Science Friday - The Best Summer Science Books. June 14, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: June 14, 2019

The Best Science Books To Read This Summer They say a vacation is only as good as the book you bring with you. And these days it feels like there are as many ways to consume science writing as there are fields of science. Whether you’re a fan of historical nonfiction, graphic novels, poetry or short essays, this year’s panel of summer science books experts has the one you’re looking for to take with you on your journey. Alison Gilchrist is a graduate student researcher at CU Boulder and host of the podcast Buff Talk Science, and editor in chief of Science Buffs. Caren Cooper is an associate professor of public science at NC State University and author of Citizen Science: How Ordinary People Are Changing the Face of Discovery. Stephanie Sendaula is associate editor for Library Journal Reviews. They join Ira to talk about what they have chosen for their best summer science reads. Chronic Wasting Disease In Wildlife Chronic wasting disease is a fatal illness affecting the brains of deer, moose, and elk. Since its discovery in 1967, the disease has been detected in at least 26 states, three Canadian provinces, Norway, Sweden, and South Korea. Rae Ellen Bichell, a reporter with the Mountain West News Bureau and KUNC, talks about the disease, research into its origin and spread, and what’s known about the possible effects of human exposure. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato coming to you today from the beautiful studios of KUNC in Greeley, Colorado. And later in the hour, we're going to be talking about some of our favorite science books to enjoy during your summer downtime. And we want your suggestions. What science book is on your summer reading list this year that you would suggest that we read also? Give us a call our number 844-724-8255. Also, you can reach us at 844-Sight-Tock or tweet us. at SciFRI. But first, This is KERNNO, St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. It's time to check in on the state of science, and we mean by that local science stories with national importance.

Now, you may be familiar with what's called mad cow disease, more technically known as bovine, spongiform, encephalopathy. But you may not be aware that there's a similar disease that affects deer, moose, and elk, It is also a brain disease that leads to unusual behavior, and the animals become gruesomely thin before they die. It's called chronic wasting disease. It was first discovered in 1967, but it is spreading. It has been detected in at least 26 states, three Canadian provinces, and South Korea. And it's a topic of concern right here in the Mountain West.

Ray Ellen Bischel is a reporter with the Mountain West News Bureau, and with K. A-U-N-C, and you'll find links to her stories on chronic wasting disease at Bent Out of Shape on our website at science friday.com. Welcome to Science Friday. Yeah, thanks for having me. Let's talk about this. Set the scene for us. What is this illness like? How do you recognize it?

What does it do? Yeah, so like you said, it's a brain disease, neurodegenerative. It actually leaves holes in the brain. And like you mentioned, it's in this group of diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, which basically just means contagious spongy brain. So that gives you a pretty clear picture. That ends up impacting behavior. It's weird for a lot of reasons, including that it can take a really long time, sometimes like years,

before an infected animal actually starts to look sick. I went out with Heather Swanson, who's a wildlife biologist with the city of Boulder. She was checking on some deer that she's monitoring. And a lot of the ones that they are pretty sure are infected actually looked really healthy. but she and some other researchers have been studying which animals get eaten by mountain lions, and she said this. The mountain lions were definitely preferentially selecting deer that had chronic wasting disease over those that were negative. And for most of the ones that they had killed, we had not detected any chronic wasting disease symptoms yet.

So certainly the lions were able to key in on far more subtle cues than we were. Wow, that is interesting. and it was originally discovered here in Colorado. It was, yeah. Back in the 1960s, there were some researchers up in Fort Collins, which is just a little bit west of us. They were studying deer trying to figure out, answer some questions about winter nutrition, but the research animals kept getting sick and dying. And they eventually looked at samples of their brains and saw all these holes and realized this was something trickier than they expected.

And they found the cause of what was causing that. Yes, it was a preon. So we're talking about this class of diseases, which is caused. It's not your typical pathogen. Usually when we think about things that make you sick, that's viruses, bacteria, maybe fungi. This is none of those. It's just a protein. So basically, all healthy mammals have this protein in our healthy bodies.

