What Einstein Told His Cook

What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained
© 2002  Richard Wolke
369 pages

What did Einstein tell his cook?  ..I still don’t know. I have learned, however, that it is possible to make a jello out of champagne;  that concrete sidewalks, even during  a Houston summer,  are unlikely to warm up to the precise temperature needed to fry an egg;    why bottled Coca-Colas can go flat, despite being sealed (the plastic allows Co2 to escape);  and why carmelized onions are called that when they’re fried into delicious brownness.  What Einstein Told His Cook consists wholly of question-and-answer, the question being those lobbed at the author.    The format reminded me strongly of Ask a Science Teacher, but with an adult audience.  In that book, the Q and A was relieved every so often with DYI science experiments; here, variety is added with interesting recipes, including one for champagne jello.  The author brings a strong sense of humor to the table, and is writing for a completely lay audience - -though he does have more technical explanations in parentheses, for readers who have a little more background reading pop science books.   Although not as substantive as I’d hoped,  What Einstein Told His Cook is nonetheless completely entertaining, and there’s more than enough chemistry here to make it a serious read, too.  There is an book on the complete science of booking, but it’s a thousand page mammoth called The Food Lab. I didn'’t know it existed until it appeared on a friend of mine’s wedding registry.  

Dinosaurs, India, and the smartphone

We in the United States  recently enjoyed a three-day weekend, ostensibly for the purpose of honoring fallen soldiers, though I suspect for most it's just an occasion to shop and cook out before the summer heat becomes unbearable.  I took advantage of the time off to read a few books:  India Connected, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, and Change Agent, the latter of which has been  reviewed already.   A few more novels are in the offing, including Trouble is my Business (Raymond Chandler), Kill Decision (Suarez), Altered Carbon, and Limited Wish, the sequel to One World Kill.

First, the dinosaurs: as its title indicates, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is a complete-as-possible history of our Saurian predecessors that focuses special attention on why and how they became such supersized creatures, as well as the demise of most of their kind.  I say most because Brusatte argues that birds did not evolve from dinosaurs, but are literally dinosaurs.   The development of feathers and particularly wings is addressed. The author believes wings first developed for display purpose, and feathers for insulation.   Although remains of feathers have not been found with any T-Rex fossils,  other tyrannosaurs (from small to large)  were feathered, so it's a fair bet that Rex was as well.

Next up,  India Connected. Global civilization is in the midst of change driven by the smartphone,  but nowhere does it have more explosive potential than in India.   The world’s largest democracy may be increasingly wealthy, but many millions of its people remain illiterate and impoverished.   Enter the smartphone, increasingly affordable even to the poorest.  Apps allow the rural villager to teach himself to read; they allow women  freedom to obtain information and look for opportunities for education, employment, and romance that would be otherwise warded away from them;  they allow those who can already read to learn new skills, like English and coding,   and they make it easier for people and India's vast democracy to function.   (And then there's dating..) 

A Forest in the Clouds

A Forest in the Clouds
© 2018 John Fowler
336 pages

John Fowler’s A Forest in the Clouds is his account of studying gorillas alongside famous naturalist Dian Fossey.   Although I picked it up for the gorillas (as one would), the memoir is overwhelmed by Fossey, who by Fowler’s account was an astonishingly eccentric and belligerent woman who viewed the science lab as a necessary evil to allow her to live on the mountain near the wildlife she loved.  Fowler presents Fossey as a  mercurial  control freak who regarded any gathering of students as a potential mutiny and waged a private war against local poachers.  Fowler contends that Fossey had little use for most people, especially the locals who she constantly verbally abused (employing both sounds imitating the gorillas and a polyglot mishmash of profanities to do so), and the amount of time readers spend in this unpleasant company does not make for an enjoyable  book. The narrative is easy to read, but the poor gorillas are nearly relegated to the background;  Fowler writes about what they’re doing often enough, but there’s little to learn about them here, besides the fact that their noses can be used like fingerprints, and they have no qualms about peeing all over a human they’re affectionately holding on to.  I’ve never read anything else about Fossey, so I don’t know if Fowler’s memory is perfect or exaggerating Fosser any. I’ll say this, though: my attempt to find background info on the African setting let me to this stunning photo.

The Big Ones

The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do About Them)
© 2018 Lucy Jones
256 pages

Earth is not a peaceful place; even it were stripped of all life, it would still teem with energy, from vast tectonic plates below, to the rolling seas and fantastic lightening storms above.  Much of that energy is put to use by human ingenuity, but sometimes it lashes out in displays that destroy hundreds or thousands of lives and undermine what we've built. The Big One reviews some of the greatest recorded disasters to strike human civilization, mixing science and history, and closes with some general advice  to the public on how to think about disaster preparation and emergency management.

Jones' background is in seismology, so it's probably no surprise that most of the disasters chronicled here are earthquakes. But disasters that  make history -- the 'big ones' that people remember  -- are rarely by themselves. The great San Francisco earthquake, for instance, did great direct damage, but its greatest impact was the fires it helped create and feed.  Likewise, for the Fukushima affair; the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan were formidable in themselves, but they compromised and accelerated the demise of a nuclear reactor and led to an altogether different kind.  The most recent 'big ones' covered in this book are the Christmas 2004 tsunami that affected sixteen countries and killed nearly three hundred thousand people, and the Fukushima event.  There are some here which have nearly no name recognition (like the massive earthquake that struck immediately after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution in China, and some I've seen mentioned in other books, like the earthquake and fire that destroyed over eighty percent of Lisbon in 1755. 

