Advance Copy Virtual Events
Archives of past NASW Advance Copy virtual events. Find links to past events, video recordings, and panelist bios.
Archives of past NASW Advance Copy virtual events. Find links to past events, video recordings, and panelist bios.
All tortoises are turtles, but not all turtles are tortoises, herpetologist George R. Zug and NASW member Devin A. Reese report in Tortoises of the World: Giants to Dwarfs. Tortoises may converse via low-frequency vocalizations, this illustrated guide to 47 tortoise species relates. They can feel tactile stimulation of their shells. Habitat change and direct exploitation threaten their survival.
Solitude, often disparaged, linked to loneliness, or thought an unattainable luxury, offers many benefits for everyday life, Netta Weinstein, NASW member Heather Hansen, and Thuy-vy Nguyen write in Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone. Solitude can boost creativity, reflection, and resilience, the authors say. Surprise: it also often fosters improvements in social relationships.
More than a century after Einstein published his theory of general relativity, physicists and mathematicians still strive to unravel its implications and expand upon it, NASW member Steve Nadis and Shing-Tung Yau write in The Gravity of Math: How Geometry Rules the Universe. Continual exchange and spillover of ideas across disciplinary boundaries, they note, advance our understanding of the universe.
“Cosmic rays remain one of the most intractable scientific puzzles of all time,” Mark Wolverton asserts. Debate between two physicist superstars over what cosmic rays are and how they came to be roiled scientific, religious, and philosophical groups in the 1930s, Wolverton writes in Splinters of Infinity: Cosmic Rays and the Clash of Two Nobel Prize-Winning Scientists over the Secrets of Creation.
Whales fertilize the ocean with their poop. Forest elephants eat small fast-growing trees, helping larger slow-growing trees flourish. In Animal Climate Heroes!, Alison Pearce Stevens urges readers aged 8 and up to become climate heroes, too, by cutting back on single-use plastics, encouraging their families to buy local, planting a vegetable garden, and choosing to bike rather than riding in a car.
On April 8, the moon’s shadow will sweep over North America from Mexico across Texas to New England into Canada. Some 32 million people will see a total eclipse. This “precious shared experience,” David Baron suggests in a new edition of American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World, may boost recognition of commonalities in our divided nation.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars, but the 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics went to her male academic advisor—not a unique story. In She Can STEM: 50 Trailblazing Women in Science from Ancient History to Today, Liz Lee Heinecke chronicles 50 women scientists’ successes and struggles. Each account includes a guide to help readers ages 7-12 conduct topic-related experiments of their own at home.
“Much of scientific inquiry, like poetry, involves play and metaphor and idiosyncratic obsessions and just plain fiddling around,” Nell Greenfieldboyce asserts. In Transient And Strange: Notes on the Science of Life, she employs these same tactics to explore the nature of tornados, meteorites, black holes, lives of fleas and spiders, doodling, quality of silence, making of toast, and making of babies.