It's not really known why we have them. Researchers are kind of looking into that question. But we all have them. And the problem arises when it's all about the shape of the protein. So problems happen when your healthy prion proteins come in contact with a misshapen bad version, essentially. So as you mentioned before, it's very similar to mad cow, other kinds of misfolded protein diseases. Yeah, it is. In that, they're all caused by preons.

there's been some discussion, especially in the last year or so, it seems, about whether this preon disease could become like mad cow disease in its ability to jump between species. And that's the thing. You know, you said it's not like the flu. It's not a virus. It's a misfolded protein. But it is contagious, right? It can spread from animal to animals. It is.

And that's one of the things that distinguishes chronic wasting disease from other preon diseases. So in the case of mad cow disease or other prion diseases, often the infectious material, those misshapen proteins that we were talking about, stay pretty contained in the brain and the central nervous system. So to pick two examples, you know, in mad cow disease, the general thought is that cows spread it to each other or obtain the disease by eating feed that was contaminated with other cow brains. And then a really crazy example in people, actually, was found years ago in Papua New Guinea. A prion disease was being passed in these groups of people who were as part of their funerary practices eating the brains of the deceased. So usually contained in the brain, but in this case with chronic wasting disease, it's not contained in the central nervous system. It spreads in a lot of ways. So infected animals, we talked about deer and elk, moose.

They shed the infectious material in pee, poop, blood, saliva. It's a lot more opportunity to expose other animals. Well, if you're a hunter and you're hunting some of these deer and you don't know that they're infected for the wasting disease, can you eat them and infected the animal and also get sick yourself? There's a lot of questions about that right now. And it's something that public health departments in this region are monitoring pretty closely. There so far haven't been any cases of human preon disease that could be linked to eating wild meat, but researchers really have not ruled that out as a possibility. It's under active investigation. I can go into more detail on that if you're interested.

Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a big study right now going on in Canada that's looking at macaque monkeys. And the question there, it's a decade-long study. It's supposed to wrap up in less than a year. So should have some answers on that. They infected these macaque monkeys, which are pretty similar to people in terms of genetic makeup.

They infected them with chronic wasting disease preons in a number of different ways, including through their stomachs, straight into the brain. And the researchers there say that they so far, in preliminary findings, have found some evidence that, the monkeys did get chronic wasting disease. But there's a lot of things that make that study really complicated. For one, these are all preliminary findings. They have not been published in peer-reviewed journals. And then also there's this issue that came up in talking to those researchers that a lot of the monkeys also have diabetes. And that can also cause some of these symptoms that they were seeing.

But we don't know whether how have the researchers you've talked to talked about the dangers of people thinking how it might spread? Oh, yes. So how it might spread is a big question. Yeah. Because, you know, it can be spread in so many different ways. It's not clear which one of those roots, you know, saliva or blood or something else, actually leads to infection. What is really complicating the matter is that there's evidence that in addition to it being spread in a bunch of different.

ways that people could come into contact with, that there might also be a number of different versions of this illness, that it might not all be one thing. Now, you talk to reindeer farmers in Norway and Sweden. Is this a problem that they're talking about also? Yeah, so chronic wasting disease was identified in the Nordic countries pretty recently, Finland and Norway, and then just like a few months ago in Sweden. There is concern there among reindeer herders and reindeer farmers. I lived in Finland for a number of years, so I know firsthand that reindeer herding is like

really big in that region. It's a huge part of their culture. And a member of the Sami Reindeer Herders Association of Norway told me that if CWD spreads to their semi-d domesticated animals, that, quote, it could easily wipe out the entire Samia reindeer husbandry culture. So a lot of concern there about that. Wow. What are wildlife officials doing to try to contain the spread of CWD?

