Thomas Levenson · Penguin Random House · 2026
In his latest book, Levenson searches for the origins of the most common arguments against vaccines: that they are unnatural; that they are more dangerous than the illnesses they claim to prevent; and that they are an affront to freedom. "A Pox on Fools" explores the human impulse to question and wonder, sometimes past the point at which the very act of questioning turns deadly.
Lorna J. Gibson · MIT Press · 2026
A renowned engineer and lifelong birder, Gibson explores the hidden microscopic structures and engineering principles that keep birds aloft and alive, how an egg forms, how a bird generates lift, how woodpeckers safely drill their holes, and much more. She also considers the longer view of birds in their habitats and natural history. Her up-close look at avian mysteries provides a perspective like no other, for the expert ornithologist and curious observer alike.
Libby Hsu · Springer Nature · 2026
In her chapter, "Drinking Water Status Around the World and Its Effect on Health," Hsu discusses the Earth's water resources, which are found in a variety of settings. In her chapter, "Waterless and Low-Water Sanitation Technologies that Improve Quality of Life and Conserve Water Resources," she shares her experience with sanitation challenges in the Global South and how that has reinforced the value of waterless and low-water sanitation technologies that are suitable for scaling around the world.
Howard J. Herzog · MIT Press · 2025
In "Carbon Removal," Herzog and MacDowell discuss how technology and policy can come together to help us reach "net-zero" climate targets. The authors explore the rapidly evolving world of carbon dioxide removal (CDR), presenting the technological pathways of enhancing the land sink, biomass-based carbon capture and storage, engineered removal methods, and ocean-based carbon removal. They also discuss barriers facing CDR as well as ethical implications of this process.
Felice Frankel · Candlewick Press · 2025
Enlisting readers to "be the scientist" through vivid fine-art photographs, science photographer Felice Frankel zooms in and out on beautiful and brilliant moments all around us to reveal the chemical, natural, or physical processes, from viscosity and venation to chlorophyll and capillary action, behind scientific phenomena.
Edward A. F. Gibson · MIT Press · 2025
This book lays out the grammar of a language from the perspective of a cognitive scientist, outlining the components of language structure and the model of syntax that Gibson advocates: dependency grammar, in which a word is connected to another word via a dependency arc to form a larger compositional meaning. This formalism can explain numerous aspects of word order universals across languages.
Tom Zeller Jr. · Harper Collins · 2025
Undark , published by the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT From blinding migraines to severe headache disorders known as "clusters," chronic head pain affects 40 percent of the population, many of them suffering in silence. Finally, "The Headache" reveals the science behind a group of disorders that is as much a curse as a cultural punchline, and leads to key insights into the nature of pain itself. Guided by his own decades-long struggle with cluster headaches, Zeller's journey into headache science is at once intimate and panoramic.
Alan Lightman · Penguin Random House · 2025
Lightman and Rees pull back the curtain on the field of science, revealing that scientists are driven by the same sense of curiosity, wonder, and responsibility toward a future that shapes us all. They guide us through the fascinating lives and minds of scientists around the world and throughout time, and provide an inside peek at what makes scientists tick, their daily lives, passions, and concerns about the societies they live in.
Jennifer Morris · Springer Nature · 2025
Understanding future emissions scenarios is essential for preparing for climate change. The chapter "Emissions and Concentration Scenarios" examines how socioeconomic uncertainty contributes to overall climate change projections, and identifies key drivers of greenhouse gas emissions. It reviews the history of emissions scenarios and compares various approaches, including IPCC methods and formal uncertainty analysis techniques. The chapter concludes with lessons learned from over 40 years of socioeconomic scenario development for climate research.
Thomas Levenson · Penguin Random House · 2025
For centuries, people in the West, believing themselves to hold God-given dominion over nature, thought too much of humanity and too little of microbes. Nineteenth-century scientists finally made the connection. Life-saving methods to control infections and contain outbreaks soon followed. Next came the antibiotic era in the 1930s. Yet, less than a century later, the promise of that revolution is receding due to years of overuse. Is our self-confidence getting the better of us again?
Alan Lightman · Penguin Random House · 2024
Nature is capable of extraordinary phenomena. Standing in awe of those phenomena, we experience a feeling of connection to the cosmos. For Lightman, just as remarkable is that all of what we see around us - soap bubbles, scarlet ibises, shooting stars - are made out of the same material stuff and obey the same rules and laws. Pairing 36 full-color photos evoking some of nature's most awe-inspiring phenomena with personal essays, "The Miraculous from the Material" explores the fascinating science underlying the natural world.
Susan Solomon · University of Chicago Press · 2024
We solved planet-threatening problems before, Solomon argues, and we can do it again. She knows firsthand what those solutions entail, as she gained international fame as the leader of a 1986 expedition to Antarctica, making discoveries that were key to healing the damaged ozone layer. She saw a path from scientific and public awareness to political engagement, international agreement, industry involvement, and effective action. Solomon connects this triumph to the stories of other past environmental victories - against ozone depletion, smog, pesticides, and lead - to extract the essential elements of what makes change possible.
