Synopsis
Interviews with Scientists about their New Books
Episodes
-
![John Hibbing et al., “Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences” (Routledge, 2013)]()
John Hibbing et al., “Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences” (Routledge, 2013)
24/02/2014 Duration: 21minJohn Hibbing, Kevin Smith, and John Alford are the authors of Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences (Routledge, 2013). Hibbing is professor of political science and psychology at the University of Nebraska, Smith is professor of political science at the University of Nebraska, and Alford is associate... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
-
![Michael Pettit, “The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)]()
Michael Pettit, “The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
19/02/2014 Duration: 55minParapsychology. You may have heard of it. You know, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis. Spoon-bending and that sort of thing. If you have heard of it, you probably think of it as a pseudoscience. And indeed it is. But it wasn’t always so. There was a time in the late nineteenth... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
-
![Chuck Adler, “Wizards, Aliens, and Starships: Physics and Math in Fantasy and Science Fiction” (Princeton UP, 2014)]()
Chuck Adler, “Wizards, Aliens, and Starships: Physics and Math in Fantasy and Science Fiction” (Princeton UP, 2014)
14/02/2014 Duration: 01h35min[Re-posted with permission from Wild About Math] I’ve admitted before that Physics and I have never gotten along. But, science fiction is something I enjoy. So, when Princeton University Press sent me a copy of Physics Professor Chuck Adler‘s new book Wizards, Aliens, and Starships: Physics and Math in Fantasy... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
-
![Hallam Stevens, “Life Out Of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)]()
Hallam Stevens, “Life Out Of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
31/01/2014 Duration: 01h16minHallam Stevens‘s new book is a rich and fascinating ethnographic and historical account of the transformations wrought by integrating statistical and computational methods and materials into the biological sciences. Life Out Of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics (University of Chicago Press, 2013) follows the data through the physical and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
-
![John Waldman, “Running Silver: Restoring Atlantic Rivers and Their Great Fish Migrations” (Lyons Press, 2013)]()
John Waldman, “Running Silver: Restoring Atlantic Rivers and Their Great Fish Migrations” (Lyons Press, 2013)
16/01/2014 Duration: 46minWhen it comes to understanding why our planet’s biodiversity is declining so precipitously, no phrase has as much explanatory power as “shifting baselines” — as essayist Derrick Jensen put it, “[T]he process of becoming accustomed to, and accepting as normal, worsening conditions.” Every generation regards its own environment as natural... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
-
![Michael Weisberg, “Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World” (Oxford UP, 2013)]()
Michael Weisberg, “Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World” (Oxford UP, 2013)
15/01/2014 Duration: 01h03minIn 1956 and 1957, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided to test a plan to dam up the San Francisco Bay in order to protect its water supply: they built a 1.5 acre model of the Bay area in a warehouse, with hydraulic pumps to simulate tides and river... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
-
![Gabriel Finkelstein, “Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany” (MIT Press, 2013)]()
Gabriel Finkelstein, “Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany” (MIT Press, 2013)
14/01/2014 Duration: 01h15min“A good wife and a healthy child are better for one’s temper than frogs.” For Gabriel Finkelstein, Emil du Bois-Reymond was “the most important forgotten intellectual of the nineteenth century.” Most famously in a series of experimental works on electricity, but also in a series of public lectures that generated... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
-
![Angela N. H. Creager, “Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)]()
Angela N. H. Creager, “Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
07/01/2014 Duration: 01h11minAngela Creager‘s deeply researched and elegantly written new book is a must-read account of the history of science in twentieth-century America. Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine (University of Chicago Press, 2013) traces a history of radioisotopes as military and civilian objects, for experimentation and therapeutic... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
-
![Sarah S. Richardson, Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2013)]()
Sarah S. Richardson, Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
27/11/2013 Duration: 01h16sMen and women are different, there’s no doubt about it. And you might well want to know what the root of that difference is. What makes a man a man and a woman a woman? Before the beginning of the twentieth century, most answers to this question were rather unsatisfying,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
-
![Kim TallBear, “Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)]()
Kim TallBear, “Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)
23/11/2013 Duration: 59minIs genetic testing a new national obsession? From reality TV shows to the wild proliferation of home testing kits, there’s ample evidence it might just be. And among the most popular tests of all is for so-called “Native American DNA.” All of this rests upon some uninterrogated (and potentially destructive)... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
-
![Muhammed Ali Khalidi, “Natural Categories and Human Kinds: Classification in the Natural and Social Sciences” (Cambridge UP, 2013)]()