Can they do anything? Yeah. There's not a lot you can do, or at least not a lot you can do easily and seemingly effectively. So here in Colorado, where we've got about 57% of the deer herds that are infected. We have that many. Pretty high number. Yeah. Yeah. The gist of the plan here in Colorado is like monitor the infected herds for a long time, do a lot of trial and error to see before and after, you know, what works.

And a lot of that has to do with letting hunters hunt more in certain areas or hunt more of a certain kind of animal. There's also this move to reduce anything that would concentrate a lot of animals in one place. So feeding wildlife in the winter or providing salt licks. but then there's also some effort to get the word out more just about this disease to people who handle meat and bodies. So hunters, taxidermis, meat processors. Is there any way to, if you suspect that something may be contaminated? I guess the first thing to do is just don't touch it. But if you're not sure, can you disinfect it?

You know, we use disinfect it on other kinds of pathogens. Can you use it on preons to try to disinfect the meat or what? Prions are really hard to destroy. An example that's really stuck with me from past reporting, not on this particular preon disease, but sometimes in cases where surgical teams, who are operating on people, realize that that person, that patient has a preon disease, they often just get rid of, you know, they landfill all the equipment they use during the surgery. It's like nuclear waste. It's really tricky to disinfect it. The normal roots don't work. What happens next?

Is there legislation? We always get down to following the money. I mean, is there any legislation to try to research this, to try to find a better fix for it? I should say there's already a lot of people who are researching this, who have been researching this, who will continue to research it. But there are a bunch of bills about chronic wasting disease that have been introduced in this session, including three in the Senate. They're basically about giving more money to research the disease. especially to figure out how to keep it from spreading. Well, thank you very much, Ray Allen.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Ray Ellen, Michelle is a reporter with Mountain West News Bureau and with the KUNC. And as I said before, you'll find links to her series on chronic wasting disease bent out of shape. It's on our website at Science Friday.com. When we come back, what are you reading this summer? What should we be reading? If you've got a science book to recommend, that's perfect for our summer. Give us a call, our number 844-724-825.

85-844-Sci Talk or tweet us at SciFRI. We've got a whole panel of readers waiting to talk about what to read this summer. Stay with us. We'll be right back after the break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato coming to you from KUNC in a beautiful Greeley, Colorado. Colorado is a great vacation destination if you're a fan of hiking, camping, or river rafting. Or maybe you prefer to forego all that physical activity.

get out in the sun here. It's gorgeous. Just take a dip in one of the state's famous hot springs. But you say vacation is only as good as the book you bring with you. You're a reader. Yeah. So which books do you choose? A tale of historical nonfiction? How about a graphic novel? A book of science poetry. A collection of short essays. It feels like there are so many ways to consume science writing. So many as there are fields of science. But don't back. Don't get overloaded. We're here to help you decide. It's our annual panel of science book lovers. The panel is here to give us their picks for summertime. You won't be stuck reading, eat, pray, love again. So we've got other things for you to read. And you can see all the books we're going to talk about on our website at science friday.com slash summer books.

Science Friday.com slash summer books. Allison Gilchrist is a graduate student researcher at CU Boulder, host of the podcast Buff's Buff Talk Science. I like that name. And is editor-in-chief of Science Buff at CU Boulder STEM Blog, and she joins me here in the studio. Alison, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, great to be here. It's great to have you. Karen Cooper is an associate professor of public science at NC State University in

Raleigh, North Carolina. She's also the author of the book Citizen Science, How Ordinary People Are Changing the Face of Discovery. Dr. Cooper, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks. Hi, I'm happy to be here. Nice to have you. Stephanie Sondala is an associate editor for Library Journal Reviews based in New York. Stephanie, welcome back.

