VOLUME 98 | NUMBER 2 | March 2010
Aaron French
A review of Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience, by Jeremy Mynott, and The Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From, and How They Live, by Colin Tudge. Both of these books explore what birds mean to us and what we can learn from living with them
John Dupré
A review of Not by Design: Retiring Darwin’s Watchmaker, by John O. Reiss. Reiss aims to reassert a thoroughgoing materialism and remove teleology from our vision of nature, says Dupré
Rick MacPherson
A review of Seasick: Ocean Change and the Extinction of Life on Earth, by Alanna Mitchell. Mitchell sets out on a personal voyage of discovery, accompanying top ocean scientists on expeditions that reveal the toll various assaults are taking on the global ocean
Anna Lena Phillips
A review of Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities, by Frank Jacobs
Brian Hayes
A review of Mapping the World: Stories of Geography, by Caroline and Martine Laffon
Jan Golinski
A review of Boyle: Between God and Science, by Michael Hunter. Hunter places Boyle’s scientific accomplishments in a context of lifelong piety and serious moral concerns, says Golinski
Ethan Remmel
A review of Nurtureshock: New Thinking about Children, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. Bronson and Merryman point to scientific findings that challenge some common assumptions about young people and parenting
Kim Sterelny
A review of Stephen Jay Gould: Reflections on His View of Life, edited by Warren D. Allmon, Patricia H. Kelley and Robert M. Ross. Because Stephen Jay Gould was ambivalent about or perhaps even hostile toward cladistics, population genetics and ecology, he was only partially connected to the mainstream of developing evolutionary thought, says Sterelny
Cosma Shalizi
A review of Predicting the Unpredictable: The Tumultuous Science of Earthquake Prediction, by Susan Hough. As recently as the 1970s, it seemed feasible that scientists would soon be able to say precisely when and where earthquakes would strike and what their impact would be, but most geologists now believe that that goal is almost certainly unattainable
Joan Silk
A review of The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society, by Frans de Waal. de Waal sets out to demonstrate that empathy is "a biologically grounded capacity that all people share"
Catherine Clabby
A photographer creates images of present-day glaciers from the same vantage point as that of historic photographs
Ralf Dahm
Confidence in the physical basis of mental disorders led to discovery of a disease
Timo Vuorisalo, Olli Arjamaa
Biology and culture have conspired to make us who we are
Jeremy A. Goldbogen
New technologies bring action at depth to light at the surface
Anna Lena Phillips
Optical physics provides the antidote to a gardening myth
Roald Hoffmann
Scientists do any number of things, besides science
Henry Petroski
Incentives help motivate solutions to humanity’s needs and wants
Kurt D. Bollacker
Data longevity depends on both the storage medium and the ability to decipher the information
David Kent
Less expensive, lower-quality innovations abound in every economic sector—except medicine