Interviews with Scientists about their New Books
https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/science-technology/science/
Violet Moller, "The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found" (Doubleday, 2019)
Moller traces the histories of migration of three ancient authors, Euclid, Ptolemy and Galen, from ancient Alexandria in 500 to Syria and Constantinople,
episode 201: David R. Montgomery, "Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life" (W. W. Norton, 2018)
Once a self-proclaimed dark green eco-pessimist, Dr. Montgomery finds this new hope as he travels the world, meeting farmers at the forefront of an agricultural movement to restore soil health...
episode 523: Vanessa Heggie, "Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
Heggie talks about the history of biomedical research in extreme environments...
episode 34: John D. Hawks, "Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story" (National Geographic, 2017)
Hawks talks about new developments in paleoanthropology – the discovery of a new hominid species Homo Naledi in South Africa, the Neanderthal ancestry of many human populations, and the challenge of rethinking anthropological science’s relationship with indigenous peoples and the general public...
episode 15: Paul Sutter, "Your Place in the Universe: Understanding Our Big, Messy Existence" (Prometheus, 2018)
Sutter presents an in-depth yet accessible tour of the universe for lay readers, while conveying the excitement of astronomy...
episode 65: Robin Scheffler, “A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
Could cancer be a contagious disease? Although this possibility might seem surprising to many of us, it has a long history...
episode 521: Philip W. Clements, "Science in an Extreme Environment: The American Mount Everest Expedition" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2018)
Clements discusses the 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition...
episode 191: David Munns, "Engineering the Environment: Phytotrons and the Quest for Climate Control in the Cold War" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2017)
The phytotron was not only at the center of post-war plant science, but also connected to the Cold War, commercial agriculture, and long-duration space flight...
episode 189: Nicholas Shea, "Representation in Cognitive Science" (Oxford UP, 2018)
In order to explain thought in natural physical systems, mainstream cognitive science posits representations, or internal states that carry information about the world and that are used by the system to guide its behavior...
episode 517: Stephan Bullard, "A Day-by-Day Chronicle of the 2013-2016 Ebola Outbreak" (Springer, 2018)
Why did Ebola, a virus so deadly that it killed or immobilized its victims within days, have time to become a full-blown epidemic?