Stephen Hawking" and host of the web series "Wild Sex" for Earth Touch Online. She has appeared on Discovery Channel's "Outrageous Acts of Science," and has hosted online and television programs created by National Geographic Wild, Scientific American, and the Science Channel.

On Tuesday (Sept. 20) at 1:30 p.m. ET, Carin Bondar joins us at Live Science to talk about her new book in a Facebook Live event, during which we'll be giving away three signed copies of "Wild Sex" to three lucky viewers. [Tune in on Live Science's Facebook page]

As the Cole Porter love song "Let's Do It" tells us, "Birds do it, bees do it." But the specifics of how they actually, well, do it — and not just birds and bees, but every animal species — can be weirder, more strenuous, and far more complicated than you could ever imagine. Writer Carin Bondar offers a glimpse between the sheets of this particular aspect of animal behavior, in her new book, "Wild Sex," introducing fascinating examples of mating practices. Some may seem a little weird, but ultimately no matter how bizarre the sex, the goal is the same — successful procreation and continued survival of the species.

Details about the giveaway are below. And don't forget to follow Live Science on Facebook and Twitter for updates on this contest and other live video events!

Wild Sex: The Science Behind Mating in the Animal Kingdom Giveaway

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Detachable penises. Genital plugs. Sexual cannibalism.

Dating and mating in the animal kingdom aren't just complicated — they can be fraught with violence and danger. Even so, they're the only game in town. Every species must reproduce, and there are many paths to successful reproduction, though those paths may sometimes be as convoluted as the corkscrew genitals of a mallard duck.

The prospect of exploring mating positions in frogs, porcupines' use of sex toys or hermaphroditic sea slugs' penis spines might seem daunting to some, but not so for biologist and writer Carin Bondar. She leads the way into the intriguing world of animal sexual practices in her new book, "Wild Sex: The Science Behind Mating in the Animal Kingdom" (Pegasus Books, 2016). [Top 10 Swingers of the Animal Kingdom]

From finding a mate, to procreating, to dealing with the successful outcome of mating — offspring — "Wild Sex" investigates the often-harsh realities of sexual behaviors practiced by animals large and small.

Bondar is the current lead presenter for Discovery World's "Brave New World with Stephen Hawking" and host of the web series "Wild Sex" for Earth Touch News Network. She has appeared on Discovery Channel's "Outrageous Acts of Science" and has hosted online and television programs created by National Geographic Wild, Scientific American and the Science Channel.

Recently, Bondar spoke with Live Science about the unusual sexual behaviors and equipment used by humans' closest relatives and most distant cousins on the tree of life, and what people's interest in animal sex reveals about them. [Live Science Book Giveaway: 'Wild Sex' by Carin Bondar]

(This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.) Live Science: What was it about sex in the animal kingdom that first attracted your attention as a biologist?

Bondar: Ironically, it happened when I was at home enjoying the young products of my own sexual activity — my children. I started blogging, and though I didn't just focus on sexual topics, I noticed engagement was so much higher when the topic was sex — and the crazier, the better! So I rolled with it and went more in that direction. And then I got a call from Earth Touch [News Network] to write and host a series about animal sex, and six weeks later, I was on a plane to South Africa. It just swept me up in its own tidal wave.

LS: For many people, sex is primarily about pleasure. How much is pleasure a factor for animals?

Bondar: Very, very little! Unfortunately, there's a massive dichotomy between sexual cells of males and females, so males have incredibly abundant sperm, and females have very rare and expensive eggs. Generally speaking, males always want to have more sex and get as many partners as they can, and females want to be protective of their expensive treasures and choose carefully who gets to fertilize them.

From bugs to mammals and everything in between, this sets the scene for violence, conflict and war. There's no champagne, no roses. It's very much, "I've evolved these structures to torture you and hold you down so I can have sex with you."

LS: What are some of the risks that animals in certain species face during sex?

