Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond by Ashley Jean Yeager paints an inspiring picture of Vera Rubin, who defied deep prejudice against female astronomers to find the best evidence of dark matter
NASA/Joel Kowsky
Hakeem Oluseyi and Joshua Horwitz
Ballantine Books
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THEY called him “the professor” because, by the age of 10, he was already reading every book he could lay his hands on. In the sixth grade, he scored 162 on an IQ test at school. Still, by the time he was in his teens, the certified genius was dealing weed and carrying a gun for protection.
“If anyone had told me I’d grow up to be an actual professor at MIT, UC Berkeley, and the University of Cape Town, I wouldn’t have believed them,” writes astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi in his inspiring memoir
Could social drinking have created our civilisation by fuelling creativity and innovation? Drunk, an engrossing new book by Edward Slingerland, roams far and wide to make the case
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“IN THE face of overwhelming odds, I’m left with only one option. I’m going to have to science the shit out of this,” says Matt Damon’s character in The Martian, when he realises he is stranded on Mars and no one is rushing to his rescue.
Eric Lander, a key scientist on the Human Genome Project and director of the Broad Institute, a biomedical and genomic research centre in Massachusetts, quotes the lines in the prologue to his podcast, Brave New Planet, that explores how technology may shape the future.
We may not be alone on our planet, but we do face an existential threat from climate change. The question is, how much should we rely on technology to get us out of trouble? Should we, for example, attempt to pump the stratosphere with chemicals to reflect some solar radiation back into space? Lander, who acknowledges that society’s relationship with science has frayed in recent times, says such important decisions cannot be left to scientists and