Archives de catégorie : Popular Science

WHERE DID THE UNIVERSE COME FROM de Chris Ferrie & Geraint F. Lewis

Do you ever look up to the stars and wonder about what is out there? An accessible science narrative for readers of Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, this book allows readers to eavesdrop on a conversation between two Award-winning physicists and delve into a multidisciplinary discussion of our understanding of the universe.

WHERE DID THE UNIVERSE COME FROM?
and Other Cosmic Questions: Our Universe, from the Quantum to the Cosmos
by Chris Ferrie & Geraint F. Lewis
Sourcebooks, September 2021

Over the last few centuries, humans have successfully unraveled much of the language of the universe, exploring and defining formerly mysterious phenomena such as electricity, magnetism, and matter through the beauty of mathematics. But some secrets remain beyond our realm of understanding—and seemingly beyond the very laws and theories we have relied on to make sense of the universe we inhabit. It is clear that the quantum, the world of atoms and electrons, is entwined with the cosmos, a universe of trillions of stars and galaxies…but exactly how these two extremes of human understanding interact remains a mystery. WHERE DID THE UNIVERSE COME FROM? and Other Cosmic Questions allows readers to eavesdrop on a conversation between award-winning physicists Chris Ferrie and Geraint F. Lewis as they examine the universe through the two unifying and yet often contradictory lenses of classical physics and quantum mechanics, tackling questions such as: Where did the universe come from? Why do dying stars rip themselves apart? Do black holes last forever? What is left for humans to discover?
A brief but fascinating exploration of the vastness of the universe, this book will have armchair physicists turning the pages until their biggest and smallest questions about the cosmos have been answered.

Chris Ferrie is an award-winning physicist and Senior Lecturer for Quantum Software and Information at the University of Technology Sydney. He has a BMath in Mathematical Physics and a PhD in Applied Mathematics. He lives in Australia with his wife and children.
Geraint F. Lewis is an award-winning astrophysicist and Professor of Astrophysics at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy.

THE DINOSAUR WARS de Gerta Keller

Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl meets Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction in this work of popular science which blends the personal narrative of a trailblazing woman’s life in a male-dominated scientific field with a highstakes inquiry into what really killed the dinosaurs, the greatest scientific detective story of our time.

THE DINOSAUR WARS: MY LIFE AS A WARRIOR SCIENTIST IN THE DINOSAUR WARS
by Gerta Keller
Penguin Press, October 2022
(via Writers House)

World-renowned geologist and paleontologist Gerta Keller is at the center of what has been called the nastiest feud in science, a contentious debate popularly known as “The Dinosaur Wars” over what triggered the fifth mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Era sixty-six million years ago. Dinosaurs have enthralled us for generations, and the question of what caused their demise is more relevant than ever, as humankind confronts the paroxysms of an imperiled planet and the possibility that we may become the dinosaurs of the sixth extinction.
Born into a life of poverty on a small farm in Switzerland as the sixth of a dozen children, Gerta was told her dreams of becoming a doctor were impossible. Defying the odds, Gerta reclaimed her childhood dream of studying science, ultimately completing her graduate studies in geology at Stanford and becoming a professor at Princeton University and a major voice in her field. Along the way, she overcame the hostility and disdain of her male colleagues, who sabotaged her work, took credit for her discoveries, and chided her for not “knowing her place.”
Driven by a relentless passion to discover the truth of Earth’s catastrophic upheavals, Gerta continued her research in a series of incredible adventures across the globe that have caused some to liken her to a female Indiana Jones and which led her to uncover a growing mass of evidence that contradicted the then-widely-accepted asteroid impact theory. Rather, Gerta discovered, the real cause of the dinosaurs’ extinction was Deccan volcanism, a series of cataclysmic volcanic eruptions on the Indian peninsula. Outraged by her daring to challenge them, the toxic, male scientific establishment launched an all-out war against Gerta, doing their utmost to sabotage her work, destroy her reputation, and suppress the publication of her research. But they picked a fight with the wrong woman.

Gerta Keller is a Professor of Paleontology and Geology in the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University, where she has been a tenured faculty member since 1984. She has placed over 260 scientific publications in international journals and is considered a leading authority on catastrophes and mass extinctions, and the biotic and environmental effects of impacts and volcanism. She has co-authored five academic books, is a frequent lecturer, and regularly receives invitations from academic institutions around the world. In recent years, her work has received increased recognition and continues to make waves in the mainstream media, including TV documentaries and news features, radio and podcast interviews, and print and web media, most notably in a widely circulated profile in The Atlantic.