Bondar: Bedbugs and some of the nudibranch species use what is aptly termed traumatic insemination, because it literally is a stab wound to the female's body. The sperm will travel from these wounds into her ovaries, so she basically ends up with stab wounds all over her body that can get infected, which could certainly affect her well-being and general health. [Animal Sex: 7 Tales of Naughty Acts in the Wild]

Some canine species have penis bones that get massively inflated during sex, so they can't separate. That's actually an evolutionarily smart thing to do, to not let your female get away until you get sperm in there, and it's also a fail-safe for the male, who can't get out until he finishes the job. But it comes with a huge element of danger from predators.

Then, there are a lot of invertebrates that are hermaphroditic, male and female at the same time. Sometimes they can fertilize themselves, but often they need an actual partner. Taking the male role is more favorable because it's less work, so these sexual encounters tend to become extremely violent.

LS: What about spider and insect species where males are cannibalized by females during sex? That seems like even when a male succeeds at reproducing, he loses.

It seems horrific to us, but it's reproductively clever — these males can actually increase their reproductive success by dying!If the female is busy feasting on his body, she's not out getting more sperm, so his sperm can dominate.

In mammals where sperm is so plentiful, it's a vastly different story than in spider species, where males only have one or possibly two chances to copulate in their entire lives. [101 Animal Shots You'll Go Wild Over]

We see the same thing in those infamous preying mantis videos where the female rips the male's head off — his genitals are still doing the deed while she's busy eating his head and body. His sperm has lots of time to travel where it needs to go, and she's not seeking new sperm. That's kind of a tough one for us to swallow (so to speak), but it is a reproductively sound strategy.

LS: Many species appear to engage in a type of "arms race" when it comes to sex, with female behavior or biology thwarting male advances, and male strategies and anatomy trying to work around that. But don't they want the same thing — to procreate?

Bondar: They do. However, they want it on their own terms.

These arms races are ridiculous. Like in the water strider, males have evolved these crazy structures that fit around eyeballs of the females to keep them in place, and the females have these anti-grasping spring things that they can use to spring males off when they're trying to have sex with them.

We assume as biologists that animals ultimately want to maximize biological fitness, in terms of getting their genetics to the next generation. But the problem is that females don't want just any sperm. They want the best sperm. Males, on the other hand, because it's so easy for them, they can afford a few missteps.

If I'm a male, and I put my sperm out there as often as I possibly can and with whomever, some will be bad mothers or bad children. But I'll do better in the long run. For females, it's a completely different story.

Think of the human case. If I get fertilized, I'm out of reproductive commission for at least another nine months or more, as I then breast-feed, so that takes me out of the reproductive game for close to a year. If I let any man fertilize me willy-nilly (pun very much intended), I'm jeopardizing my own biological fitness, because that's a huge commitment for me. I'm doing this huge thing in my body for the embryo.

LS: I was going to ask for the most extreme example of a sexual behavior, but … there are so many. Is there one in particular that stood out to you when you were researching this book?

Bondar: There's one of those hermaphrodites I was talking about, a sea slug. As many hermaphrodites do, each one is trying to be the male. What this species in particular does is it takes its razor-sharp penis and stabs the partner directly in the forehead. And they're doing this with a degree of accuracy and precision that's unprecedented.

Biologists puzzled about this for long time, until scientists looked at the chemical makeup of what was getting deposited. And they found that there was some kind of neurochemical warfare going on. They were ejaculating into the cerebral ganglia of the receiving partner, so they manipulated the partner to become more female. Since being female is more expensive, it makes sense for them to want to be the male as much as possible.

The other one that I really like is a cannibalistic spider species. Like many other species, they have something called a mating plug, something that plugs up the female's genitals after she's been fertilized. Sometimes males put them in, and sometimes females seal themselves up.

In this species, females take the substance they'd use to seal themselves up, and they use it to ensnare males because they're hungry. They make their genitals into a spider-sized sticky trap. A male comes along, and she'll trap him. He'll die there, and she won't necessarily eat him right way. So she'll be walking around with a dead guy on her genitals until such time as she decides to eat him.

LS: What might all these examples of different animal sex practices mean for readers in terms of understanding their own sexual behavior?

