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PODCAST

New Books in Science

New Books Network

Interviews with Scientists about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

science natural sciences

All Episodes

59:09

J. Doyne Farmer, "Making Sense of Chaos" (Yale UP, 2024)

New Books in Science ·

2025/09/25

We live in an age of increasing complexity--an era of accelerating technology and global interconnection that holds more promise, and more peril, than any other time in human history. The fossil fuels that have powered global wealth creation now threaten to destroy the world they helped build. Automation and digitization promise prosperity for some, unemployment for others. Financial crises fuel growing inequality, polarization, and the retreat of democracy. At heart, all these problems are rooted

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65:59

Jonas Enander, "Facing Infinity: Black Holes and Our...

New Books in Science ·

2025/09/23

Humanity's relationship with black holes began in 1783 in a small English village, when clergyman John Michell posed a startling question: What if there are objects in space that are so large and heavy that not even light can escape them? Almost 250 years later, in April 2019, scientists presented the first picture of a black hole. Profoundly inspired by that image, physicist Jonas Enander has traveled the world to investigate how our understanding of these elusive celestial objects has evolved

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65:02

Dan Roche, "Eyes by Hand: Prosthetics of Art and...

New Books in Science ·

2025/09/05

Eyes by Hand: Prosthetics of Art and Healing (MIT Press, 2025) is a book about artificial eyes—about the artisans and artists who make them, and about the life-changing and sometimes life-saving experience of wearing them, as author Dan Roche has done for 15 years. Eye making is done by hand, for one person at a time, by a very small number of ocularists (fewer than 200 in the US); it is a slow, intricate, and unusually intimate process of molding, fitting, and painting that brings ocularist and

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38:48

Nick Spencer, "The Landscapes of Science and...

New Books in Science ·

2025/08/24

The relationship between science and religion has long been a heated debate and is becoming an ever more popular topic. The scientific capacity to manipulate and change humans and their environment through genetic engineering, life extension, and AI is going to take a huge leap forward in the twenty-first century, provoking endless debates around humans “playing God”.But what do we mean by this? Asking this question is surprisingly hard work. Attempts to 'essentialise' science, let alone religion,

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50:51

Christopher Kemp, "Dark and Magical Places: The...

New Books in Science ·

2025/08/24

Inside our heads we carry around an infinite and endlessly unfolding map of the world. Navigation is one of the most ancient neural abilities we have―older than language. In Dark and Magical Places: The Neuroscience of Navigation (Norton, 2022), Christopher Kemp embarks on a journey to discover the remarkable extent of what our minds can do. Fueled by his own spatial shortcomings, Kemp describes the brain regions that orient us in space and the specialized neurons that do it. Place cells. Grid

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34:56

Eugene Rosenberg and Ilana Zilber-Rosenberg, "Where...

New Books in Science ·

2025/08/23

In this intimate interview, Mel Rosenberg speaks with Prof. Eugene Rosenberg and his partner in life and in science, Dr. Ilana Zilber-Rosenberg on their new book for the general public on how life started and developed on earth, titled Where Did We Come From? The Origin and Evolution of Life (Austin Macauley, 2025). We talk about their scientific backgrounds individually and together, and how they became involved in evolution and made significant contributions to the field. Learn more about your ad

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55:44

Mario Livio and Jack Szostak, "Is Earth Exceptional?:...

New Books in Science ·

2025/08/21

For a long time, scientists have wondered how life has emerged from inanimate chemistry, and whether Earth is the only place where it exists. Charles Darwin speculated about life on Earth beginning in a warm little pond. Some of his contemporaries believed that life existed on Mars. It once seemed inevitable that the truth would be known by now. It is not. For more than a century, the origins and extent of life have remained shrouded in mystery. But, as Mario Livio and Jack Szostak reveal in Is

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52:29

James Kimmel, Jr., "The Science of Revenge:...

New Books in Science ·

2025/08/14

There is a hidden addiction plaguing humanity right now: revenge. Researchers have identified retaliation in response to real and imagined grievances as the root cause of most forms of human aggression and violence. From vicious tweets to road rage, murder-suicide, and armed insurrection, perpetrators almost always see themselves as victims seeking justice. Chillingly, recent behavioral and neuroimaging studies of the human brain show that harboring a personal grievance triggers revenge desires and

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70:37

Richard Mainwaring, "What the Ear Hears (And...

New Books in Science ·

2025/08/13

What do the world's loneliest whale, a black hole, and twenty-three people doing Tae Bo all have in common?In 2011, a skyscraper in South Korea began to shake uncontrollably without warning and was immediately evacuated. Was it an earthquake? An attack? No one seemed quite sure. The actual cause emerged later and is utterly fascinating: Twenty-three middle-aged folks were having a Tae Bo fitness class in the office gym on the twelfth floor. Their beats had inadvertently matched the building's

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57:38

Athena Aktipis, "The Cheating Cell: How Evolution...