In addition to discussing the science behind disasters -- why they happened, what specific forces are causing various calamities, why some earthquakes are more disastrous than others  -- Jones also addresses the long-term effects of these disasters when possible. The timing of the Lisbon earthquake -- on All Saint's Day, during the morning when all the churches were full of faithful parishioners celebrating the memory of saints present and pass --  could not have been better timed for mass death, and it shook the faith of many, just as the Holocaust would centuries later.   Japan and China's traditional way of explaining disasters, as distortions of yin and yang, would be challenged by "big ones' during the dawn of modernity as well.  The disasters around the Mississippi -- a great flood and then Katrina -- also  bring up a discussion of race, and the US government's first forays into federal emergency management. Jones defends FEMA during Katrina, however, arguing that the great failures there happened on the ground, as both the city and state officials were not communicating with one another or with FEMA enough to be at all effective.   In one of the few non-earthquake examples,  Jones points to greater international information-sharing as a result of the 2004 tsunami.   (Which...was triggered by an earthquake. We're really never far removed from that!)

All said, this is an interesting history of how  a few earthquakes have altered nations' responses to disaster response, driving the desire to learn about them and find realistic politics to cope with the aftermath -- topped with advice to citizens at the end that's a little generic ("Educate yourself"). It's not as wide-ranging as I'd hoped, since most of the disasters were earthquakes, but keeping this subject in mind is good for any citizen today. Future disasters will effect proportionally more people, as the global population swells and concentrates, and as the globe becomes fully industrialized we will have more distortive effects on the environment.  Emergency awareness and management should be near to the forefront not just for citizens, but for every level of government.

The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe

The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake
© 2018 Dr. Steven Novella, Bob Novella,  Cara Santa Maria, Jay Novella, and Evan Burnstein
512 pages

...wow.  Okay, so...back in 2006 I found a weekly podcast that was so consistently good that, even on a dial-up connection,  I had no problem spending four or five hours every week downloading it, just for an hour of content. It was The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, hosted by several brothers and a couple of friends, sharing science, skeptic, and tech news, playing games, etc.  It often featured scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins as interviewees,  and was for a long time my absolute favorite podcast.   I still listen to it on a regular basis thirteen years later, and I never had any doubt that I'd buy and read this book.  However, I didn't.  Instead, I discovered that there was an audible version.....featuring the primary host of the show, Steven Novella.    So I listened to SGU Audible, instead, and -- well, it was delightful, and even opens with the SGU theme music.  Here's the short version: The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is the best guide to critical thinking since Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World, and even surpasses Sagan as far as depth of content goes.  If you're a regular listener of SGU, there's added appeal is not only choice of narrator, but the fact that it ends with the entire SGU panel talking about the podcast and the creation of the book.

When this book calls itself "The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe", it's not kidding. This is not a one-off work to take advantage of the podcast's popularity, filled with little more than transcripts of old interviews. It's a fat ol' book, with a table of contents that runs three pages. It opens with core concepts that everyone should keep in mind, moves to logical fallacies and the like,   tackles pseudoscience both historical and contemporary,  addresses the media and Hollywood, and -- by way of ending -- dips into the grim results of persistent irrationality before offering ways to change ourselves and the world. Make no mistake: the target of this Skeptic's Guide is the reader, and that's obvious from the very beginning when Novella addresses the frailty of memory, as well as other mental snags like our  hyperactive pattern recognition.  The skeptical "rogues" as they term themselves are no strangers to mistakes, as Novella shares later on;  we all have blind spots. I was also taken with the section on trying to communicate with people; one tactic Novella suggests is finding common ground between the skeptic (on a particular issue) and the believer, or something they both disbelieve in -- and trying to find a connection from there.  The focus of Novella and company is to find a path to the truth, not prove oneself's right.

As much as I enjoyed listening to a familiar voice for nigh sixteen hours, framed by familiar music, given the sheer amount of content I find myself wishing now I had read the physical book. For one thing, it's harder to take notes on an audio book, especially when you're out doing laps or playing Civilization III. (I was playing Civ3 more often than doing laps, alas.) I'm going to keep my eyes open for a used copy and possibly revisit this one. It's an excellent resource as well as a fun read, and the panel discussion at the end of the audiobook indicated there are more books on the way.  I'm eagerly anticipating them!

Heavens on Earth

Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia
pub. 2018 Michael Shermer
320 pages

Alone among the animals, human beings live in the knowing shadow of our own mortality.  It is rarely a specter which is embraced,  and escaping death has attracted more than its share of brainpower and creative force. In Heavens on Earth, Michael Shermer appraises religious, scientific, and somewhere-in-between attempts to deny the boatman his due.  Although winsomely varied and compassionately delivered,  Shermer's latest could have delivered more.