Bondar: The breakdown of the book — trying to find a mate, trying to have sex with your mate and then dealing with the aftermath of the sex — that affects us just like it does every other animal.

It's funny and gruesome and horrible to talk about all these "insert part A into slot B" examples, and people like to hear about that. But the reason people are so interested in sex in other animals is [because] we're so obsessed with it in our own lives. I always like to bring it back to humans remembering that we're part of the animal kingdom, even though we often pretend that we're not.

"Wild Sex: The Science Behind Mating in the Animal Kingdom" was published Aug. 6.

Original article on Live Science.

Hindsight is 20/20, right? That's the premise of a new book that poses the question:  What if we were wrong?

Chuck Klosterman's "But What If We're Wrong?" (Blue Rider Press, 2016) deals with the fact that the great march of history shows us that, well … we're always wrong. Aristotle had his run as the smartest man on the planet, but he got disproved by Galileo, who was trumped by Newton, until Einstein ruled the roost. And while there have been some hints of "proving Einstein wrong," nothing has really stuck. But even so, scientific "fact" is a fact only until it's proved wrong.

In his book, Klosterman tries to imagine the world today viewed from the vantage point of a distant future, and attempts to suss out what humans might have gotten wrong. Klosterman asks if our belief in democracy might lead to the failure of society, and speculates as to which writer who isn't even born yet is going to be as important as Hemingway, Melville or Kafka. [Read an excerpt from Klosterman's new book, "But What If We're Wrong?"]

Klosterman's strong suits are writing about rock music and contemporary culture. But, yes, there's science here, specifically the importance of embracing your potential wrongness, and how humanity might all be fictional creatures stuck in an advanced video game. But understand … this could all be wrong.

Live Science caught up with Klosterman to get the lowdown on his book and all of its "wrongness." Below is a Q&A with Klosterman that was edited for brevity.

Live Science: You say this is not a book about science; but about continuums. What do you mean by that?

Klosterman: The first part is easy to describe: It's not about science, because science is just one sliver of the book. But it's impossible not to write about science in this, because of the overall thesis/argument of the book.

What I mean about continuums is that I'm not really dealing with any specific problem, especially as it applies to science. It's not like I feel particularly qualified to take a specific problem in science and say, 'Well, here's something we're probably wrong about." I don't have those qualifications!

But I am interested in the possibility that we are going to be wrong in the same way that history has indicated that mankind always is. It seems as though the history of ideas is the history of being wrong. And to me, that is a kind of continuum. It's a continual path that shows we don't always know something, but we're always shifting to a path that makes us feel more comfortable in the moment, even if that shift is wrong, and a new shift is destined to happen again.

Live Science: What got you interested in the topic of "Holy crap, we're always wrong?"

Klosterman: Part of it is I was watching the Fox reboot of "Cosmos," the one that Neil deGrasse Tyson is the host of. As I watched it, I was always intrigued that whoever was referenced, usually some scientist from the past who had some breakthrough idea, usually turned out to be wrong, and usually within one generation of his life. And it occurred to me that this must still be happening now. We're inside the now, so we can't really see it, but this process must be happening all the time. We just can't recognize it until we get outside of the time frame. [Oops! The 5 Greatest Scientific Blunders]

I think it's important to accept that things that seem almost beyond question still need to be questioned.

Live Science: You spoke to Brian Greene and Neil deGrasse Tyson for this book. How did they respond to your book's premise?

Klosterman: You know, Tyson, I think, questioned my motives. I think that he was skeptical about what my real reasons for writing a book like this were. I don't know if it's because he's become used to being asked about things by people who are really trying to disprove the validity of science, or maybe it's just the way I was asking the questions.

But all I was trying to do was say, "I'm not trying to contradict what you believe, because in all likelihood, I believe it, too. I just want to know if you think there's the possibility that what we believe now could be fundamentally flawed." And he … did not. I think he really feels that since the Copernican Revolution, we have only been refining our understanding of science because of use of the scientific method and because science is now intertwined with mathematics instead of philosophy. He seemed to think this whole line of questioning was, I wouldn't go so far as to say "dangerous," but definitely superfluous.

