Future Science Essays from the Cutting Edge

About this book

The next wave of science writing is here. Editor Max Brockman has talent-spotted 19 young scientists, working on leading-edge research across a wide range of fields. Nearly half of them are women, and all of them are great communicators: their passion and excitement makes this collection a wonderfully invigorating read. We hear from an astrobiologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena about the possibilities for life elsewhere in the solar system (and the universe); from the director of Yale's Comparative Cognition Laboratory about why we keep making the same mistakes; from a Cambridge lab about DNA synthesis; from the Tanzanian savannah about what lies behind attractiveness; we hear about how to breed plants to withstand disease, about ways to extract significance from the Interne's enormous datasets, about oceanography, neuroscience, microbiology, and evolutionary psychology.

Contents

Preface; 1. On the Coming Age of Ocean Exploration; 2. Children's Helping Hands; 3. Molecular Cut and Paste; 4. Next Step: Infinity; 5. Nurture, Nature, and the Stress That is Life; 6. What Can Huge Data Sets Teach Us About Society and Ourselves?; 7. On the Universality of Attractiveness; 8. To Err is Primate; 9. Our Brains Know Why We Do What We Do; 10. Is Shame Necessary?; 11. Plant Immunity in a Changing World; 12. The Emergence of Human Audiovisual Communication; 13. Why Rejection Hurts; 14. Finding the Mind in the Body; 15. Should the Law Depend on Luck?; 16. How We Read People's Moral Minds; 17. How Odd I Am!; 18. Where Does Human Diversity Come From?; Acknowledgements

Customer Reviews