Although Heavens on Earth opens with a chapter on religious views of the afterlife,   the real heart of this book is what lays beyond. Obviously, the founder of Skeptic magazine won't be embracing ideas of heaven and hell, or reincarnation for that matter.  What attracted me to this book was the fact that Shermer also addresses scientific and political attempts to dodge mortality --  scientific, in the form of cyrogenics and transhumanism, and political in the form of creating utopias.  Although many people have had themselves frozen in time, in the hopes that one day a way to restore them to life without destroying their tissues will be invented,  that hasn't surfaced yet.   Anti-aging cures, too, are not just around the corner. Aging, like cancer, doesn't have one cause:  it's a collective name given to several things happening at once. Shermer doesn't believe human life can be extended realistically beyond 125-150 years.  (Not mentioned is the fact that even if we replace most of our innards with synthetic organs, we still can't stop our minds from going.)  Also covered in the scientific section are attempts to copy the mind digitally, and then recreate it -- but even we had the capacity to copy a mind in full (and the psychologist Shermer does not believe we do, given the sheer complexity of neural networks),  re-creating an active intelligence from that copy wouldn't preserve the original life.  It would create a new one, effectively.

The last section addresses utopias, and it is here that Shermer misses a step by only examining one family of utopian experiences in full, those associated with neo-tribal Nazism.   Guessing the reason why isn't difficult, as Shermer alludes to an uptick in neo-tribalism in the present day,  and covers the alt-right by name.  Connecting utopias to immortality is a bit of a stretch, but if one buys into a tribal or group identity strongly enough, then its story envelops one's own, and individual mortality is forgotten. It's well and good to point to the dangers of national socialism, but communism should have been included as well: it is equally utopian, and far more murderous historically speaking.  He may have also been influenced by a quoted review from George Orwell, who spoke to the lure of Nazism: while other worldviews promised comfort and hedonic pleasures, Nazism offered the invigoration of 'struggle, danger, and death'.  The human need for challenge is one Shermer revisits.

Ultimately, Shermer concludes, the only real answer to defeating the fear of death is to embrace life, and to make the most of what which we have. If you've ever taken to Star Trek, what Shermer suggests won't be surprising -- a life emphasizing connections to family, friends, and a political community, with individual goal, a little room for contemplation, and a decided place for awe of the cosmos.

She Has Her Mother's Laugh

She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity
© 2018 Carl Zimmer
672 pages

Overhearing discussion of heredity a few hundred years ago would have meant only one thing:  being in the presence of noblemen, who stood to inherit their fathers' titles, lands, rights, and responsibilities.  Heredity quickly became a scientific concept,  and is now more commonly associated with biology than law, but genes aren't all we inherit. She Has Her Mother's Laugh is a meaty exploration of the history and present tracking of inheritance, genetic and otherwise.

Much of the book is a history of attempts to figure out heridity, beginning with mental impairment and the suspicion that it was something which could be passed down from generation to generation. This came of age when interest in biological inheritance was white-hot: Darwin and Huxley were at work, and various animal fanciers were creating ever-more elaborate breeds of pigeons and the like by monitoring traits from generation to generation and promoting the birth of different  variants.  It wasn't at all difficult for people to decide that imbecility was a distinct trait which could be controlled against, if all its present carriers were prevented from reproducing. This 'effort' was initially conceived as sterilization, but in the 1940s those efforts took on ghastly and murderous proportions Hitler's regime.

Aside from the outstandingly massive moral problems of controlling other people, including their ability to beget life,  there's also the scientific problem that "imbecility" is not one thing, created  by one trait. Mental impairments are diverse, and stem from all manner of biological hiccoughs. Many people in the Victorian age who were 'imbeciles' merely suffered from a metabolic disruption: they were unable to process a substance common in foodstuffs, and ingesting it slowly poisoned them, giving their skin an odd hue and eroding their mental faculties.  Children who were diagnosed early with this syndrome could be put on an appropriate diet, and be perfectly healthy members of society. Biology is chemistry in action, but the genes aren't the only chemicals in the solutions: they're constantly interacting with the substances of their mother's body, or the outside environment. Even if eugenicists had won, we would still have sick and infirm people, because there are so many variables. 

Other 'inheritance' issues are similarly problematic.  Take race, for instance; the human eye might look at a Norwegian, a Nigerian, and a Chinese citizen and declare them to be three obviously different kinds of people, but if that same eye were to look at their genes it would be unable to tell much of a difference beyond ordinary individual distinctions. Humans, for all our passionate in-grouping and out-grouping,  are far more alike than we are different -- biologically.  That doesn't mean our in-grouping and out-going is irrelevant; it  probably won't ever go away, because crucial to understanding human inheritance is realizing we are fundamentally cultural creatures. We don't come out of the womb sniffing wine and venturing opinions about the ballet, but we're as hungry for teaching as we are for food. When compared to chimpanzee juveniles, human youths are far more imitative.   Heredity cannot only apply to genes, or even biology (we also inherit bacteria from our parents):  it has to apply to culture, as well,

Zimmer also includes a chapter on CRISPR, and the admittedly scary potential that puts in our hands. Yes, we can eradicate genetic disease. We  can also turn our children into gross experiments, tinkering with their bodies to produce barbies or ubermensch. Society needs to think long and hard about the implications.