Now with Greene, he was more like, "This is a crazy hypothetical! I love this!" And Tyson was still fine. He gave consistently smart answers. I probably quote him at length more than anyone else in the book.

[The Copernican Revolution defines the shift from the belief that Earth was at the center of the universe to the now-established view that the sun is this center and the planets in the solar system revolve around it.]

Live Science: But isn't "well now we're right" the exact arrogance that puts us back to pre-Copernicus?

Klosterman: Well … my first answer would be yes. I would believe that to be true. But I don't feel completely secure in that belief, either. There are many arguments, thousands, that support Tyson and the way in which he views the world. Those are all micro-arguments. And the only macro-argument against that would be, "Well, that's what everyone thinks until it changes."

And I think I almost have an obligation to accept Tyson's arguments because they do seem foundationally rational. But I feel the way we view science now and the way we will view it in 500 years are going to be radically different. But I don't have the argument for that other than, "That's what everyone thinks until it changes." That's the thing, and that's why a lot of this book deals with the dissonance between what we think and what we feel.

Live Science: You mention the "simulation argument" popularized by Nick Bostrom in which we all might be sentient gamepieces in a hyper-advanced game of "The Sims." Even Bostrom admits the high end of this probability is 20 percent. What's your number?

Klosterman: The idea of us living in a simulation makes a lot of sense to me. And you know what? There are a lot of things about life that are explainable to me if we were to accept that this is a simulated reality being played by some person in the future, and that everything we know about the universe and ourselves is just on some supercomputer. That makes a lot of sense to me. It feels right in a lot of ways. But I don't have a persuasive argument to convince anyone of that other than giving them the idea and saying, "Hey, think about this." [5 Reasons We May Live in a Multiverse]

I don't have any proof for it, and science is a world of proof. I'm not dealing as much with proof as I am this idea that if we have proof, how much is really a fabrication of our own desire? Does it feel like proof just because we want it to be true?

Live Science: In discussing the simulation argument, you bring up those 20-or-so numbers that seem to guide the universe: the gravitational constant, the mass of an electron, and so on. The whole argument does feel like a stoner college dorm conversation, but things like this could point to reality being "programmed." Do you think these 20 numbers give a seemingly crazy argument some credence?

Klosterman:I think there are many things about the simulation argument that are sort of comfortably reasonable. I don't know if the 20 numbers are, because the converse to the argument that this is all some kind of computer simulation is the idea of infinity. And in infinity, all things that could possibly happen will happen. If the universe is truly infinite, every possibility will come to play. But I don't know if we as simple people really have the ability to grasp infinity. We can explain it, and we can even explain it to a 5-year-old. But we can't truly comprehend the magnitude of the infinite. [The 9 Most Massive Numbers in Existence]

Live Science: Shifting gears to the more mundane, if you had to pick the one act that rock 'n' roll will be defined by in 200 years, who is your pick?

Klosterman: Well, in a rational world, the answer is the Beatles. Their performance on "The Ed Sullivan Show" alone impacted the culture so strongly, and rippled so strongly forward. And the Beatles set the template for what a rock band is supposed to be like. Every band after the Beatles was subconsciously modeling themselves after the Beatles to some degree.

I kind of draw an analogy to the presidents, and how we're always re-ranking them. But no matter how many times we re-rank them, in another 200 years, the top presidents will still be Washington and Lincoln and Jefferson, because they defined what a president is. They are the idea, and you can't be better than the idea. The Beatles are the idea of what a rock band is.

Now will that happen? Will the Beatles be the answer? [laughs] Everything I know about the history of ideas tells me "probably not." But if things work out rationally … probably them.

Live Science: What have you learned in researching and writing this book?

