First, a confession. I attended four different middle schools and three different high schools. I managed to take Earth Science, Environmental Science, and then Biology five times over before pursuing a liberal arts degree. I never learned much of anything about chemistry in school, so that bar may be artificially low. The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean is a wandering, at times rambling, collection of stories that winds along with the Periodic Table of Elements. Like a good liberal arts science class, the book does […]
Where Do You Go Oh Oh Oh Oh Eh Oh
The library’s audiobook app knows me so well that it decided to recommend to me Mary Roach’s 2004 bestseller Stiff. A book about cadavers called “Stiff” sounded awesome, almost as awesome as the others book about science and sex called Bonk. With nothing to lose except my ignorance about what happens when I die, I pressed the Check Out button and enjoyed the next eight hours of audio delight. In the book, author Mary Roach saucily quips her way across time and the planet to understand how […]
“Health and dignity are indissociable in human beings.”
It’s hard for me to gauge exactly how interesting a book like this may be to someone else, because when asked about my fantasy dream career, I say epidemiologist. And not the fun kind – the data wonk kind. I think objectively, this book is objectively “exciting” if you have a tolerance for fairly dry excitement, and a lot of details on slow, frustrating, painstaking searches for pathogens, outbreaks, sources of contamination, and underlying causes of the things that plague us. Despite the rather dramatic […]
Okay, fuckety bye.
So firstly, this was fun and liked it and I admire its enthusiasm. Any book that tries to break down the taboo veil surrounding swearing is good in my book. I do not understand the fixation that some people have about swearing, and I probably never will. But this book does a really good job laying out a general overview of, as the title tells you, why swearing is good for you. This is actually why I’m only giving it three and a half stars, […]
To the reference shelf with you
Some books seem like they were written with you in mind. I look at this cover and read the title, with words like fate, chance, and evolution, and I think this is exactly up my alley. And. . .it kind of is. No matter how hard I tried, though, I simply did not love this book. Jonathan Losos isn’t a bad writer, but I think at times he is too close to his own studies to know where to edit them down for the casual […]
Mitten Kittens, Sonic Hedgehog, and a Better Understanding of Genes
Space genes! Bloody space genes! If you’ve been keeping an eye on popular science news recently, you’ve probably come across the story of a comparative study between current astronaut Scott Kelly and his retired astronaut brother, Mark. Along with this came the breathless headlines, tweets and shares on how 7% of Scott’s DNA had changed after his time in space! They weren’t identical twins anymore! Which is insane! NO! Argh!!! The media ran riot with the idea that massive changes had occurred […]
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