Hi, Ira. Thank you for having me back. I love sitting in her chair for the time being. Keep it warm for me. I will. Okay, Allison, so if you like to travel to different cities, you might want to know something about each of them, specifically the air pollution. What book should people read to find out of it?

about that? Right. Yeah. So I recommended a book called Choked by Beth Gardner, which is about air pollution in different parts of the world. Beth traveled all over the place. She went to places that you would expect to have bad air like Delhi and Beijing and L.A. and places that you might not expect to have bad air like London and Warsaw. And so this is a book about the chemistry of air pollution where it comes from, why it's different in different cities, and also about the politics about air pollution and how we can mitigate it using politics. Well, you know, people will always ask you in your research, what's the most surprising thing you learned about air pollution?

To you, it was? To me, it was probably that the air pollution in Warsaw is terrible, and it's a result of the people burning coal there. So I didn't realize that coal was still a primary source of fuel in a developed country. And I didn't realize that that could create the bat. the air that is so bad in Warsaw. Stephanie Sandala, a lot of people are going to be hitting the beach this summer. Yes.

More and more, we're seeing algae proliferating in the world's oceans. We are. You've got a book on your list about that topic, right? I do. It's called Slime by Ruth Cassinger. She is a gardener and botany expert. And this was just a really fun, interesting book about how algae plays a hidden role in our lives. It's in our salad dressings, our shampoos, our lotions, even some of our...

shoes, and she follows people who make a living from wild seaweed harvesting and even from indoor algae farming, which I didn't even know was a thing. And she talks a lot about how the climate is warming, algae is growing and multiplying, which isn't always a good thing. And she also has recipes included for seaweed fans. So this is a really great, interesting, fun read for people who are just taking a look into science. I just want to know more about what we eat and how it gets there.

So their book does then talk about climate change. It does. Yes, yes. If you're talking about allergy. Karen, you're known for your work with citizen science. So do you have any citizen science book recommendations on your list? Yeah, well, I have a couple. And one is kind of to prepare people to be citizen scientists.

It's called Observe, Collect, Draw, a visual journal. And it's a how-to book, right? So it's when you read and then it's one you do rather than it's not really a relax in the hammock. kind of read a book time. It's more of an action book. So it's just fun because it's really for people to discover and visualize patterns in their life. Right? Some people might get into that with their fit bits, but this is like the old-fashioned pen and paper way.

And it's a sequel, actually, to Deer Data, which was sort of a set of postcards that two friends had exchanged to each other. over the course of a year weekly, where they shared their lives, but they shared their lives through these visualizations of data. So I think there was so much interest in that that people really wanted to be able to do the same thing, and so this book is really to help people learn how to do that.

So it has a lot of different activities for really like seeing your life in a whole new way. That's an interesting idea. And our number, if you have an idea for a book, our number is 844-7-24-824. Yeah, because making graphics out of science data is really an important thing so we can actually visualize what's going on. We do that better than computers, right? We pick out patterns better than computers can do.

Right, and it's just a creative and fun thing to be able to do. Oh, besides that. You want to put steam in there. Alison, if you're a kind of person who likes creepy crawlies, We've got a book for you. What book book do you have on your list? Yeah, well, I have to admit that I don't really like creepy crawlies. So this is the perfect book for someone like that.

If you're afraid of them, this book is for you. So this is a book called Bugged. It's about bugs. And it's by a Denver journalist called David McNeil. And he wrote about insects and the different niches in which they exist, but also about the people who really care about them, who study them, and collect them and are otherwise obsessed with them. So for me, it was not so much a way to learn about bugs,

although I did learn something about bugs, but also a way to learn about people's weird obsessions and how they spend their time and money. Well, you could go on forever with that kind of book. But also, you've got a book for some budding entomologists who want to inspect insects. Karen, right? Oh, that's right.