Klosterman: Well, I address a whole bunch of different categories of thought. This book talks about literature, about rock, about science, about football, about politics, about TV. And what I found is an ultimately predictable thing: Someone who is an expert in television will have issues with the section on television, but assume that everything else makes sense. Or a rock critic will have serious issues with the rock section, but completely accept everything else. So I know in the science category, all scientists are going to see is the simplicity of my thinking, and the evidence that I'm in over my head.

But I'd ask people to keep in mind the idea that if you really understand something, it's even more important for you to consider the possibility of your wrongness. Even if it takes someone dumber than you to point that out.

"But What If We're Wrong?" is available now, published by Blue Rider Press, a division of Penguin Random House. You can order via Amazon, or your local bookstore.

—Similar articles of this ilk are archived on a crummy-looking blog. You can also follow @McLauchlin on Twitter.

In his new book, Chuck Klosterman asks questions that are profound in their simplicity: How certain are we about our understanding of gravity? How certain are we about our understanding of time? What will be the defining memory of rock music, five hundred years from today? How seriously should we view the content of our dreams? How seriously should we view the content of television? Are all sports destined for extinction? Is it possible that the greatest artist of our era is currently unknown (or—weirder still—widely known, but entirely disrespected)? Is it possible that we “overrate” democracy? And perhaps most disturbing, is it possible that we’ve reached the end of knowledge? Below is an excerpt from Klosterman's "But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past" (Blue Rider Press, 2016). [Read Live Science's Q&A with Chuck Klosterman]

[2] If I spoke to  one  hundred   scientists  about  the  topic of scientific wrongness,  I suspect I’d  get one hundred slightly different  answers, all of which would represent  different notches  on a continuum of confidence.  And if this were a book about science, that’s what I’d need to do. But this is not a book about science; this is a book about continuums. Instead, I interviewed two exceptionally famous scientists who exist (or at least appear to exist) on opposite ends of a specific psychological spectrum.  One of these was Tyson, the most conventionally famous astrophysicist alive. He hosted the Fox reboot of the science series Cosmos and created his own talk show on the National Geographic Channel. The other was string theorist Brian Greene at Columbia University (Greene is the person mentioned in this book’s introduction, speculating on the  possibility  that  "there  is a very, very good chance that our understanding of gravity will not be the same in five hundred  years").

Talking to only these two men, I must concede, is a little like writing about debatable ideas in pop music and interviewing only Taylor Swift and Beyoncé Knowles. Tyson and Greene are unlike the overwhelming majority of working scientists. They specialize in translating ultra-difficult concepts into a language that can be understood by mainstream consumers; both have written best- selling books for general audiences, and I assume they both experience a level of envy and skepticism among their professional peers. That’s what happens to any professional the moment he or she appears on TV. Still, their academic credentials cannot be questioned.  Moreover, they represent the competing poles of this argument almost perfectly. Which might have been a product of how they chose to hear the questions.

When I sat down in Greene's office and explained the premise of my book—in essence, when I explained that I was interested in considering the likelihood that our most entrenched assumptions about the universe might be wrong—he viewed the premise as playful. His unspoken reaction came across as "This is a fun, non-crazy hypothetical."  Tyson’s posture was different.  His unspoken attitude was closer to "This is a problematic, silly supposition."  But here again, other factors might have played a role: As a public intellectual, Tyson spends a great deal of his time rep- resenting the scientific community in the debate over climate change. In certain circles, he has become the face of science. It’s entirely possible Tyson assumed my questions were veiled attempts at debunking scientific thought, prompting him to take an inflexibly hard-line stance. (It's also possible this is just the stance he always takes with everyone.) Conversely, Greene’s openness might be a ref lection of his own academic experience: His career is punctuated by research trafficking on the far edges of human knowledge, which means he’s accustomed to people questioning the validity of ideas that propose a radical reconsideration of everything we think we know.

