Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week's best science picks.
Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat
- John McQuaid
In pinning down the subtle sense of taste, Pulitzer-prizewinning journalist John McQuaid ranges through more than a soupçon of chemistry, neuroscience and genetics. His is a relentlessly moreish narrative, whether he is examining the evolutionary interplay between foraging and human brain development, the protein miraculin's ability to make limes taste like oranges, or the “bizarre, Lovecraftian-looking” double genes of sweet-receptor molecules. Disgust also gets a look-in, through Charles Darwin's account of a Tierra del Fuegan's encounter with a tin of cold beef.
The Story of Collapsing Stars: Black Holes, Naked Singularities, and the Cosmic Play of Quantum Gravity
- Pankaj S. Joshi
Black holes — whether they exist or not (see Nature http://doi.org/x25; 2014) — continue to exert a pull on scientific minds and the popular imagination alike. In this lucid overview, theoretical astrophysicist Pankaj Joshi corrals the research on collapsing massive stars and space-time singularities, including the idea that the event horizon might be a 'firewall' of fierce radiation. Joshi sees work in these areas as a lab for testing the pressing problems in fundamental physics and beyond.
Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt's America
- Ian Tyrrell
Theodore Roosevelt, US president from 1901 to 1909, is rightly lauded as a pioneering conservationist. And as historian Ian Tyrrell reveals in this trenchant transnational chronicle, the hyper-energetic 'Teddy' also preached sustainability at a time of domestic outcry over resource misuse. Roosevelt's national urge for global power was as strong as his prescient environmentalism, however; and Tyrrell shows how US interests abroad and the president's vision of a world conservation congress created tension between ethics and economics.
Hall of Small Mammals: Stories
- Thomas Pierce
A dwarf mammoth called Shirley Temple ends up in the backyard of a God-fearing insomniac in the American South. A young physicist investigating a hypothetical particle, the 'daisy', has both a theoretical husband, accessible solely through dreams, and a real one. An early naturalist stands helplessly by as a money-hungry showman fashions an implausible monster out of a heap of dinosaur bones. These science-flavoured short stories by New Yorker regular Thomas Pierce dance at the edge of possibility, exuding an off-kilter brilliance in their exploration of human longing and fear.
Walls: Enclosure and Ethics in the Modern Landscape
- Thomas Oles
Our world may be densely networked, but boundaries from the West Bank barrier to the US–Mexican border fence remain an often controversial presence. In this engrossing ethical study, landscape architect Thomas Oles ponders walls and their potential for oppression or human exchange. Drawing on rich historical examples such as Britain's economically and ecologically valuable hedgerows, Oles offers an ethics test for proposed barriers that questions whether they support commonalities or embed differences.
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Kiser, B. Books in brief. Nature 517, 437 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/517437a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/517437a