New Books in Science
New Books Network
Interviews with Scientists about their New BooksSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
Episodes
Mentioned books
May 30, 2017 • 47min
Beau Lotto, “Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently” (Hatchette Books, 2017)
We may think we see the world as it is, but neuroscience proves otherwise. Which is a good thing, according to neuroscientist and author Beau Lotto. In his new book Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently (Hatchette Books, 2017), Lotto explains the mechanisms underlying our difficulty apprehending the world accurately,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
May 13, 2017 • 1h 12min
Sophia Roosth, “Synthetic: How Life Got Made” (U Chicago Press, 2017)
Sophia Roosth‘s wonderful new book follows researchers clustered around MIT beginning in 2003 who named themselves synthetic biologists. A historically informed anthropological analysis based on many years of ethnographic work, Synthetic: How Life Got Made (University of Chicago Press, 2017) offers a fascinating account of the changing relationship between making... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
May 11, 2017 • 36min
Tara H. Abraham, “Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science” (MIT Press, 2016)
Fueling his bohemian lifestyle and anti-authoritarian attitude with a steady diet of ice cream and whiskey, along with a healthy dose of insomnia, Warren Sturgis McCulloch is best known for his foundational contributions to cybernetics but led a career that spanned psychiatry, philosophy, neurophysiology, and engineering. Tara H. Abraham‘s new... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
May 4, 2017 • 1h 4min
Lisa Messeri, “Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds” (Duke UP, 2016)
What kind of object is a planet? Lisa Messeri‘s new book asks and addressed this question in a fascinating ethnography that explores how scientific practices transform planets into places and helps us understand why that matters not just for how we understand outer space, but also for how we understand... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
Apr 29, 2017 • 50min
J. C. McKeown, “A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Healing Arts of Greece and Rome” (Oxford UP, 2017)
The back cover of J. C. McKeown‘s new book, A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities (Oxford University Press, 2017), is adorned not with review quotes from contemporary scholars, but rather the discordant voices of the medical writers he excerpts. Speaking of Galen, Photius of Constantinople notes that the author tends... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
Apr 25, 2017 • 1h 3min
Tania Munz, “The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language” (U of Chicago Press, 2016)
Tania Munz‘s new book is a dual biography: both of Austrian-born experimental physiologist Karl von Frisch, and of the honeybees he worked with as experimental, communicating creatures. The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language (University of Chicago Press, 2016) alternates between chapters that take... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
Mar 29, 2017 • 1h 3min
Raz Chen-Morris, “Measuring Shadows: Kepler’s Optics of Invisibility” (Penn State UP, 2016)
Raz Chen-Morris‘s new book traces a significant and surprising notion through the work of Johannes Kepler: in order to account for real physical motions, one has to investigate artificially produced shadows and reflections. Measuring Shadows: Kepler’s Optics of Invisibility (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016) beautifully places Kepler’s optics into... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
Mar 29, 2017 • 1h 4min
Colleen Derkatch, “Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine” (U of Chicago Press, 2016)
What makes for new science? What happens to the evidentiary basis of the medical profession when patients demand treatments beyond the range of their conception of human biology? Are the criteria of the sciences amenable to healing practices that are touted for their focus on singularity, rather than uniformity? Colleen... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
Mar 21, 2017 • 40min
Kathleen McAuliffe, “This is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society” (Mariner Books, 2017)
Kathleen McAuliffe‘s This is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society (Mariner Books, 2017) unveils the world of parasites. From the influence of parasites on the ability to transform rats brains to be easily susceptible to cat predation to altering web formation structures in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
Mar 15, 2017 • 1h 6min
Stephanie Ruphy, “Scientific Pluralism Reconsidered: A New Approach to the (Dis)unity of Science (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2017)
The idea that the sciences can’t be unified–that there will never be a single ‘theory of everything’–is the current orthodoxy in philosophy of science and in many sciences as well. But different versions of pluralism present very different views of what exactly they are pluralistic about, why sciences cannot be... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