She Has Her Mother's Laugh is a steak of a book, of obvious interest to anyone with an appetite for human biology.

Some of my highlights:
"In Morgan’s own research on flies, he had learned to respect the power of the environment. His students discovered one strain of flies that developed normally if they were born in the summer but tended to sprout extra legs if they were born in the winter. It turned out that the researchers could get the same outcomes in their lab simply by changing the temperature in which they reared the fly eggs. It was thus meaningless to talk about the effect of their mutation without taking into account their environment."

“It was my child who taught me to understand so clearly all people are equal in their humanity and that all have the same human rights,” Pearl [Buck] wrote. “Though the mind has gone away, though he cannot speak or communicate with anyone, the human stuff is there, and he belongs to the human family.”

"To eliminate imperfection would demand eliminating humanity itself."

"We were three people of African, Asian, and European descent from three corners of the world. Three races, some might say. And yet we shared far more than what set us apart."

"Textbooks say that the human body has about two hundred cell types, but recent studies have rendered that figure a laughable understatement. No one can say how many cell types there are, because the more scientists examine cells the more they break down into more typed. Immune cells may all carry out the same mission to save us from pathogens and cancer, but they are an army with hundreds of divisions. All our cell types are seperate branches on the body's genealogical tree, like rival dynasties descended from a first monarch."

Seeing Further

Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery, and the Genius of the Royal Society
© 2010 Bill Bryson
512 pages

Although Bill Bryson is  chiefly known for his humorous travelogues, he has been known to venture into other nonfiction at times, and in fact the first science book I ever read for fun outside of high school was his A Short History of Nearly Everything.   I wasn’t too surprised, then, to see his name on a history of the Royal Society.  What did come as a surprise was the tenor of the contents, because Bryson was the editor here rather than the author, and the contributing scientists deliver a far more thoughtful history than I’d anticipated, one that’s almost introspective.  Rather than a straightforward chronicle of discoveries made and lines of thought pursued year by year,  the essays are more  thematic, emphasizing  through moments and movements  the evolution of natural philosophy and the development of a distinct discipline which rebuilt the world. (The history of the Royal Society itself appears at the beginning of the book, then the individuals and their contributions take over.  One of the earliest essays, dwelling on the rise of scientific materialism,  argues that the greatest disruption to traditional thought was the idea that the entire cosmos was made of the same material thing, that the stars had fallen from a heavenly realm and were instead pedestrian, subject to the same laws as apples and the dead leaves of autumn. In the monist world, where was the otherworldly?  Another explores the tension between logic-driven natural philosophers and experiential ones in the late medieval period, whose work would eventually dovetail together. It’s not all introspection, as chapters on the important of mathematics (undergirding science) and engineering (applying science) bring us out of the clouds and closer to earth.  

Science Report Card 2018

The last couple of years I've imposed a little order on my science reading, forcing myself to read across fields more deliberately; so far I've enjoyed it and will continue the structure in the future. I just finished the last entry on the list, Seeing Further, and will be posting comments in the next few days.  I'm in good shape to start next year's,  as I already have four titles waiting to be read and ideas for several others.

Cosmology and Astrophysics
Hubble: Window on the Universe, Gwyneth Snow. I didn't give full comments on this one because it's mostly exceptional for its bounty of full-page photos from the Hubble telescope. The contents are the sort of thing you'd read in a book version of Sagan's Cosmos: the lifespans of stars, the structure of galaxies, and the ins and outs of our local neighborhood.

Local Astronomy
First Light, Richard Preston. This was...also one I didn't comment on, partially because it was weird.  Centered on the Hale telescope in the Palomar mountains, its story of scientific research often pretends to be a novel and switches back and forth between decades.  It wasn't an approach that proved winning for me.

Geology
The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions, Peter Brannen.

Chemistry and Physics
Stuff Matters:  Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World, Mark Miodownik. Fun microhistory.

Biology
Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ, Giulia Enders

Flora and Fauna
The Truth About Nature,  Stacey Torno and Ken Keller

Anthropology
The Invaders: How Humans and their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction, Pat Shipman

Neurology and Psychology
This Is Your Brain on Parasites,  Kathleen McAuliffe

Weather and Climate
The Water Will Come:  Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World, Jeff Goodell

History of Science
Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society,  edited by Bill Bryson

Science and Society
A Crack In Creation:  Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution,  Jennifer Doudna

Thinking Scientifically
50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True,  Guy  Harrison

The Ends of the World

The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions
© 2017 Peter Brannen
336 pages

Earth has tried to kill us five times before, and now it's at it again. (To be fair, we're kind of egging it on.)   The Ends of the World is a long natural history of life on Earth which examines five mass extinctions, period in which the majority of life was destroyed. Each time it rebounded as the Earth itself continued to grow, supercontinents forming and breaking up, the air and oceans altering in their chemistry. Although direct causes of species-death vary by incident,   and are sometimes so numerous that it's rather like the murder suspects on Agatha  Christie's Orient Express,   climate is a crucial factor in each one. Specifically, author argues that as carbon dioxide goes, so goes the planet.

