VOLUME 100 | NUMBER 1 | January 2012
David R. Walt, Shannon E. Stitzel, Matthew J. Aernecke
Electronic olfaction aims to mimic mammalian systems
Douglas Larson
A North Dakota lake swells without regard for people or property
Robert M. Pringle
Understanding ecosystems is complex but can be taken on one tweak at a time
Stephen Ledoux
A behaviorologist reviews what has happened since B. F. Skinner’s 1957 classic.
Anna Lena Phillips
Evidence mounts for endocrine effects of a compound used in many antibacterial bar soaps
Elsa Youngsteadt
Microbial evolution helps explain why a mild-mannered American beetle has become a tree killer in Asia
Brian Hayes
Watch the cosmos evolve in a cube one billion light-years wide
Robert L. Dorit
Science now takes for granted the importance of forces and time spans we can’t perceive directly
Henry Petroski
The story of the stone memorial to the first U.S. president spans a century
B. F. Skinner
The 1957 American Scientist article, reproduced in full
Philip E. Mirowski
A review of Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself—and the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future, by Harriet A. Washington. Washington offers vivid narrative vignettes of various travesties that have resulted from the commercialization of science and health care
Michael Riordan
A review of The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe, by Frank Close. The book’s core strength, says Riordan, is its discussion of how the electromagnetic and weak forces were combined into the electroweak force
Brian Hayes
A review of Handbook of Floating-point Arithmetic, by Jean-Michel Muller, Nicolas Brisebarre, Florent de Dinechin, Claude-Pierre Jeannerod, Vincent Lefèvre, Guillaume Melquiond, Nathalie Revol, Damien Stehlé and Serge Torres. In the borderland between mathematics and computer science, correct answers are not always to be had, says Hayes—particularly if we demand efficiency
Robert J. Richards
A review of Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells us about Morality, by Patricia S. Churchland. Churchland regards oxytocin as fundamental to morality, but what is that hormone’s role in a decision to send a $50 check to Oxfam, wonders Richards
Michael D. Gordin
A review of Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything, by Margaret Wertheim. Wertheim wants mainstream scientists to give the work of “outsider physicists” the same sort of attention that folk art has gotten from the elite art community
Kent E. Portney
A review of Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City, by Andrew Ross. Ross shows how power, class, greed and prejudice shape the micropolitics of the pursuit of urban sustainability in Phoenix
Silvan S. Schweber
A review of Ordinary Geniuses: Max Delbrück, George Gamow, and the Origins of Genomics and Big Bang Cosmology, by Gino Segrè. Segrè insightfully narrates the personal and professional lives of Delbrück and Gamow and explains their scientific contributions
Greg Laden
A review of Born in Africa: The Quest for the Origins of Human Life, by Martin Meredith, and The Fossil Chronicles: How Two Controversial Discoveries Changed Our View of Human Evolution, by Dean Falk. Both of these books focus on controversies over how to distinguish what is apelike from what is humanlike in early hominin species
Steven Sloman
A review of Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman explores the capabilities, faults, biases and pervasive influence of intuitive thought
Jonathan L. Feng
A review of The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, by Richard Panek. Panek has a talent for elucidating difficult concepts and explains the history of dark energy beautifully, says Feng
Donald Worster
A review of A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest, by William deBuys. DeBuys reports on how and why the precipitation and ecology of the Southwest are changing in unpredictable and nonlinear ways
Colin Renfrew
A review of Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present, by Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail, with Timothy Earle, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Clive Gamble, April McMahon, John C. Mitani, Hendrik Poinar, Mary C. Stiner and Thomas R. Trautmann. The articles in this volume stress the very remote past of the hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic era, says Renfrew, and then leap to modernity without sufficiently considering the mediating effects of ancient civilizations.
Using images to tell (and sell) the scientific story
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