Restaurants where patrons have to shout to converse. Car alarms and traffic that disrupt sleep. In Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World and How We Can Take It Back, Chris Berdik tells not only how noise harms hearing and health, but also how better soundscapes in schools, offices, hospitals, streets, airports, and even parks can lower stress, improve well-being, and boost quality of life.
Dragonflies are acrobats of the air, with four wings that can move in different directions simultaneously. Bats are the only mammals that can fly. Rebecca E. Hirsch explores the functions of wings in insects, birds, seeds, and even airplanes in Wonder Wings: Guess Who's Flying, her illustrated book of rhyming science riddles for 4-to-8-year-olds. Additional text helps adults expand the content.
While most of us regard zombies as a sci-fi staple, real-world zombies live in virtually all habitats where terrestrial invertebrates dwell. In Rise of the Zombie Bugs: The Surprising Science of Parasitic Mind Control, Mindy Weisberger describes the zombification process with horror-movie immediacy & tells how understanding it may benefit agriculture, drug development, studies of behavior, & more.
Exercise or watch TV? How do we make everyday choices? Do our choices serve our big-picture goals? In What We Value: The Neuroscience of Choice and Change, Emily Falk explores the brain systems at work in making—and improving—our daily decisions. Her studies at UPenn’s Annenberg School draw on functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the neural underpinnings of what we do and why we do it.
A news report on a family of 6000 people with a high frequency of early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease caused by a genetic mutation drew Jennie Erin Smith to Colombia in 2017. To research and write Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer's Families and the Search for a Cure, Smith spent 7 years immersed in experiences of these family members & their doctors, genetic studies, an experimental drug trial & more.
Every urban environment includes rocks, plants, animals, and habitats, including front and back yards and empty lots. These topics reward a writer’s attention, David B. Williams asserts in Wild in Seattle: Stories at the Crossroads of People and Nature. He explores urban stalactites, seals and sea lions, a winter-active fungus known locally as “hair ice,” & more. Illustrations by Elizabeth Person.
Sugar-sweetened beverages boost rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, Murray Carpenter asserts. In Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes Us Sick, he focuses on the world’s largest soda manufacturer, calling for greater consumer awareness of sodas’ nutritional risks and the strategies corporations use to hide those risks.
Differential privacy (DP), now the gold standard of algorithmic privacy protection, protects confidential data by adding random numbers to create statistical noise when the data is used. The U.S. Census Bureau used DP to protect 2020 census data, for example. In Differential Privacy, Simson L. Garfinkel tells what DP is and how it works. His book is part of an MIT science series for general readers.
Forget biological determinism! “Mainstream science is not as objective, neutral, or singularly truthful as people might expect,” Ambika Kamath & Melina Packer write in Feminism in the Wild: How Human Biases Shape Our Understanding of Animal Behavior. Scientists view animal behavior through their own social, cultural, & political lenses, they note, calling for more study of diverse perspectives.
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