Member articles

In Animal Wise: How We Know Animals Think and Feel, Virginia Morell explores the inner lives of wild and domesticated animals, and tells how animal behaviorists gain such knowledge. In February 2014, Morell’s book was chosen as a finalist in the science and technology category of this year's LA Times Book Award competition. It previously was named a Kirkus Reviews’ "Best Book of 2013" and an American Library Association "Notable Book for 2014."

Matthew Bettelheim teamed up with illustrator Nicole M. Wong to write a children’s book about the Lange’s metalmark butterfly, an endangered species found only in one California wildlife refuge. In 1999, the peak butterfly count in a single day totaled 2,342; in 2012, the daily count peaked at 32. Writing the book in verse proved challenging, Bettelheim says, as “not much rhymes with ‘metamorphosis.’”

The unearthing in the 1990s of a cemetery for black slaves in New York City prompted curiosity about a little publicized fact of colonial American life, slavery of blacks in the North. A costly study of human remains from the cemetery yielded little useful information, David Zimmerman asserts.

NASW member Steve Nadis and Harvard mathematician Shing-Tung Yau report on the development of novel mathematical concepts at Harvard, and the contribution of Harvard researchers to the shaping of their field.

A passion for biology prompted Teisha Rowland to write on a wide range of biology topics for her local newspaper while still in grad school. Now she’s collected and updated her columns in two books.