“Even though the world needs mining more than ever, the world needs mining to change,” Christopher Pollon writes in Pitfall: The Race to Mine the World’s Most Vulnerable Places, recipient of NASW’s 2024 Science in Society Book Award. It’s sometimes better to leave metals in the ground, he suggests, and capture those needed for present-day use by recycling outdated products, such as smartphones.
“There’s nothing more complicated than parenthood,” Kavin Senapathy asserts in The Progressive Parent: Harnessing the Power of Science and Social Justice to Raise Awesome Kids. She aims to help parents make evidence-based decisions about breast-feeding, vaccines, and food additives, and help their children acquire a positive racial, cultural, and gender identity, along with a social conscience.
In her novel, Rebecca of Ivanhoe, Alison Bass imagines the life of Rebecca, a 12th-century healer saved from being burned alive as a witch, after she flees from England to Spain and then to Egypt. Bass describes botanical remedies and other therapies used in medieval medical practice. She incorporates historical characters, wars, and other events occurring in the background of daily life.
Do you need a new cell phone? Could you manage without a car? In Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future, Vince Beiser explores the damage to human and planetary health caused by mining metals to manufacture cars, phones, computers, and other everyday “necessities.” Repairing, reusing, and recycling products isn’t enough, he asserts. He suggests mindful DIY action.
Studying a sundial at age six, Roger Penrose first glimpsed a mathematical “world behind the world” where the shape of things revealed the universe’s deep secrets. In The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius, Patchen Barss follows Penrose from childhood to Nobel Prize, capturing the intense mix of joy and sacrifice that allowed him to rewrite our understanding of the cosmos.
Viruses that prey on bacteria, known as phages, may be our best defense against the next bacterial pandemic, Lina Zeldovich asserts in The Living Medicine: How a Lifesaving Cure Was Nearly Lost—and Why It Will Rescue Us When Antibiotics Fail. Multi drug-resistant bacteria kill more than a million people annually, she reports. Anthony Fauci and others have called for further phage research.
Essays on how to evaluate ideas before you pitch, conduct difficult interviews, write a great lede and self-edit are among 42 articles in The Craft of Science Writing: Selections from The Open Notebook, expanded edition, edited by Siri Carpenter. Beyond craft, the book also addresses such topics as working with a sensitivity reader and dealing with the emotional toll science reporting may take.
Imagine a food additive that makes any food irresistible. Restaurant buffets would prompt stampedes. People unable to slake their cravings may devour unpalatable items. Terrorists could use the additive to destabilize large populations. That’s the sci-fi scenario Dennis Meredith presents in Attack of the Food Zombies, a cautionary tale on the risks of food additives and manufactured foods.
When a child sleeps poorly, parents may, too. In Beyond Tired: A Sleep Physician's Guide to Solving Your Child’s Sleep Problems for Good, Funke Afolabi-Brown draws on personal and professional experience to offer practical tips. She addresses such topics as the need for children who shuttle between homes to have consistent sleep schedules and for adolescents to have healthy school start times.