We live in a moment in time -- a period when the Earth is rather comfortable for our species and those we rely on.  That wasn't the case for most of Earth's history; oxygen took at least a billion years to arrive, and land-based plants themselves are relatively recent arrivals, appearing 700 million years ago at the earliest.  Even once Earth began to look familiar --  familiar continents, trees,  rabbits, etc -- it wasn't settled    There are geological cycles  -- shifts between glacial and tropical epochs, for for instance -- at work.   Other cycles involve carbon as it travels between land, sea, and air, and this is a cycle that can play hell with life if it gets out of kilter and...oh, turns the Earth into a hothouse, or acidifies the ocean and kills everything there.  And then there's vulcanism -- not only do mass eruptions offload unwieldy tons of CO2 at once, but sometimes they cover areas the size of the United States or Russia in  two mile-deep tide of lava.   Even a prepper with a bulging bug-out bag and a remote hideout would be hard pressed to come back from that.

Geological forces are usually slow and ponderous -- glacial.  But slow forces building up can reach a threshold where everything goes sideways all at once, a catastrophic quantum leap. Think of an earthquake, and the slow-but-accumulating stresses that build up between tectonic plates until they finally slip and a city is reduced to rubble in seconds. Brannen believes this happens with atmospheric and oceanic chemistry, too.   Even when the cause of an extinction seems outside, unavoidable, and sudden -- like the asteroid impact that has the primary credit for killing the dinosaurs,  the climate can't be ignored. The chapter on the K-T extinction argues that the asteroid collision wasn't responsible for the mass extinction on its own: while it would have  done an enormous amount of local damage,  its real contribution was to cause so much tectonic distress that mass volcanic eruptions and outgassing crippled the atmosphere.

If you have anticipated that the book ends with a few pointed remarks about global warming and the present state of the carbon cycle, well -- you're on the mark. Brannen dedicates the last section of the book debating the 'sixth extinction', and humanity's role in clearing the earth of megafauna and challenging the old super-volcanoes in terms of how much gas can be pumped into the atmosphere.   The debate covered shies away from putting the human-induced extinctions of many species into the category of these documented five.  The five are judged to have been global events, near-complete ecosystem collapses: the only survivors were in weird niches, ecological islands. (Or perhaps on literal islands.) While humans have deliberately killed many species and accidentally obliterated more, we've also repopulated the Earth with species under our control: cattle, oxen, sheep,  the like.  Ecosystems have been formed and sometimes destroyed, but we're not facing  imminent and global collapse.    Even so ,the  author argues, the role of the carbon cycle in previous mass extinctions should be foremost in our mind, because it's not just a matter of rising seas.  Ocean acidification from CO2 absorption  is the "other" carbon problem, compromising as it does submarine ecosystems like those centered on coral reefs. (This "other" problem comes up a few times in another science/nature book I'm reading, Lost Antarctica.)


Although it's a little odd to describe a book recording the near-total loss of life on Earth not one but five times as 'fun',, Ends of the World kind of is,  a morbid Planet Earth.  I particularly appreciated being able to sit in on debates in the last two chapters, as Brennan interviews various scientists who are contending (politely) with one another for the most accurate and factually-supported theory..  Ends of the World may expose many readers to the carbon cycle, something I've heard little about,  and there's nothing quite like mile-deep sheets of lava rolling over continents to pique the imagination!

A Crack in Creation

A Crack in Creation:  Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution
© 2017 Jennifer Doudna and Sam Sternberg

"No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain, we can change ourselves. Think of the possibilities." - Carl Sagan

A few years ago I tuned into the middle of a science-news podcast and encountered a panel of otherwise sensible people caught up in an enthusiastic conversation about...crisper? Crisper drawers?  I'd missed something.

What I'd missed was a story about CRISPR, a gene-editing tool with enormous and explosive potential for  medicine and agriculture.  The outgrowth of attempts to use bacteria as microsurgeons,  CRISPR allows for fine-tuned genetic manipulation with reproducable results.  The first half of A Crack in Creation delivers the story of how CRISPR as a tool was discovered, and this history of scientific investigation is followed by the author's thoughts on the implications. While optimistic about the tool's applications for agriculture and medicine,   she admits that the potential for abuse in modifying the human genome itself is high.

Humans have been manipulating domesticated populations' genomes for millennia, of course, but with clumsier methods:   finding animals with expressed traits we favor, and breeding them while taking the rest home to cook.  We have toyed with forcing mutations with chemical and radioactive agents, but the results thereof are unpredictable.  Now,  nearly two decades into the 21st century,  we have the ability to make fine-tuned adjustments, with applications both serious and trivial.  An internal biological weapon used to disarm viruses  and effect cellular repair can instead be used as a tool to remove  and supply whatever genes we desire.

  We've already created mosquito populations which have been stripped of the ability to propagate malaria, and -- depending on trials and the weight of government oversight --  may use pigs to grow human organs for use in transplants.   As Doudna warns, however,   modifying humans -- modifying ourselves -- takes us into an area fraught with ethical quandaries.    She speculates that we may wish to discriminate between germ cells (sperm and egg cells, which would be capable of reproducing whatever edits we make) and somatic cells, which constitute the rest of the body.  Unless, of course, eugenics makes a comeback and we decide to create a race of supermen, a la Khan Noonian Singh. Then, germ cells would be fair game. (Okay, the bit about Khan is just me. As one of the principle discoverers of CRISPR, Doudna is seriously concerned about the ethical implications, to the point that she's had a literal dream about Hitler contacting her with an interest in learning how to use CRISPR.)

