Category Archives: science

A Man on the Moon

Posted on August 27, 2012 by smellincoffee

A Man on the Moon:  the Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts © 1994 Andrew Chaikin670 pages Yet a higher goal was calling, and we vowed to reach it soon So we gave ourselves a decade to put fire on the moon … Continue reading →

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The Ghosts of Evolution

Posted on July 31, 2012 by smellincoffee

The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsense Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms© 2000 Connie Barlow291 pages Grocery stores are excellent places to encounter ghosts. They lurk in the fruit section, feasting on anachronisms. The biological world is a wondrous web … Continue reading →

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Why We Get Fat

Posted on June 9, 2012 by smellincoffee

Why We Get Fat: and What To Do About It© 2011, 2012 Gary Taubes267 pages The secret of weight, we are told, is as simple as physics, as the laws of thermodynamics. If we take in more energy in eating … Continue reading →

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Why We Get Sick

Posted on June 2, 2012 by smellincoffee

Why We Get Sick: the New Science of Darwinian Medicine© 1994 Randolph M. Nesse, M.D; George C. Wiliams, Ph.D.290 pages Years ago I read an exceptional book on evolution by David Sloan Wilson. I say exceptional because it advocated for … Continue reading →

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The Shallows

Posted on May 23, 2012 by smellincoffee

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains© 2010 Nicholas Carr276 pages How many tabs do you have open right now? Neil Postman thought we were undoing ourselves with a distracting and busy fusion of information and entertainment … Continue reading →

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Catching Fire

Posted on May 9, 2012 by smellincoffee

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human © 2009 Richard Wrangham309 pages Cooking has created a great many fantastic dish throughout the centuries, but Richard Wrangham holds that the culinary art’s greatest triumph is us — humanity, for the advent of … Continue reading →

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Life Ascending

Posted on March 31, 2012 by smellincoffee

Life Ascending: the Ten Great Inventions of Evolution© 2009 Nick Lane344 pages For my money, few subjects are as impressive, beautiful, and awe-inspiring as biology and evolution. Is there a greater drama in the cosmos outside the long play of … Continue reading →

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The Ingredients

Posted on February 11, 2012 by smellincoffee

The Ingredients: A Guided Tour of the Elements© Phillip Ball 2002216 pages There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium […] (Tom Lehrer, “The Elements”). Chemistry is not an arcane subject solely practiced in a … Continue reading →

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Death from the Skies!

Posted on January 29, 2012 by smellincoffee

Death from the Skies! These are the Ways the World Will End…© 2008 Phil Plait326 pages By anyone’s standards, 2011 was a banner year for disasters, with Earth’s ful inventory of catastrophes on display. Flooding, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcano eruptions, hurricanes, … Continue reading →

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The Oceans

Posted on January 21, 2012 by smellincoffee

The Oceans© 2000 Ellen J. Prager with Sylvia A. Earle314 pages Seventy percent of the Earth’s surface is covered in water, constituting a vast and largely unknown world of its own — vitally important to ours, but scarcely explored and … Continue reading →

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