“All matter—everything around and within us—has an ultimate birthday: the day the universe was born,” Dan Levitt writes in What's Gotten Into You: The Story of Your Body's Atoms, from the Big Bang Through Last Night's Dinner. In reporting how we became who we are, Levitt illuminates the lives and struggles of the scientists who discovered how the past remains alive in the present.
In thousands of hours of manned spaceflight, all dependent on computers, the Apollo Guidance Computer never failed. In an era when men dominated computers and spaceflight, Margaret Hamilton and her team wrote AGC’s software. Richard Maurer interviewed Hamilton and tells her story for readers age 10-14 in The Woman in the Moon: How Margaret Hamilton Helped Fly the First Astronauts to the Moon.
Where do birds go when seasons change? A 17th-century theory posited they flew to the moon. Researchers today use radar, satellites, light-level geolocation, DNA, data from community bird-watchers, and more to track and understand migration patterns, as Rebecca Heisman details in Flight Paths: How a Passionate and Quirky Group of Pioneering Scientists Solved the Mystery of Bird Migration.
Parents of children with rare, potentially fatal, disorders, building on activism by people with breast cancer and HIV, have spurred the burgeoning citizen-science movement. Their efforts, Amy Dockser Marcus reports in We the Scientists: How a Daring Team of Parents and Doctors Forged a New Path for Medicine, have improved both national health policy and social and political equality.
From the 1890s to the 1920s, reporter/photographer Eliza Scidmore covered Alaska’s Klondike gold rush, Japan’s emergence as a modern world power, and other world events for National Geographic and other publications. She also orchestrated Japan’s 1912 gift of 3000 cherry trees to Washington, DC, Diana Parsell recounts in Eliza Scidmore: The Trailblazing Journalist Behind Washington's Cherry Trees.
Climate disruption occurs almost too slowly to fear, Dennis Meredith asserts in The Climate Pandemic: How Climate Disruption Threatens Human Survival. The innate human “optimism bias” thwarts efforts to halt rising global temperatures, acidifying oceans, disappearing forests, and increasing wildfires. With 1700 references, “this book is not a wake-up call,” he insists. “It may well be taps.”
What could prompt a person to act like a cat, view family members as imposters, eat cigarette ashes, or hear sounds others don’t notice? What allows others to memorize dozens of books or rapidly calculate math problems? Neuroscientist and science writer Marc Dingman explores such queries in Bizarre: The Most Peculiar Cases of Human Behavior and What They Tell Us about How the Brain Works.
Would charts and other visuals enhance your articles, press releases, blog, social media posts, book, and talks? Learn DIY tactics from Jen Christiansen’s book, Building Science Graphics: An Illustrated Guide to Communicating Science through Diagrams and Visualizations. Christiansen includes worksheets and case studies to help journalists, editors, students, and teachers improve their messaging.
Turning a sheet pan into a science lab involves no alchemy, only the wizardry of kitchen pantry scientist Liz Lee Heinecke. In Sheet Pan Science, Heinecke provides photo-illustrated guides to 25 fun home experiments. Using baking powder, cornstarch & other kitchen staples, readers aged 7 to 10 will learn the science behind pyramid & cube-shaped bubbles, tie-dye milk, kaleidoscopic eggs, & more.