Although I'm still trying to understand the mechanics of it (as much as I like biology, genetics is a definite weak point for me),  the potential for this excites me. Medicine is going to go very interesting places in the decades to come.

Of Neanderthals and dogs and extinction level events

Time for science short rounds!

Last week I read The Invaders,  a much-anticipated work about how dogs gave humans a competitive edge over their neanderthal cousins. This brief book posits that human beings function like invasive species, and after establishing a few housekeeping facts (the background of climate change, the available evidence for judging human / neanderthal populations and their diets) argues that humans and Neanderthals were competing for the same space in some regions of the globe, rather like wolves and coyotes, and that humans drove neanderthals out because of their advanced tool usage and domestication of wolves. While Neanderthals did use tools and traps, discovered tools to date suggest that the Neanderthals were more ambush predators, hiding and taking their quarry in close quarters. We sapiens used more ranged weapons like thrown spears. The wolf-dogs enter the book's argument relatively late in the game (~ 50 pages from the book's end), so this is chiefly a work about sapiens v neanderthal competition is therefore a book more of interest to those curious about ancestral man than his ancestral best friend.

Additionally, I finished listening to What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Questions, penned by the author of XKCD and read by Wil Wheaton. If you've never encountered XKCD before, you probably don't spend a lot of time on the internet.  It's a webcomic of "romance,sarcasm, math, and language."   I can't vouch for the romance bit, but science and math humor are a constant.  That's the same of What If? in which the author uses his legit-science background to respond to outlandish questions submitted to his website. What if the Earth suddenly stopped rotating? What if we could drain the oceans? What if everyone was gathered in one spot and jumped at the same time?  Although none of these scenarios are remotely possible,  Munroe disregards this and puts math -- and humor -- to work  exploring the possibilities.  Naturally,  geek references abound. (River Tam of Firefly is consistently quoted as an expert on how fast it takes to drain a human body of all its blood, assuming adequate suction). Wil Wheaton is golden in his delivery, barely hiding his humor at times when Munroe's writing is tongue in cheek. There's an entire chapter on the positive effects of the sun  suddenly not working.   If you're into science, What If? is great fun. 

50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True

50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True
© 2011 Guy Harrison
458 pages

"Just because it's vivid, detailed, and expressed with confidence and emotion...doesn't mean it's true."


Chances are you know someone who harbors what you know to be irrational beliefs, and chances are they hold the same opinion about you. It isn't easy to stay sober with a monkey brain trying to impose order on the chaos of life,  sometimes mesmerizing itself with its own fiction.  50 Popular Beliefs consists of an introduction, fifty brief essays debunking various icons of culture from ghosts to horoscopes, and a conclusion.  Those who count themselves skeptics already will find no surprises, and should not anticipate anything that will add greatly to their own knowledge, like The Demon Haunted World or Why People Believe Weird Things. This is straightforward debunking, along with some information on how we are so easy to fool -- especially when we're fooling ourselves. The ideal audience is people who regard themselves as well-informed and appropriately skeptical, but who are exposed to some ideas so often that they're wanting confirmation that yes, horoscopes really are BS.

While many of the essays address areas of constant skeptic scorn -- astrology, homeopathy, ancient aliens, Area 51,  Holocaust denial --  Guy Harrison also covers matters that aren't low-hanging fruit, like the value of television and the dimensions of race. He explores race as a concept, then some stereotypes about it in regards to sports and intelligence. The pieces have a strong personal flavor, as Harrison uses his own experiences to try to understand those of others, and he attempts to experiment directly when he can. For instance, in the chapter on psychics he successfully cold-reads someone, and in the chapter on faith healing he attends a Benny Hinn performance. The pieces are sometimes too short to do their topic service, which I think will expose them to "what about" rebuttals as believers present similar convictions from a slightly different angle  Not every article has the same length, however;  Harrison is partcularly passionate about the veracity of the Moon landings and that essays goes on for a bit rebutting the various arguments for their being a fraud.

The most valuable part of 50 Beliefs, personally, are its resources for extended reading. I saw more than a few titles in here which I'd either long forgotten about or had never heard of at all.  Harrison has written more in this genre, but I'm more interested in Brian Dunning's new book dissecting conspiracies or The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe's  October release of a book using their name.

