Blue Jeans: The Art of the Ordinary | Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward | University of California Press | 184 pages | $24.95 (Paperback) I’m willing to bet you own at least one pair of jeans. Denim clothing—which will be used interchangeably with jeans for this discussion—is popular with people just about everywhere, with the [...]

I was charged with moving my library over the weekend, and while I typically enjoy spending time with my books—in particular, feeling their heft in my hands—it was backbreaking labor to lug all of them up the stairs through the house to their new, sunnier home. It dawned on me—having professed to being a reluctant [...]

I’m a bibliophile. And an avid bookworm. I bring books home the way some people do stray animals—I have a soft spot for books that have been thrown away, though I have been forced to learn some restraint in recent years as a result of space considerations. I’m always in need of more shelves. S [...]

In 2008, the 9-year-old son of paleoanthropologist Lee Berger discovered a fossil that landed Berger’s team on the covers of the journal Science, of Scientific American, and on the front pages of  newspapers including The New York Times. Berger and his son, Matthew, discovered a clavicle bone in Johannesburg, South Africa that belonged to an entirely [...]

Last week I recommended 20 great science books, in authorial alphabetical order from A to J, picked from my personal library. Here are 20 more, from K to W. Feel free to tell me if you don’t like my picks as well as offer some of your own. War Before Civilization, Lawrence Keeley (Oxford University [...]

I don’t know about you, but I like nothing more in summer than settling down with a great science book. So here are 20 recommendations, in authorial alphabetical order, from A to J. Next week I’ll give you 20 more. Some are new, some more than a century old, but they’re all classics. And since [...]

This is the last part of my interview with Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic, author of Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate, conducted earlier this month over lunch at Evvia in Palo Alto. (Here is part 1 of the interview. Here is part 2 of the interview.) [...]

We continue my interview with Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic, author of Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate, conducted earlier this month over lunch at Evvia in Palo Alto. (Here is part 1 of the interview.) In this segment of the interview, we ponder the kind of [...]

This summer, I reviewed Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate by Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic. This month, with the approach of the holiday season (prime time for picky eaters to sit with non-picky eaters at meal time), Stephanie and I sat down for lunch at Evvia [...]

Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food by Jeff Potter O’Reilly Media, 2010 We have entered the time of year during which finding The Perfect Gift for family members and friends can become something of an obsession. Therefore, in coming days, I’ll be sharing some recommendations. If you have family members and [...]

Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Last year, I shared my reflections on Ada herself. This year, I’d like to celebrate the day by pointing you to a book about another pioneering woman of science, Maria Mitchell. Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer among the American Romantics by Renée Bergland Boston: Beacon Press [...]

When I and my three younger siblings were growing up, our parents had a habit of muttering, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” The muttering that followed that aphorism usually had to do with the danger coming from the “little” amount of knowledge rather than a more comprehensive understanding of whatever field of endeavor [...]

What is the deal with the picky eater? Is she simply being willful, choosing the dinner table as a battlefield on which to fight for her right to self-determination? Or, is the behavior that those purveyors of succotash and fruit cup interpret as willfulness actually rooted in factors that are beyond the picky eater’s control? [...]

In our modern world, many of the things that contribute to the mostly smooth running of our day-to-day lives are largely invisible to us. We tend to notice them only when they break. Uncaged, a thriller by Paul McKellips, identifies animal research as one of the activities in the background supporting the quality of life [...]

One of the interesting and inescapable features of our knowledge-building efforts is just how hard it can be to nail down objective facts. It is especially challenging to tell an objective story when the object of study is us. It’s true that we have privileged information of a particular sort (our own experience of what [...]

During one of my trips this spring, I had the opportunity to read Carl Elliott’s book White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine. It is not always the case that reading I do for my job also works as riveting reading for air travel, but this book holds its own against [...]

A deadly but critically endangered snake, one of the world’s rarest birds and a heavily guarded flower are among the endangered species in the news this week. A New Snake with a Sad Story: A gorgeous but extremely dangerous new snake species has been discovered in Honduras. The new palm pit viper has been named [...]

The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water, By Charles Fishman, Published in 2011 by Free Press, New York NY, ISBN 978-1-4391-0207-7 ____________________ Resorting only minimally to the standard statistics of water scarcity in various regions around the world, Mr. Fishman dives in to several specific case studies intended to help the [...]

For the author of Moby-Duck, Donovan Hohn, it all started with a school assignment. In 2008, he challenged his journalism class to find the "archaeology of the ordinary." A student, known to be a bit of an odd one, wrote his assignment on his lucky rubber duck. In passing, the student mentioned a newspaper article [...]

Few things inspire wonder like seeing something out of its element: Christmas lights on a cactus, a flag on the moon or a yellow rubber duck floating in the middle of the ocean. This incongruity captivates writer Donovan Hohn, who decides to go looking for 28,800 bath toys 13 years after they were lost at [...]

Book review: ‘Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How one man’s obsession with runaway sneakers and rubber ducks revolutionized ocean science’ by Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano, Collins hardcover edition, 2009: ISBN 978-0-06-155841-2, HarperCollins paperback edition, 2010: ISBN 978-0-06-155842-9 With a touch of whimsy, tales of the grotesque, and the barest hints of essential mathematics, Dr. [...]

