Science writing news

A Voodoo Lily that surfaces unexpectedly in her yard moves a potter to make shiny purple pitchers that won’t pour, and bumpy, leaky mugs. A child treasures an autumnal butterscotch leaf; its mother refrains from revealing that “when beauty speaks it doesn’t hang around for an answer.” “Deep in a cave, life distills to one question — Which way now?” These meditations on the natural world and our place in it come from Kelly Lenox’s first book of poetry, The Brightest Rock. In her day job, Lenox edits Environmental Factor, the monthly newsletter of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

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The periodic table is one of the most iconic symbols of science of all time, Adrian Dingle observes in his latest chemistry book for a general audience, The Elements — A Tour of the Periodic Table. Both a science writer and a high school and college chemistry teacher, Dingle provides a conversationally-written, generously illustrated overview of many of the known 118 chemical elements. He discusses their discovery, action, applications, and, for some, hazards tied to their use.

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On average, children in the United States will have had twenty courses of antibiotics by the time they reach adulthood, Emily Monosson reports in Natural Defense: Enlisting Bugs and Germs to Protect Our Food and Health. Today’s scientists seek ways to prevent the potentially adverse consequences of wiping out beneficial and/or harmless bacteria along with pathogens. “Twentieth century technology isolated us from nature,” Monosson writes, “but now twenty-first century technology is repairing the rift.”

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The nation’s sad state of oral health often gets short shrift in the mainstream press. In Teeth: the Story of Beauty, Inequality and the Struggle for Oral Health in America, Mary Otto explores economic disparities in dental care, the connection between tooth decay and diminished job prospects, the continuing fake debate over the value of water fluoridation, the ethics of cosmetic dentistry, and more. Having focused her reporting on such issues for more than a decade, Otto serves as oral health topic leader for the Association of Health Care Journalists, for which she writes a weekly blog.

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What procedures, drugs, foods, environmental exposures, and everyday practices can help or harm your children in pregnancy, birth, and the first years of life? What can you do to protect your children’s health and development? In Dirt Is Good, Jack Gilbert, Rob Knight, and NASW member Sandra Blakeslee provide a parent-friendly guide to the human microbiome — the community of mostly friendly microbes that populate the human body. The Q&A format gives parents quick access to their most pressing questions, and, Blakeslee reports, streamlined the writing process.

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On August 21, 2017, for the first time in 99 years, the moon’s shadow will traverse the entire breadth of the continental United States. The event presents a host of opportunities for both scientific research and media coverage. In American Eclipse, David Baron examines the total solar eclipse of 1878, which crossed western North America from Alaska to Texas and Louisiana, attracting Thomas Edison and others. “Those three minutes of midday darkness,” he writes, “would enlighten a people and elevate a nation.”

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