THE GRIEVING BRAIN de Mary-Frances O’Connor

THE GRIEVING BRAIN:
How Our Neurons Map Love and Loss
by Mary-Frances O’Connor
Harper One, March 2022

There is the initial pain of loss, and then there is the grieving. We have long assigned grief to the realm of nebulous emotions, but we now know that the brain creates those emotions in response to many outside factors. Neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor has been studying the effects of grief on the brain and body for more than twenty years, and the clues she has found as to how we cope with loss turn out to be rooted in how we fall in love. In THE GRIEVING BRAIN, she explores this new territory and explains what happens inside the brain when we become attached to another and then lose that loved one—and why it can be so difficult to imagine a future without them. (Hint: Sometimes the brain leads us to believe the death is just not true.)
For readers of popular science such as Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score and Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made, as well as Joan Didion’s memoir of loss, The Year of Magical Thinking, THE GRIEVING BRAIN offers remarkable insight into the inner workings of our minds and the evolution of grief. O’Connor’s explanation of the brain’s reaction to loss is an inspiring look at love. And her discovery, that we should think of grief as a form of learning, is a bold new perspective on a timeless struggle.

Mary-Frances O’Connor is the award-winning director of the Grief, Loss and Social Stress (GLASS) Lab, and an associate professor of psychology at the University of Arizona. She earned her degrees in psychology from Northwestern and in clinical psychology from the University of Arizona, and she completed her clinical training at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute and Hospital and her post-doctoral fellowship at the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. In 2017, she received the American Psychosomatic Society’s 75th Anniversary Award, given in recognition of her important career contributions in the field of mind-body medicine. She has previously appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition and Good Morning Tucson, and has been featured in the New York Times and Psychology Today, among many others.

WATER ALWAYS WINS de Erica Gies

Told as an unfolding detective story, WATER ALWAYS WINS by award-winning science journalist Erica Gies follows experts who are obsessed with water as they use close observation, historical research, ancient animal and human expertise and cutting-edge science to understand how water really works, why efforts to control it are failing and how to create more resilient water systems in the urgent race to mitigate the catastrophic effects of climate change.

WATER ALWAYS WINS:
Collaborating with Nature for a More Resilient Future
by Erica Gies
University of Chicago Press, 2022

WATER ALWAYS WINS makes clear that we need to fundamentally rethink our relationship with water. We must embrace the reality that we are an integral part of nature and need learn to live in harmony with these forces that we cannot conquer. This requires humility, not arrogance; collaboration, not aggressive control and setting a goal, which is to determine what water wants and figure out a how to make way for it, while protecting and securing our lives. The overarching theme is that such a mindset is essential in all our dealings with every aspect of nature, if we want our planet to survive. As Erica Gies so beautifully states, water is life, it “flexes with the rhythms of the earth, expanding and retreating in an eternal dance upon the land.”
WATER ALWAYS WINS follows the scientists and engineers who are recovering this lost knowledge and also new understanding of water and then finding ways to let water be water, a kind of un-engineering that reclaims space for water to stall on the land for cleaning, capture, and storage – a “slow water” ethic with many of the same attributes as the slow food movement. WATER ALWAYS WINS takes us along on this great journey, from Peru, where scientists are restoring a 1,500-year-old aqueduct system created by a pre-Incan civilization to Chennai, India, where the technology of ancient Dravidian temple tanks is being introduced to control flooding to San Francisco, where urban planners are mapping the original “ghost” waterways under the city to find improved methods of water management. Animal researchers are studying the ways creatures from beavers (who built a continuous dam twice as long as the Hoover dam) to elephants naturally “engineer” water systems that renew and replenish the land.
This is a riveting and eye-opening “big idea” book that will do for water what The Hidden Life of Trees did for forests or what The Sixth Extinction did for animal genocide.

Erica Gies is the perfect person to write this book. She is an independent journalist who writes about water, climate policy, urban planning, plants and animals for Scientific American, Nature, The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, The Economist, with a proven track record of bringing science alive for the general public. Erica has appeared on NPR’s Science Friday and they are eager to have her on when the book comes out. She holds a master’s degree in literature with a focus in eco-criticism, which brings a wide-angle, narrative lens to her science reporting.

DIGITALE BALANCE de Christoph Koch

Less smartphone – more life!

DIGITALE BALANCE
(Digital Balance)
by Christoph Koch
Heyne/PRH Germany, March 2021

The smartphone. How could a small device have become so life-defining so quickly? Can we change this situation without having to do without too many things? Christoph Koch says, yes, we can. For many years he has been dealing with the topics of internet abstinence and online addiction. With scientifically supported findings, he explains what is behind all this. Why are apps so addicting? What is happening in the brain? Why is almost no one resistant to it? Which business models are based on this? And what do experts say? Koch’s 30-day challenge shows why it is worth reducing online consumption and how one can benefit both physically and mentally through a more aware interaction with digital media. Motivating, entertaining, easy to implement – a guide for creating a digital balance.

Christoph Koch, born in 1974, is a journalist for many respected news-papers and periodicals. Some years ago his book I Am Offline: Life without a Smartphone was many weeks on the Spiegel bestseller list. Since then he has given countless lectures on the topic of internet abstinence and online addiction, and holds interviews in radio, print, and television. Considered a digitalisation expert, he speaks at conferences and is welcome guest in podium discussions. He has received various awards for his journalistic work.