Today is the publication day of Pink Boots and the Machete, book by Mireya Mayor, physical anthropologist, National Geographic Explorer, and former NFL Cheerleader. For this occasion, we have invited Darlene Cavalier to conduct a brief interview with the author. Darlene: You discovered the world’s smallest primate in existence in Madagascar. Walk me through the [...]

Usually this announcement comes out much earlier in the year, but the transition from Lulu.com to FSG has changed all the dates – the cycle is now different. But still, it’s high time to announce the Guest Editor for the next edition of The Best Science Writing Online, the annual anthology of the best science [...]

Open Laboratory 2013 – the complete list of entries! We just closed the submission form for the 2013 edition. Thank you all who submitted the posts. Below are all the blog posts submitted over the past year. I need to crowdsource some help first. In the comments, please let me know if you notice any [...]

Deadline is here, tonight! We are closing the submissions on Monday, October 1st at 11:59pm EDT! The submission form for the 2013 edition of Open Lab is here. Any blog post written since October 1, 2011 is eligible for submission. We accept essays, stories, poetry, cartoons/comics, and original art. Once you are done submitting your [...]

Deadline is here, just three days away! We are closing the submissions on Monday, October 1st at 11:59pm EDT! The submission form for the 2013 edition of Open Lab is here. Any blog post written since October 1, 2011 is eligible for submission. We accept essays, stories, poetry, cartoons/comics, and original art. Once you are [...]

The Big Deadline is looming! We are closing the submissions on October 1st at 11:59pm EDT – just a week from now! The submission form for the 2013 edition of Open Lab is here. Any blog post written since October 1, 2011 is eligible for submission. We accept essays, stories, poetry, cartoons/comics, and original art. [...]

The 2012 edition is coming out tomorrow! Join us for festivities! The book can be pre-ordered at Amazon.com and Amazon UK. You can buy the last five annual collections here. You can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here. The submission form for the 2013 edition of Open Lab is now open. Any blog [...]

Only half a month till the 2012 edition is out! Mark your calendars for September 18th! The 2012 edition can now be pre-ordered at Amazon.com and Amazon UK. You can buy the last five annual collections here. You can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here. The submission form for the 2013 edition of [...]

Less than month till the 2012 edition is out! Mark your calendars for September 18th! The 2012 edition can now be pre-ordered at Amazon.com and Amazon UK. You can buy the last five annual collections here. You can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here. The submission form for the 2013 edition of Open [...]

Only a month till the 2012 edition is out! Mark your calendars for September 18th! The 2012 edition can now be pre-ordered at Amazon.com and Amazon UK. You can buy the last five annual collections here. You can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here. The submission form for the 2013 edition of Open [...]

It is now expected by the science blogosphere that I post the full updated listing of all the submissions every Monday morning. This serves as a reminder for bloggers to submit their (and other people’s) posts, and to some extent prevents duplicate entries. But most importantly, it presents a growing listing of some of the [...]

As a little boy, I was always drawn to books about wilderness, exotic places, explorers and wild animals. I hungrily read accounts of real events, from Joy Adamson to Gerald Durrell, and works of fiction, from The Jungle Book to The White Fang, from Henryk Sienkiewicz’s In Desert and Wilderness to the entire Doctor Dolittle [...]

Edward Tufte is a man of many callings—data visualization guru, author of widely praised books, professor emeritus at Yale University, proprietor of the New York City gallery ET Modern. Add to the list collector of rare books—apparently Tufte tends a research library that contains works by some of the greatest thinkers of the past several [...]

If a discussion Monday at a Manhattan bookstore is any indication, book publishers and sellers find e-books threatening, but writers, feeling generally abused for decades by publishers, are gleeful over their newfound digital access to readers—be that via the Web, iPads, e-book readers, podcasts or cell phones. The event at McNally Jackson bookstore started with [...]

Perhaps you—like me—are disappointed by the amateur calculations done every December that purport to show how Santa couldn’t possibly deliver presents to all the good boys and girls in the world. Okay, fine: if Santa were just a dude in a sleigh (even one powered by some very fast reindeer), his task would be very [...]

Cheese is carefully rotted milk, an ancient domestication of microbial activities for human consumption. Humans work in concert with communities of bacteria and fungi to produce the hundreds of different kinds of cheeses, flavored by the metabolic excretions of microbes eating the sugars, proteins, and fats in the milk. The ecologies of cheese provide a [...]

I am one of those people that’s usually “reading” a lot of books at once. This summer I’ve been alternating between skimming and devouring, picking up and putting on hold a few new favorites and some less favorite books, which have coalesced in my head into an overarching narrative about the history and future of [...]

On January 28, 1986, NASA Challenger mission STS-51-L ended in tragedy when the shuttle exploded 73 seconds after takeoff. The image of the explosion shortly after liftoff is burned into the memory of many of us, so revisiting the “major malfunction” may not be necessary, but is here for those who’d like to witness it [...]

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 [...]

For all their popularity as the subject of dedicated books, cats, dogs, bears and their relatives have never previously been the focus of a single, field guide-style volume that treats all of them together. Luke Hunter and Priscilla Barrett’s A Field Guide to the Carnivores of the World (published 2011) is a beautifully illustrated, comprehensive [...]

For no particular reason whatsoever, here are some montages featuring the covers of books I’ve written and/or edited. Long-time readers might be familiar with the backstory to Tetrapod Zoology Book One (Naish 2010a), Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: A Historical Perspective (Moody et al. 2010) and The Great Dinosaur Discoveries (Naish 2009), but I’d still [...]