And you concentrate, starting inside your house. Right. So Never Home Alone by Rob Dunn is a book about a whole bunch of research that his lab has done with citizen scientists, with people sharing their observations. And it's really just like a marvel of the amount of arthropods, microbes, fungi, all the things that dwell in our homes. And then there is also a citizen science project by that same name, Never Home Alone. and in which every reader, any person, really, can photograph and report all the little tiny creatures that they find living in their homes. Yeah, and we have a Facebook group, and on our Facebook group, Jasmine Antonio says that she recommends the secret life of flies by Erica McAllister. And we did a side-price segment on this book, and I was blown away by, I had no idea.

there were more than house flies. How many more there were? I had no idea. You agree with that, Karen? Right. That's what surprised me, too, is just how much diversity there is, even just right around us. And you can either start to have your skin crawl,

or you can just really get into it and just appreciate that amount of biodiversity. Now, let me throw in one of the books I really have been reading and I enjoy. I've noticed beekeeping is becoming very popular with people. And we recently had Tom Seeley, I guess the beekeeper's beekeeper on to talk about his book, The Lives of Bees, so that that would be really on my summer book recommendation list for all aspiring beekeepers out there. And then we have this Stephanie Bee book. Yes, we do. I also loved The Honey Bus by Meredith May, and she is a fifth-generation beekeeper.

And in her memoir, she talks about how she found her way into beekeeping as kind of a refuge from an unstable childhood. Her grandfather took her in, and he was a beekeeper. And she just found order and stability in watching the bees, learning their language. And she just had these really great vivid recollections of visiting their apiary in Big Sur and just like becoming like just falling in love with bees and just sharing her love of them with everyone else. And this is just also a great read for anyone who's just interested in memoirs or just bees in just. general, so really interesting. Yeah, staying with our nature theme. Let's go to the phones.

Let's go to Tampa, Florida. And Oaz Kalia, is that correct? Yes, that is. That's pretty correct. Yeah, that's good enough. Yeah, I get the same with my name, so I know how it is. I'm sorry about that. Go ahead.

No problem. My summer book recommendation would be a book called Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. And the first time I read the book, it was so, it spoke to me so much because I pictured myself in a time when the book was written when the environmental effects of things like pesticides weren't really widely known. And just reading the book, you could see what Rachel Carson was able to do because she was able to show people what the effects of things like pesticides

did to the environment. And I thought a book like that serves the purpose of just what an educational book should be. It should be something that educates people. But also that's something that's a great read. And it can read even though, say, like, 50 or 60 years later in our time as well. Allison, you're nodding your head about this.

You're a young, your student, it was written way before you were born. Do you agree that this is something that's something even, you know, modern, younger, young people should be reading now? Oh, yeah. I think it really changed the game for science readers or writers because they could, they saw that they could make a huge difference. And I think there's still a lot of, there's a long way to go in terms of changing the world around you for the better in terms of fixing the environment.

But that was a great first step forward. Yeah. Can I chime in on that too? Sure, absolutely. Yeah. So Silent Spring directly motivated the initiation of two citizen science projects that still continue that really actually, yeah, also helped people find their path to making a difference in helping conservation. And these were, my field is ornithology. These were bird projects, the breeding bird survey and the nest record.

cards. We asked people to tweet in during the week what their favorite books. We had so many answers. Let me see if I can get through a few of them. Karen says, I'm halfway through the map that changed the world by Simon Winchester, a great book about the first geological map of England. Camille, from Camilla, she says, Naomi Kleinz, this changes everything. This book covers it all. Climate science, economic, climate change, politics, environmental policies. Yet she gives us hope. So thinking about Rachel Carson about these books, people are still talking about environmental books. Yeah, they are still, more than ever, perhaps, would you not think? Karen, Stephanie.

Yes, I completely agree. Yeah. One of my favorite categories of summer books is animal science books. And they're just great for summer. Do you have any recommendations, Karen or Stephanie? I do, if I can just chime in. Sure. I really liked Eager by Ben Goldfarb.

He's an environmental journalist. And I tell people, you might not think you're interested in beavers, but after reading this book, you definitely will be. He talks about how their numbers declined during the first trade in the 1800s, and they since come back up. And there's this whole career of people who, if you found a beaver in your house or backyard, you can call relocation expert, and they can help relocate that beaver elsewhere, which is a really fascinating career.