Stefan Helmreich · Duke University Press · 2023
In this book, Helmreich examines ocean waves as forms of media that carry ecological, geopolitical, and climatological news about our planet. Drawing on ethnographic work with oceanographers and coastal engineers in the Netherlands, the United States, Australia, Japan, and Bangladesh, he details how scientists at sea and in the lab apprehend waves' materiality through abstractions, seeking to capture in technical language these avatars of nature at once periodic and irreversible, wild and pacific, ephemeral and eternal.
Nancy G. Leveson · MIT Press · 2023
Preventing accidents and losses in complex systems requires a holistic perspective that can accommodate unprecedented types of technology and design. Leveson's book covers the history of safety engineering; explores risk, ethics, legal frameworks, and policy implications; and explains why accidents happen and how to mitigate risks in modern, software-intensive systems. It includes accounts of well-known accidents like the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters, Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear accidents, examining their causes and how to prevent similar incidents in the future.
Henry Jacoby · Springer Cham · 2023
Four veteran climate experts present our current understanding of the climate threat and what can be done about it, in lay language ― without losing critical aspects of the natural and social science. In a series of essays, they explain the essential components of the challenge, countering the forces of distrust of the science and opposition to a vigorous national response.
Alan Lightman · Pantheon · 2023
Drawing on intellectual history and conversations with contemporary scientists, philosophers, and psychologists, Lightman asks a series of thought-provoking questions that illuminate our strange place between the world of particles and forces and the world of complex human experience.
Robert S. Pindyck · Oxford University Press · 2022
Climate change initiatives typically focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions - but what happens if these efforts fall short? In his latest book, Pindyck, an environmental economist, contends that most countries will not come close to meeting their CO2 reduction goals. He recommends adaptations such as sea walls and dykes, hybrid crops, and large-scale geoengineering.
Deborah Blum · Oxford University Press · 2022
Undark, the digital science magazine published by KSJ Drawing on insights from writers based at publications including The New York Times, the BBC, The Washington Post, Science, The New Yorker, National Geographic and more, this book serves as an essential survey of the best in science reporting today - and a testament to the importance of independent journalistic inquiry in understanding research and building trust with audiences.
Stefan Helmreich · HKW · 2022
"What is life?" is a question that has haunted the life sciences since Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Gottfried Treviranus independently coined the word "biology" in 1802. The query has titled scores of texts, with Erwin Schrödinger's 1944 book and Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan's 1995 volume only the most prominent. In this inventive art-and-science book, the editors curate and comment upon a collection of first pages of publications from 1829-2021 entitled "What Is Life?"
Yossi Sheffi · MIT CTL Media · 2021
In "A Shot in the Arm," Sheffi recounts the Covid-19 vaccines' extraordinary journey from scientific breakthroughs to coronavirus antidote and mass vaccination. He also explores how the mission could transform the fight against deadly diseases and other global-scale challenges.
Hale Bradt · Van Dorn Books · 2021
This is the story of the Rossi X ray Timing Explorer (RXTE), an Earth-orbiting NASA observatory built to study X-ray-emitting celestial objects. Bradt provides a personal account of the 20-year effort of his team at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research to bring about the RXTE mission. Technical and bureaucratic hurdles facing the mission are described with humor and wry personal anecdotes. The payoff: 16 years of successful observations resulting in critical new insights into black holes and neutron stars.
Frank Wilczek · Penguin · 2021
Wilczek offers a simple yet profound exploration of reality based on the deep revelations of modern science. With clarity and joy, he guides readers through the essential concepts that form our understanding of what the world is and how it works. Through these pages, we come to see our reality in a new way - bigger, fuller, and stranger than it looked before.
Alan Lightman · Pantheon · 2021
From the acclaimed author of "Einstein's Dreams" comes a collection of meditative essays on the possibilities - and impossibilities - of nothingness and infinity, and how our place in the cosmos falls somewhere in between.
Arup Chakraborty · MIT Press · 2021
This book provides an accessible explanation of how viruses emerge to cause pandemics, how our immune system combats them, and how diagnostic tests, vaccines, and antiviral therapies work - concepts that provide the foundation for our public health policies.
Noelle E. Selin · MIT Press · 2020
This book explores how people have made beneficial use of mercury for thousands of years, how they've been harmed by its toxic properties, and how they've tried to protect themselves and the environment from its damaging effects. The authors develop and apply an analytical framework that can inform other efforts to evaluate and promote sustainability.
David Kaiser · University of Chicago Press · 2020
Kaiser introduces readers to iconic episodes in physicists' still-unfolding quest to understand space, time, and matter. He explores moments of discovery and debate among the minds of Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Stephen Hawking, and many more who have indelibly shaped our understanding of nature as they've tried to make sense of a messy world.