Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week's best science picks.
Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade
- Robert Cialdini
Fittingly, Influence (William Morrow, 1984) became one of the most influential studies in behavioural science, a triumph of field research on persuasion and how to resist it by social psychologist Robert Cialdini. Here Cialdini turns the tables, analysing how to harness persuasion by “frontloading” attention and pinpointing patterns of association conducive to change. His trove of findings and case studies covers how our focal points determine who we see as influential, how babies can be “pre-suaded” to be helpful, and how language can become a fulcrum in fraught negotiations.
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
- Yuval Noah Harari
Historian Yuval Noah Harari's blockbuster Sapiens (Harvill Secker, 2014; see Nature 512, 369; 2014) was a trenchant treatise on what he sees as our species' resistible rise to global dominion. In this equally acerbic forecast, Harari argues that the biological paradigm that casts organisms as biochemical algorithms shaped by natural selection could open the way to domination by networked computer algorithms. He opines that, as search engines and social media absorb our life histories and artificial intelligence advances, “dataism” may even make humanity obsolete.
The Cure for Catastrophe: How We Can Stop Manufacturing Natural Disasters
- Robert Muir-Wood
From the August earthquake in central Italy to the Fukushima crisis of 2011, multitudes of 'natural' disasters are exacerbated by shoddy construction, non-existent preparedness and political inertia. Disaster expert Robert Muir-Wood's study is science in the round, spanning centuries of catastrophes, key figures such as seismologist Charles Richter, forecasting, the intricacies of insurance (multistorey concrete buildings are revealed as “weapons of mass destruction” in a quake) — and a detailed, workable recipe for resilience.
Revenger
- Alastair Reynolds
This latest science-fiction gem by astrophysicist Alastair Reynolds is a pacy space opera set in a far-future universe, where a broken civilization hangs on in a phalanx of artificial worlds. Rebellious teenagers Fura and Adrana join the crew of a solar-sailed vessel, riding the photon winds in search of lost technologies in the galactic deeps. Reynolds makes the human story compelling in a narrative that, spiced with bizarre characters aplenty and propelled by vengeance, smacks intriguingly of everything from Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island to Mad Max.
Sun Moon Earth
- Tyler Nordgren
On 21 August 2017, the United States will experience its first total solar eclipse in 40 years. Astronomer Tyler Nordgren's primer maps essentials for that event, contextualized by a fascinating history that sweeps us from Anaxagoras' explanation of eclipses in the fifth century BC to Arthur Eddington's test of Einstein's theory of general relativity during the May 1919 total eclipse. Nordgren is a wonderful guide to both the science and the sensory thrills, such as the shimmer of Baily's beads or the eerie twilight of totality.
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Kiser, B. Books in brief. Nature 537, 305 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/537305a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/537305a