Stuff Matters

Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World
© 2014 Mark Miodownik
272 pages

Stuff Matters begins with a photo of the authorhaving coffee on the roof of his London flat, the table before him scattered with papers and the unremarkable clutter of everyday life.  That clutter, however, is composed of stuff that makes modern life unimaginable without it.  Stuff Matters scrutinizes each object in turn, and is thus a bundle of microhistories with  strong scientific undercurrent.  Mark Miodownik combines a history of how a material like porcelain came into being with an analysis of why they work -- why glass is transparent, why stainless steel can effectively repair itself,  how prosthetics can fool the body into thinking they're just part of the gang.  Miodownik often adds a personal touch, as he has a genuine obsession with materials science: if he's stabbed or thrown through a window, his first thoughts are about the feel and wonder of the materials he's passing through (or which are passing through him).   He would share Carl Sagan's conviction that the beauty of a living thing -- in Miodownik's case, just a thing -- is not the atoms that go into it, but the way they're put together.  After all, diamonds and graphite have the same atomic core, being made of pure carbon, but they're fundamentally different substances because of the way their carbon atoms are connected. 

Encompassing Flagstaff: Atop Mars' Hill

Overlooking the fair city of Flagstaff is Lowell Observatory, perched atop Mars Hill.  The founder of the Observatory, Percival Lowell, believed based on changing observations of the planet, that it was occupied by a technologically adept civilization, one which had established canals to route water from its own ice caps to fields further away.  He was a wealthy mathematician turned diplomat who had the means to establish his own private observatory, and needed a place which was dry, dark, and high. Flagstaff was ideal.  The inspiring early observations of Mars later proved problematic and the conclusion wholly wrong, but the Observatory has done great work over the years since 1894.. It was featured in Carl Sagan's Cosmos,  as the place where Vesto Slipher discovered that galaxies were moving (and more quickly with their distance from Earth),  as well as the site of Pluto's own discovery.   The observatory still does scientific work at its dark-skies campuses further from town, but the original site is by no means retired. Instead, it focuses on public education; I was there for four hours listening to lectures and using telescopes to look at solar flares and the stars.  I also got to see the original Clark telescope, though it wasn't available for viewing the night I was there. Sometimes the public can look through it, however.

The Clark Telescope, with a dome originally constructed by local bicycle repairmen. 

The Clark. Spectroscopy was invented using equipment attached to this telescope. 

The "Pluto Walk",  which begins with the Sun and ends at the telescope which discovered Pluto. Between them, signs for the other planets are sprinkled by scale. 

Alas, I missed the Pluto tour, so  I didn't get to see inside.

This is...not a telescope. It was the original library, now used as the multimedia room or lecture hall. The acoustics are interesting, in that you can hear a pin drop like it's a fifty-pound weight, conversations from one spot of the room can be heard or not heard in other spots of the room willy-nilly, and if you stand in the right spot you can hear Percival Lowell whispering that there was water on Mars, so hah HAH.

One arc, showing off what's left of the stacks above.

Now that's what I call a cherry ride. Percival Lowell's old wheels are still used in Christmas parades.

Also not an telescope this is Percival Lowell's mausoleum. I guess on his deathbed he really did wish he'd spent more time at the office. 

Still to come: meteors, painted deserts, petrified trees, and the Canyon.

This Is Your Brain on Parasites

This is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Brains and Shape Society
© 2016 Kathleen McAuliffe
299 pages

Are you under the influence?  There’s a chance that you may be, even if you haven’t darkened the door of a bar in years. Our bodies are home to a multitude of microbes,  many of them allies of a sort:  in exchange for a moist roof over their heads, they help us digest food, or take up space that would otherwise be available to the disease-causing riff-raff.  Other,s however, are the riff-riff, and they can exert a bad influence on those who let them hang around.  By and large we’re familiar with bacteria that can cause disease, but there are microbes which have more subtle effects --  seemingly causing shifts in our mood, our metabolism, and our ability to think and process information. This is Your Brain on Parasites argues for a parasite-centered perspective on health and evolution,  told in four parts.    She opens by establishing the ubiquity and variety of microbes,  moves to demonstrating how some species can directly manipulate other species’ behavior,  argues that human beings’ mental/emotional state can be likewise influenced by microbes, and finally argues that much of human civilization is indirectly driven by parasites in that an obsession with cleanliness has driven us to create religions, laws, etc.

Whew! That’s a lot to take in in one book. The first two sections are paths well traveled, from 10% Human to Gut. The second section addresses an utterly fascinating aspect of nature, the ability of some species to manipulate others. The creatures documented here aren’t all microbes: parasitic wasps show up hijacking spiders and roaches and putting them to work, the first as a shelter-creator and the second as a beefsteak on the hoof.  The mechanisms for manipulation are not always known. Microbes aren’t comic book villains with glowing towers: they do their work with secretions of chemicals,  sometimes using our own bodies to produce it for them.  By subtle means can one parasite prompt grasshoppers to move en masse toward bodies of water, drowning themselves  Part of the difficulty of studying parasites is that their manipulation of one host is only one part of their life stage, and they usually have a series of hosts to go through to get back to where they can spawn. One parasite common to humans arrives  in the intestines, matures, works its way to the exit, raises hell to make us itchy, and then relies on a probing finger scratching the itch to carry their young out into the world to restart the cycle.  That’s more indirect manipulation, but the author also includes cases in which the presence of certain bacteria are strongly correlated with instances of depression, and others with dangerous, near-deadly behavior.