One of Greene’s high-profile signatures is his support for the concept of "the multiverse." Now, what follows will be an oversimplification—but here’s what that connotes:  Generally, we work from the assumption that there is one universe, and that our galaxy is a component of this one singular universe that emerged from the Big Bang. But the multiverse notion suggests there are infinite (or at least numerous) universes beyond our own, existing as alternative realities. Imagine an endless roll of bubble wrap; our universe (and everything in it) would be one tiny bubble, and all the other bubbles would be other universes that are equally vast. In his book The Hidden Reality, Greene maps out nine types of parallel universes within this hypothetical system. It’s a complicated way to think about space, not to mention an inherently impossible thing to prove; we can’t get (or see) outside our own universe any more than a man can get (or see) outside his own body. And while the basic concept of a limited multiverse might not seem particularly insane, the logical extensions of what a limitless multiverse would entail are almost impossible to fathom.

Here's what I mean: Let’s say there are infinite universes that exist over the expanse of infinite time (and the key word here is "infinite").  Within infinity, everything that could happen will happen. Everything.  Which would mean that—somewhere, in an alternative universe—there is a planet exactly like Earth, which has existed for the exact same amount of time, and where every single event has happened exactly as it has on the Earth that we know as our own . . . except that on Christmas Eve of 1962, John F. Kennedy dropped a pen. And there is still another alternative universe with a planet exactly like Earth, surrounded by an exact replica of our moon, with all the same cities and all the same people, except that—in this reality—you read this sentence yesterday instead of today. And there is still another alternative universe where every- thing is the same, except you are slightly taller. And there is still another alternative universe beyond that one where everything is the same, except you don't exist. And there is still another alternative reality beyond that where a version of Earth exists, but it's ruled by robotic wolves with a hunger for liquid cobalt. And so on and so on and so on. In an infinite multiverse, everything we have the potential to imagine—as well as everything we can't imagine— would exist autonomously. It would require a total recalibration of every spiritual and secular belief that ever was. Which is why it's not surprising that many people don’t dig a transformative hypothesis that even its proponents concede is impossible to verify.

"There really are some highly decorated physicists who have gotten angry with me, and with people like me, who have spoken about the multiverse theory," Greene says. "They will tell me, 'You've done some real damage.  This is nuts.  Stop it.' And I’m a completely rational person. I don't speak in hyperbole to get attention. My true feeling is that these multiverse ideas could be right. Now, why do I feel that way? I look at the mathematics. The mathematics lead in this direction. I also consider the history of ideas. If you described quantum physics to Newton, he would have thought you were insane. Maybe if you give Newton a quantum textbook and five minutes, he sees it completely. But as an idea, it would seem insane. So I guess my thinking is this: I think it’s extraordinarily unlikely that the multiverse theory is correct.  I think it’s extraordinarily likely that my colleagues who say the multiverse concept is crazy are right. But I'm not willing to say the multiverse idea is wrong, because there is no basis for that statement.  I understand the discomfort with the idea, but I nevertheless allow it as a real possibility.  Because it is a real possibility."

Greene delivered a TED talk about the multiverse in 2012, a twenty-two-minute lecture translated into more than thirty languages and watched by 2.5 million people. It is, for all practical purposes, the best place to start if you want to learn what the multiverse would be like. Greene has his critics, but the concept is taken seriously by most people who understand it (including Tyson, who has said, “We have excellent theoretical and philosophical reasons to think we live in a multiverse”). He is the recognized expert on this subject. Yet he’s still incredulous about his own ideas, as illustrated by the following exchange:

Q: What is your level of confidence that—in three hundred years—someone will reexamine your TED talk and do a close reading of the information, and conclude you were almost entirely correct?

A: Tiny. Less than one percent.  And you know, if I was really being careful, I wouldn’t have even given that percentage a specific number, because a number requires data. But take that as my loose response. And the reason my loose response is one percent just comes from looking at the history of ideas and recognizing that every age thinks they were making real headway toward the ultimate answer, and every next generation comes along and says, “You were really insightful,  but now that we know X, Y, and Z, here is what we actually think.” So, humility drives me to anticipate that we will look like people from the age of Aristotle who believed stones fell to earth because stones wanted to be on the ground.

Still, as Greene continues to explain the nature  of his skepticism, a concentration of optimism slowly seeps back in.