New Books in Science ·

2025/08/08

When we think of the forces driving cancer, we don’t necessarily think of evolution. But evolution and cancer are closely linked because the historical processes that created life also created cancer. The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer (Princeton UP, 2020) delves into this extraordinary relationship, and shows that by understanding cancer’s evolutionary origins, researchers can come up with more effective, revolutionary treatments. Athena Aktipis goes back billions

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88:20

Emilio Elizalde, "The True Story of Modern Cosmology:...

New Books in Science ·

2025/08/08

This book tells the story of how, over the past century, dedicated observers and pioneering scientists achieved our current understanding of the universe. It was in antiquity that humankind first attempted to explain the universe often with the help of myths and legends. This book, however, focuses on the time when cosmology finally became a true science. As the reader will learn, this was a slow process, extending over a large part of the 20th century and involving many astronomers, cosmologists

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62:13

David J. Helfand, "The Universal Timekeepers:...

New Books in Science ·

2025/08/07

Atoms are unfathomably tiny. It takes fifteen million trillion of them to make up a single poppy seed—give or take a few billion. And there’s hardly anything to them: atoms are more than 99.9999999999 percent empty space. Yet scientists have learned to count these slivers of near nothingness with precision and to peer into their internal states. In looking so closely, we have learned that atoms, because of their inimitable signatures and imperturbable internal clocks, are little archives holding the

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20:40

On Bullshit in AI

New Books in Science ·

2025/07/31

Today we’re continuing our series on Harry Frankfurt’s seminal work, On Bullshit. I have the privilege to speak with Arvind Narayanan co-author of the book AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What it Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference (Princeton University Press, 2024). Arvind is the perfect guest to explore the subject of bullshit in AI as AI Snake Oil takes on the ridiculous hype ascribed to the promise of AI. AI chatbots often hallucinate and many of the promoters of AI engage

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67:21

Anil Ananthaswamy, "Why Machines Learn: The Elegant...

New Books in Science ·

2025/07/30

Machine learning systems are making life-altering decisions for us: approving mortgage loans, determining whether a tumor is cancerous, or deciding if someone gets bail. They now influence developments and discoveries in chemistry, biology, and physics—the study of genomes, extrasolar planets, even the intricacies of quantum systems. And all this before large language models such as ChatGPT came on the scene.We are living through a revolution in machine learning-powered AI that shows no signs of

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67:01

Book Talk 67 : The Knowledge Machine: How...

New Books in Science ·

2025/07/29

What is reliable knowledge? Listen to philosopher Michael Strevens, author of The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science, to understand how science discovers the truth. At the current moment, when expertise is under attack and the idea of truth is contested from all sides, Strevens explains the remarkable success of science’s “irrational” method to settle debates, regardless of philosophical, religious, or aesthetic preferences. Drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of

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33:28

Kurt D. Fausch, "A Reverence for Rivers: Imagining an...

New Books in Science ·

2025/07/28

In A Reverence for Rivers: Imagining an Ethic for Running Waters (OSU Press, 2025), Kurt Fausch draws on his experience as a stream ecologist, his interest in Indigenous cultures, and a thoughtful consideration of environmental ethics to explore human values surrounding freshwater ecosystems. Focusing on seven rivers across the globe—from the Salmon River in Oregon to the Sarufutsu River in Japan—he examines the growing ethical dilemmas threatening our rivers, including increasing demands for

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42:01

Rene Almeling, Lisa Campo-Engelstein, Brian T....

New Books in Science ·

2025/07/22

In Seminal: On Sperm, Health, and Politics, Rene Almeling, Lisa Campo-Engelstein, and Brian T. Nguyen come together across disciplines to offer a kaleidoscopic view of the relationship between sperm, health, and the intersecting politics of gender, race, and reproduction. Always insightful and often provocative, the essays in this unprecedented collection cover a broad range of issues related to male reproductive and sexual health—including the latest technological developments for creating sperm;

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37:59

Robert N. Spengler, "Nature's Greatest Success: How...

New Books in Science ·

2025/07/22

The 15,000-year story of how grass seduced humanity into being its unwitting labor force--and the science behind it.Domesticated crops were not human creations, and agriculture was not simply invented. As Robert N. Spengler shows, domestication was the result of an evolutionary process in which people played a role only unwittingly and as actors in a numberless cast that spanned the plant and animal kingdoms. Nature's Greatest Success: How Plants Evolved to Exploit Humanity (Univ of California

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78:50

Paul Sen, "Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference...

New Books in Science ·

2025/07/17

Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe (Scribner, 2021) tells the incredible epic story of the scientists who, over two centuries, harnessed the power of heat and ice and formulated a theory essential to comprehending our universe. “Although thermodynamics has been studied for hundreds of years…few nonscientists appreciate how its principles have shaped the modern world” (Scientific American). Thermodynamics—the branch of physics that deals with energy and

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64:35

Savannah Mandel on an Argument for the End of Human...

New Books in Science ·

2025/07/14

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with space anthropologist, writer, and Virginia Tech doctoral candidate, Savannah Mandel, about her book, Ground Control: An Argument for the End of Human Space Exploration (Chicago Review Press, 2025). The book uses history, ethnography, participant observation in policy-making, and other forms of evidence to argue for the discontinuation of human space exploration until pressing forms of human suffering are brought to an end on Earth. The pair also talk

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117 results

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