The last part, attributing everything from sanitation to religion to racism on human attempts to ward off parasites, is...interesting, but an example of how specialists in one field tend to view everything from their particular angle.   The fact that religious dietary laws often barred the very species which carry the most risk for internal parasites is insightful, but  human culture and evolution are rivers fed by many streams. Attributing the motherload to parasites, or cooking, or power, usually tells more about the author’s interests than the actual subject.  On the whole, however,  This is Your Brain on Parasites smartly marches through a lot of linked territory and makes itself of interest to general science readers.

Related:

• Parasite Rex, Carl Zimmer. A more in-depth treatment of parasites in general, and an inspiration for this book according to the author.  I read this back in 2008 but that was back in days when I posted one great big wall of text about every book I'd read in that week, and few of the 'reviews' were more than the same kind of abstract you'd find on an Amazon publisher' s description. 
• I Contain Multitudes, Gut, 10% Human. 

Springing forward

At the library I've put out the gardening books, which means it's officially springtime! ...at least, in central Alabama.  I'm still not certain we're past the threat of a sudden frost, but I am looking forward to my annual spring planting, of vegetables that do OK and of flowers that fail completely. (Every year I plant flowers and get green sprouts, but no actual flowers.  Sure, I could buy flowers and plant them, but the joy is watching them grow and..er, flower, not just admiring them after they've done it already.)

Recently I requested a science book on NetGalleys and was promptly sent...a third of it.  The third comes from Soonish:  Ten Emerging Technologies that'll Improve or Ruin Everything,  a bit of futurism/science fusion. The authors are the creators of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and their artwork is part of the text.   The part accessible via NetGalley only covered the falling costs of space travel, the feasibility of space elevators, and the potential if any in mining asteroids. Although the text itself was a nice mix of information and amusing commentary,  I wasn't particularly interested in this section of the book. I wanted to read about 3D printing and advances in medicine, and I got cannons that shot things into space.  It was perfectly entertaining, to the degree that I was interested in such things.  Perhaps one day the full book will be cheap enough for my miserly self to buy it.  Until then I have The Inevitable and Tomorrowland,   one of which should address those subjects.

Gut

Gut: The Inside Story Of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ
© 2015 Giulia Enders
271 pages

Through the teeth, past the gums, look out stomach, here we come! Gut is a tour of your innards, of the surprisingly clean but bustling twists and turns of the digestive system. "Wait a second," say you, "I've had this tour before. Mary Roach did it in Gulp!". Well, yes, and she did take you the entire way -- from the mouth right out the other end, none the worse for the wear. Gut is different, however. The author is a touch more serious, for one thing; while never lacking in humor, she doesn't provide a constant effusion of fart and poop jokes. Enders provides more of a thoughtful study of how the gut impacts us, particularly in our microbiome. This is a mix of Roach's Gulp and I Contain Multitudes: a study of our intestinal habitat and the fauna thereof. I bought this primarily because I was interested in the ways our gut can influence our psychology. I've heard reports of there being neural cells active within the gut, and while there is a chapter on the "vagus nerve", it wasn't as extensive as I hoped. The author conveys the impression that the nerve collects and conveys feelings of general un-ease and distress within the body, providing the brain with its first reports of problems within. More extensive are the chapters on the bacteria within us -- how they change depending on our diet, how they can contribute to our health or diminish it , that sort of thing. This ground was covered more extensively in 10% Human and I Contain Multitudes, but a review of this subject is perfect in a book on the gut: 90% of our bacteria live there, after all.

If you're interested in the digestive system -- and who isn't, really? -- Gut is a quick, fun read that takes its reader more seriously than Gulp, and includes more concrete information from an actual M.D.

Related
10% Human 
I Contain Multitudes 
Gulp 

The Truth about Nature

The Truth About Nature:  A Family's Guide to 144 Myths about the Great Outdoors
©  2014 Stacey Torno and Ken Keller
212 pages

Great news, kids. The tyranny of mom is over: no longer do you have to wait 45 minutes after eating to go swimming. Turns out you can wolf down a hot dog mid-stroke and nary a thing will happen, except for maybe a really soggy hot dog bun. Or...an attack by sea gulls.  That misconception and 143 others are debunked in The Truth about Nature,  which collects misinformation about the natural world passed down from one generation to another, alongside columns like "Strange but True", or facts that seem outrageous but which are really truth -- because that's just how nature rolls. I stumbled upon this book at the library and was immediately attracted by the cover. It's written for juvenile audiences, and is written not just to flush out old information but to sharpen scientific appraisal: the authors often charge the reader with evaluating just how they might find out that a particular information is bunk, prompting them to imagine different possibilities and how they might evaluate them  The collected misconceptions themselves range from folk wisdom ("Moss grows on the north side of trees") to entries that I think were just fudged a bit and thrown in. There's a section on how clouds aren't actually white, as they can also be grey -- and sometimes, oak trees don't have acorns, because it's not the right season.  Well...okay, but that doesn't strike me as a "myth" in the same way that "touching a toad will give you warts" does.  At least one debunked fact -- that rabbits are rodents -- was a surprise to me. Turns out they're lagomorphs. Also, they don't eat carrots, but I kind of figured. They also don't sing opera, or foil the engineering schemes of malevolent coyotes.

While this is intended for younger audiences -- probably late elementary and early middle --  adult readers who are in the mood for some light reading will also find it enjoyable.