Piotr Naskrecki’s new book Relics is not easy to read. Physically, I mean. I have wanted to review this book for some time. After all, Piotr Naskrecki is a leading conservation photographer & katydid biologist, and I loved Naskrecki’s last book The Smaller Majority. But I had to concentrate hard to stay focused on the text. The [...]

Sometimes it frustrates me that we feel the effects of climate change so slowly, if at all. It’s not that I’m an apocalypse-monger, dreaming of mass hysteria induced by floods and droughts, shortages of food and fuel. Rather, I worry about people’s incredible ability to acclimate: to let changes go unnoticed, as long as they’re [...]

The Future of Water: A Startling Look Ahead, by Steve Maxwell, with Scott Yates, Published in 2011 by the American Water Works Association, Denver Colo., ISBN 978-1-58321-809-9 Full disclosure: I answered an open e-mail solicitation for reviewers of this new book and received a review copy for free in exchange for my promise of a [...]

In his new book, Tabloid Medicine: How The Internet Is Being Used to Hijack Medical Science for Fear and Profit, Robert Goldberg, PhD, explains why the Internet is a double-edged sword when it comes to health information. On the one hand, the Web can empower people with quality medical information that can help them make [...]

This is “Breast Cancer Awareness” month, the much-hyped recognition of a serious problem that we should be conscious of throughout the year. The associated “pink ribbon” campaign sometimes feels akin to a “Hallmark holiday” sales gimmick, rather than recognition of the pain of breast cancer and need for further research. Carmen Gonzalez just had a [...]

First, a confession—I’m a mathphobe, traumatized by growing up in a family skewed with an overabundance of math genes for whom math skills came as naturally as breathing.  I always got confused, and thought it was “sadistics,” not “statistics.” So it was with a bit of hesitation that I tentatively began Between the Lines (BTL), [...]

Video is everywhere, and it turns out that the book publishing industry and authors know to get readers, they simply must have a video of some sort out there! There are several different ways to promote a science book on video. One way is to put up a talk given on the topic of the [...]

Almost five years ago to the day, Neil Shubin’s first book (and my first foray into illustrating popular non-fiction), Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body debuted. It was by all accounts hugely successful, far exceeding the publisher’s sales expectations in the first few months and going into multiple [...]

If Mark Changizi (web, blog, twitter, G+) is right, you don’t have to go see The Avengers in theaters to be impressed by superheroes and their super abilities. Instead, just consider the human eye. That’s right: your visual system contains superhuman powers! X-ray vision? No problem. Color telepathy? Sure. The ability to see into the [...]

Babel’s Dawn, a book that grew out of a blog about the natural history of speech, is probably not like any other book you’ve read. That’s because it’s not really a book about the natural history of speech: it’s a book about a (fictitious) museum that tells the story about the natural history of speech. [...]

Mike Brown always wanted to discover a planet. On August 25, 2006, Mike Brown killed Pluto. Well, the truth is Pluto had been killed long before, but it wasn’t until August 25 that the International Astronomical Union met, in Prague, to have the official vote. And it wasn’t until August 25 that the press conference [...]

As a child – okay, even still as an adult – I couldn’t get enough of adventure stories with animals at the center, whether in text or on the screen. Jack London’s Call of the Wild comes to mind, or Disney’s The Jungle Book. More recently, books like Bonobo Handshake, by Vanessa Woods (see my [...]