Muhammed Ali Khalidi, “Natural Categories and Human Kinds: Classification in the Natural and Social Sciences” (Cambridge UP, 2013)
15/11/2013 Duration: 01h06minThe division between natural kinds – the kinds that ‘cut nature at its joints’ – and those that simply reflect human interests and values has a long history. The natural kinds are often thought to have certain essential characteristics that are fixed by nature, such as a particular atomic number,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
-
![William J. Clancey, “Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Exploration Rovers” (MIT Press, 2012)]()
William J. Clancey, “Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Exploration Rovers” (MIT Press, 2012)
03/11/2013 Duration: 01h07minHow does conducting fieldwork on another planet, using a robot as a mobile laboratory, change what it means to be a scientist? In Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Exploration Rovers (MIT Press, 2012), William J. Clancey explores the nature of exploration in the context of the Mars Exploration... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
-
![Dorothy H. Crawford, “Virus Hunt: The Search for the Origin of HIV” (Oxford UP, 2013)]()
Dorothy H. Crawford, “Virus Hunt: The Search for the Origin of HIV” (Oxford UP, 2013)
16/10/2013 Duration: 42minIf you think about it, pretty much everything has a history insofar as everything exists in time. Historians, however, usually limit themselves to the history of humans and the things humans make. Occasionally, of course, they make forays into the history of animals, the environment and even the universe (see... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
-
![Adam R. Shapiro, “Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Anti-Evolution Movement in American Schools” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)]()
Adam R. Shapiro, “Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Anti-Evolution Movement in American Schools” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
27/09/2013 Duration: 01h12minDuring the 1924-25 school year, John Scopes was filling in for the regular biology teacher at Rhea County Central High School in Dayton, Tennessee. The final exam was coming up, and he assigned reading from George W. Hunter’s 1914 textbook A Civic Biology to prepare students for the test. What... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
-
![Tim Maudlin, “Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time” (Princeton UP, 2012)]()
Tim Maudlin, “Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time” (Princeton UP, 2012)
17/09/2013 Duration: 57minTim Maudlin‘s Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time (Princeton University Press, 2012) is a clear, approachable, and engaging introduction to the philosophy of physics that focuses on fundamental notions of space and time. The book expertly interweaves the history and philosophy of science in the course of its narrative; readers... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
-
![Michael Ruse, “The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)]()
Michael Ruse, “The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
08/09/2013 Duration: 01h11minIn The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Michael Ruse offers a fascinating history of the Gaia Hypothesis in the context of the transformations of professional and public engagements with science and technology in the 1960s. Based on an archive that spans texts, oral... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
-
![Hannah S. Decker, “The Making of DSM-III: A Diagnostic Manual’s Conquest of American Psychiatry” (Oxford UP, 2013)]()
Hannah S. Decker, “The Making of DSM-III: A Diagnostic Manual’s Conquest of American Psychiatry” (Oxford UP, 2013)
23/08/2013 Duration: 01h09minLike it or not, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) has an enormous influence in deciding what qualifies as a mental health disorder in the United States and beyond. The each revision of the DSM directly influences people’s lives, guides treatment, and has important legal and economic consequences. In... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
-
![David Munns, “A Single Sky: How an International Community Forged the Science of Radio Astronomy” (MIT Press, 2012)]()
David Munns, “A Single Sky: How an International Community Forged the Science of Radio Astronomy” (MIT Press, 2012)
29/07/2013 Duration: 01h09minHow do you measure a star? In the middle of the 20thcentury, an interdisciplinary and international community of scientists began using radio waves to measure heavenly bodies and transformed astronomy as a result. David P. D. Munns‘s new book charts the process through which radio astronomers learned to see the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
-
![Nathaniel Comfort, “The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine” (Yale UP, 2012)]()
Nathaniel Comfort, “The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine” (Yale UP, 2012)
05/07/2013 Duration: 01h10min“This is a history of promises.”So begins Nathaniel Comfort‘s gripping and beautifully written new book on the relationships between and entanglements of medical genetic and eugenics in the history of the twentieth century. Based on a rich documentary and oral history archive, The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
-
![Maki Fukuoka, “The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in 19th-Century Japan” (Stanford UP, 2012)]()
Maki Fukuoka, “The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in 19th-Century Japan” (Stanford UP, 2012)
22/06/2013 Duration: 01h10minZograscope. Say it with me: zograscope. ZooooOOOOOoooograscope. There are many optical wonders in Maki Fukuoka’s new book The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in 19th-Century Japan (Stanford University Press, 2012), the zograscope not least among them. The book opens with Fukuoka’s account of stumbling upon a manuscript of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
