Books
scientificactivist | January 13, 2010The top 50 science blog posts of the year, as judged by a large panel of bloggers, have been announced and will be included in The Open Laboratory 2009. The fourth annual volume of this blog anthology will be published early this year, but you can go ahead and see the winning posts here and here. The editor, Scicurious, the series editor, Bora Zivkovic, and all of the judges deserve a round of applause for their hard work.
And, I'm happy to announce that my post on H1N1 influenza antiviral drug resistance ("Why Swine Flu Is Resistant to Adamantane Drugs" from 01 May 2009) made the cut and…
clock | January 12, 2010The time has come....the moment many of you have been waiting for, for months!
The most amazing 2009 guest editor Scicurious and I are ready to announce the 50 posts that have made it through a grueling judging process to emerge as winners to be included in the Open Laboratory 2009, the anthology of the best writing on science blogs of the past year.
Out of 760 posts, all of amazing quality (we could have collected something like ten anthologies, all good), the survivors of all the rounds, the posts that will actually get printed on physical, dead-tree paper, are:
Breastatistics, by Dr.…
cagapakis | January 11, 2010I just finished reading Evelyn Fox Keller's wonderful biography of Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism. Barbara McClintock was probably the best corn geneticist of all time and definitely one of the sassiest female scientists ever. In the 1940s and 1950s she discovered transposition, the process by which pieces of genes can literally jump out of one part of the chromosome and land back in another part. These jumping elements are controlled by master regulating elements in other parts of the genome and can turn different genes on and off at different times. This incredible discovery…
grrlscientist | January 10, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
sciencepunk | January 7, 2010Just before Christmas I was sent a copy of the rather splendid Life Ascending by Nick Lane (author of Power, Sex, Suicide).
Over the last decades, groundbreaking new research has provided vivid insights into the molecular makeup of life. These discoveries have helped explain the evolution of life on earth in unprecedented detail.Lane uses this new knowledge to describe the ten greatest inventions of life, based on their historical impact, their importance in living organisms today, and their iconic power. In ten chapters, he explains the origin of life itself, the formation of DNA, the…
pharyngula | January 6, 2010The National Library of Medicine has released scans of classic science texts from the 15th-16th century — they're beautiful.
And the amazing thing is, they're still better science than anything you'll find from a creationist!
aardvarchaeology | January 6, 2010I hardly ever read books in French and I hardly ever read books by Nobel laureates. In the first case, my grasp of the language is shaky and I have no good entry point into French literature: I don't know what to try. I think the last French-language book I tried reading was Les Trois Mousquetaires, and I dropped it halfway through because it's silly and romantic. In the second case, I have no respect whatsoever for the collective taste (or "artistic authority"!) of the Swedish Academy, and it is my firm opinion that the only reason that anybody cares about the Nobel prize for literature is…
grrlscientist | January 3, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
laelaps | January 1, 2010Ever since my first book, Written in Stone, found a home at Bellevue Literary Press I have had a number of people ask me how to publish their own books. How does a book go from being an idea to a real, dead-tree product? I will be discussing some of the details of this process (especially using online resources to write and promote books) with Rebecca Skloot and Tom Levenson in a few weeks at ScienceOnline2010, but I thought I would cover some of the basics here.
The first and most crucial step of the process is coming up with a book to write! This is not as easy as it might sound.…
grrlscientist | December 27, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
terrasig | December 26, 2009The other day, author pal and PharmFamily friend Rebecca Skloot sent out a Twitter request for iPhone app suggestions for her new gadget, particularly those that might be of greatest use on her upcoming, self-supported book tour for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
Let me first congratulate Ms. Skloot on ditching that CrapBerry and adopting a technology that is as superior as her book.
Rebecca got me looking at my iPhone and made me realize that, well, it sort of has that not-so-fresh feeling. I've got a few tried-and-true apps that I've shared with our Twitter followers but I even feel…
laelaps | December 24, 2009
There was perhaps no Victorian naturalist so well-known and so misunderstood as Richard Owen. He could be warm to friends, but to his scientific peers he was an obstinate autocrat. He was among the first scientists to start publicly considering life in evolutionary terms, yet he never fully demonstrated the mechanism by which his evolutionary visions might be carried out. He crossed swords with theologians who were rankled by the implications evolution, but at the same time Owen fancied himself as a "high priest" of science. Neither here nor there, neither warm nor cold, Owen was seemingly a…
bcohen | December 23, 2009(Ten Best of the Decade from Half of the World's Fair)
This series began with the kindness of a friend who agreed to let me ask him about his book about Barry Commoner, science, and modern environmentalism. It then spawned a series of 17 interviews with authors of books in science studies, environmental history, the history of science, and all combinations in between. Every one of them was enjoyable to do; every author was generous and insightful. I've been able to use some of these as thumbnail sketches of readings I use in class. In that, they stand as the best example of blogging as a…
grrlscientist | December 20, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
laelaps | December 15, 2009After spending a long weekend hammering away at the text, I am now happy to say that the first formal iteration of Written in Stone is nearly complete.
It has been difficult work. Making sure that the narrative flows smoothly throughout the book has been among the top challenges, especially since I am not using the somewhat worn technique of starting at a point in earth's history and chronologically creeping towards the present. Instead I am using the history of science as a way to introduce what we have come to understand about the history of life from the fossil record. The two narratives…
grrlscientist | December 13, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
clock | December 12, 2009There will be, at ScienceOnline2010, at least two sessions dedicated to books and book publishing - From Blog to Book: Using Blogs and Social Networks to Develop Your Professional Writing and Writing for more than glory: Proposals and Pitches that Pay - as well as several others that will at least mention books as vehicles for distributing scientific information, popularization of science, or science education.
This got me thinking....about ways that the Web is changing the world of the book. I can think of three aspects of this:
1) Changes in the process of writing a book
It may not be a…
ddobbs | December 7, 20091. Maybe it was just the headline ... but the runaway winner was "No pity party, no macho man." Psychologist Dave Grossman on surviving killing. Actually I think it was the remarkable photo, which looks like a painting. Check it out.
2. I'm not vulnerable, just especially plastic. Risk genes, environment, and evolution, in the Atlantic. The blog post about the article that led to the book.
3. Senator Asks Pentagon To Review Antidepressants
4. Gorgeous thing of the day: Sky's-eye view of the Maldives & other islands
5. The Weird History of Vaccine Adjuvants, even though it was from Oct 1…
grrlscientist | December 6, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
gregladen | December 5, 2009Subtitled "The truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity," this might be a book you should read.
James Hansen is probably the world's best known climate scientist, partly because of his own work and his testimony before Congress, and partly because he has become a target of Global Warming denialists who seem to revel in every opportunity to accuse him of fraud, deceit, or incompetence.
In Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity, Hansen provides a message that is much more severe…