In the recesses of my mind, where I would not want to be out in public—even though I realize you’re recording this, and this is a public conversation—I do hold out hope that in one hundred or five hundred years, people will look back on our current work and say, “Wow.” But I love to be conservative in my estimates. Still, I sometimes think I’m being too conservative, and that makes me excited. Because look at quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics,  you can do a calculation  and predict  esoteric  properties  of electrons.  And you can do the calculation—and people have done these calculations, heroically, over the span of decades—and compare [those calculations] to actual experiments, and the numbers agree. They agree up to the tenth digit beyond the decimal point. That is unprecedented—that we can have a theory that agrees with observation to that degree.  That makes you feel like “This is different.”  It makes you feel like you’re closing in on truth.

So here is the hinge point where skepticism starts to reverse itself. Are we the first society to conclude that this time  we're finally right about how the universe works? No—and every previous society who thought they were correct ended up hopelessly mistaken.  That, however, doesn’t mean that the goal is innately hopeless.  Yes, we are not the first society to conclude that our version of reality is objectively true. But we could be the first society to express that belief and is never contradicted, because we might be the first society to really get there. We might be the last society, because—now—we translate absolutely everything into math. And math is an obdurate bitch.

[3] The "history of ideas," as Greene notes, is a pattern of error, with each new generation reframing and correcting the mistakes of the one that came before. But “not in physics, and not since 1600," insists Tyson. In the ancient world, science was fundamentally connected to philosophy.  Since the age of Newton, it's become fundamentally connected to math.  And in any situation where the math zeroes out, the possibility of over- turning the idea becomes borderline impossible. We don’t know— and we can’t know—if the laws of physics are the same everywhere in the universe, because we can’t access most of the universe. But there are compelling reasons to believe this is indeed the case, and those reasons can’t be marginalized as egocentric constructions that will wax and wane with the attitudes of man. Tyson uses an example from 1846, during a period when the laws of Newton had seemed to reach their breaking point.  For reasons no one could comprehend, Newtonian principles were failing to describe the orbit of Uranus.  The natural conclusion was that the laws of physics must work only within the inner solar system (and since Uranus represented the known edge of that system, it must be operating under a different set of rules).

"But then," Tyson explains, "someone said: 'Maybe Newton’s laws still work. Maybe there’s an unseen force of gravity operating on this planet that we have not accounted for in our equations.' So let’s assume Newton’s law is correct and ask, 'If there is a hidden force of gravity, where would that force be coming from? Maybe it’s coming from a planet we have yet to discover.' This is a very difficult math problem, because it's one thing to say, 'Here's a planetary mass and here’s the value of its gravity.' Now we’re saying we have the value of gravity, so let’s infer the existence of a mass. In math, this is called an inversion problem,  which is way harder  than  starting  with the object and calculating  its gravitational field. But great mathematicians engaged in this, and they said, ‘We predict, based on Newton’s laws that work on the inner solar system, that if Newton’s laws are just as accurate on Uranus as they are anywhere else, there ought to be a planet right here—go look for it.’ And the very night they put a telescope in that part of the sky, they discovered the planet Neptune.”

The reason this anecdote is so significant is the sequence. It’s easy to discover a new planet and then work up the math proving that it’s there; it’s quite another to mathematically insist a massive undiscovered planet should be precisely where it ends up being. This is a different level of correctness. It's not interpretative, be- cause numbers have no agenda, no sense of history, and no sense of humor. The Pythagorean theorem doesn’t need the existence of Mr. Pythagoras in order to work exactly as it does.

I have a friend who’s a data scientist, currently working on the economics of mobile gaming environments. He knows a great deal about probability theory,  so I asked him  if our  contemporaryunderstanding of probability is still evolving and if the way people understood probability three hundred  years ago has any relation- ship to how we will gauge probability  three  hundred  years from today. His response: “What we think about probability in 2016 is what we thought in 1716, for sure . . . probably in 1616, for the most part . . . and probably what [Renaissance mathematician and degenerate gambler Gerolamo] Cardano thought in 1564. I know this sounds arrogant, but what we’ve believed about probability since 1785 is still what we’ll believe about probability in 2516."

If we base any line of reasoning around consistent numeric values, there is no way to be wrong, unless we are (somehow) wrong about the very nature of the numbers themselves. And that possibility is a non-math conversation.  I mean, can 6 literally turn out to be 9? Jimi Hendrix imagined such a scenario, but only because he was an electric philosopher (as opposed to a pocket calculator).

"In physics, when we say we know something, it’s very simple," Tyson reiterates.  "Can we predict the outcome?  If we can predict the outcome, we're good to go, and we’re on to the next problem. There are philosophers who care about the understanding of why that was the outcome.  Isaac Newton  [essentially] said, ‘I have an equation that says why the moon is in orbit. I have no f------ idea how the Earth talks to the moon. It’s empty space—there's no hand reaching out.' He was uncomfortable about this idea of action at a distance. And he was criticized for having such ideas, because it was preposterous that one physical object could talk to another physical object. Now, you can certainly have that conversation [about why it happens].  But an equation properly predicts what it does. That other conversation is for people having a beer. It’s a beer conversation. So go ahead—have that conversation.  ‘What is the nature of the interaction between the moon and the Earth?’ Well, my equations get it right every time. So you can say that gremlins do it—it doesn’t matter to my equation . . . Philosophers like arguing about [semantics]. In physics, we’re way more practical than philosophers. Way more practical. If something works, we’re on to the next problem. We're not arguing why. Philosophers argue why. It doesn’t mean we don’t like to argue. We’re just not derailed by why, pro- vided the equation gives you an accurate account of reality.”

In terms of speculating on the likelihood of our collective wrongness, Tyson’s distinction is huge. If you remove the deepest question—the question of why—the  risk  of  major  error  falls through the  floor.  And this is because the problem of why is a problem that's impossible to detach from the foibles of human nature. Take, for example, the childhood question of why the sky is blue. This was another problem tackled by Aristotle. In his systematic essay “On Colors,” Aristotle came up with an explanation for why the sky is blue: He argued that all air is very slightly blue, but that this blueness isn’t perceptible to the human eye unless there are many, many layers of air placed on top of each other (similar, according  to his logic, to the  way a teaspoon  of water looks clear but a deep well of water looks black). Based on nothing beyond his own powers of deduction, it was a genius conclusion. It explains why the sky is blue. But the assumption was totally wrong. The sky is blue because of the way sunlight is refracted.  And unlike Aristotle, the person who realized this truth didn’t care why it was true, which allowed him to be right forever. There will never be a new explanation for why the sky is blue.

Unless, of course, we end up with a new explanation for everything.

Copyright © 2016 by Chuck Klosterman. Used by permission of Blue Rider Press. All rights reserved.

The book giveaway is now closed, but you can check out the video interview with Ed Yong on our Facebook page.

Live Science is hosting a book giveaway!

"I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life" is a new book by science writer Ed Yong — staff writer for The Atlantic, creator of the long-running blog "Not Exactly Rocket Science" hosted by National Geographic, and contributor to the New York Times, Wired, Nature, Science and Scientific American, among others.

On Thursday (Aug. 10) at 3:00 p.m. ET, Ed Yong joins us at Live Science to talk about his new book in a Facebook Live event, during which we'll be giving away a signed copy of "I Contain Multitudes" to one lucky viewer. [Tune in on Live Science's Facebook page]

"I Contain Multitudes" explores the fascinating and frequently bizarre world of microbes, and the complex partnerships they share with every animal species on Earth. Our own relationship with microbes has undergone close scrutiny over the last decade. Scientists are just beginning to uncover how important these unseen partners are to our everyday health, and how individual species and vast communities of microbes affect our vulnerability to disease and can even impact our behavior.

Details about the giveaway are below. And don't forget to follow Live Science on Facebook and Twitter for updates on this contest and other live video events!

LIVE SCIENCE BOOK GIVEAWAY: "I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life" by Ed Yong

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