And how they're being reintroduced in Scotland after being extinct. This is a really fun, quirky read. There's lots of great people, scientists, journalist, engineers who work revolves on beavers. And I would just recommend that as a really great summer read. Amira Plato, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm sorry, I usually walk on people's lines. Go ahead. I don't mean to.

I have an animal book that I recommend, which is called What the Dog Knows by Cat Warren. So what does the dog know you ask? What does the dog know you ask? Thank you. The dog knows. I can play straight, man. How to sniff out cadavers. Is that a pun?

The dog knows? Is that just a dad joke? Sorry. But yeah, it is. It's all about their noses. The story is about a woman who's actually an English professor at NC State. But her hobby is training her dog. to find missing persons and in telling that journey of how how she is trained to train her dog,

right? So the people are trained as well as the dog. There's just a, she weaves in a lot of science about scent, about like these amazing abilities that dogs have, and because of this topic is a lot of detective work. And I actually just really like mysteries, so I really like when science nonfiction involves mysteries, or else I'm just morbid, but, What's exciting, too, is that the young adult reader's version is coming out, I think, sometime in the next few months. This animal science books seem to be very interesting among everybody. One of my favorite genres of books. I like books about the history of science.

Do you, too, Allison, you like History of Science books? My list shows that. They're just fascinating. We have one coming up. I'm reading now that we'll be talking about in the next week or two. Tell us what you say you're fascinated. Give us a picker or two of your history of science books. Yeah, well, I really wanted to talk about Poison Squad by Deborah Blum.

Yeah, so I know she was on last year's program, but I really loved her other book, The Poisoners Dilemma, or Handbook, sorry, which is also pretty morbid. She did the Poison Deluxe. That was great. So I knew picking up Poison Squad was going to be really interesting and well-ridden. But it's a book about how the FDA came to be. And she talks about in the book how we romanticize historical foods a little bit. And the word old-fashioned is a little bit synonymous with untainted. But in actuality, historical foods were pretty gross.

And one great example is that they used to, dairy companies used to put formaldehyde in milk to keep it fresh for longer. And in fact, it turned it a little bit sweet. So people didn't mind it so much. But obviously, that's pretty gross. And there are a bunch of other examples of gross chemicals added to foods to preserve them or to color them. And it was only because of a group of activists and chemists and politicians complaining about this and trying to enact some legislation that that got changed. Any other book in that genre?

So Radium girls. Radium girls. Yeah, that's a great book. It's about the women who worked at the Radium Corporation painting watch faces. With no idea what the consequences. No, no idea. Yeah, and the company had an idea, which is the worst part, is the company knew long before the women who were working with Radium that Radium could be very dangerous, and they just ignored it and pushed it off. And these poor women, their bones crumbled away because they were ingesting radium, and it was killing them from the inside.

So it's a really, really horrible story. Ed Story, but we have to take a break. We're going to come back and talk lots more about books, your favorite books. We've got all kinds of folks on the line I want to talk about it. And if you'd like to join, we'd be very happy to have you to join us. So we're going to take a break. We'll be right back. Stay with us.

Don't go away. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday. We're talking about summer reading. Good books people are suggesting that you might want to take along with you on going to the beach, out to the mountains, hiking, whatever. and we're talking about with our readers, Allison Gilchrist,

Karen Cooper, Stephanie Sandala, and if you'd like to join us, we'd be happy to have you. We'd be happy to have you. 844-724-8255. Allison, anything on your list of people don't normally enjoy reading science books? Well, they could read some fiction if they wanted to.

Go for it. So I recommended a book called The Immortalism, by Chloe Benjamin. And this is fiction, but it does include a scientist, the story of a scientist. So this is a book about four kids who meet a fortune teller when they're quite young. And the fortune teller predicts the day that they're going to die. She can't tell them how or why, but she tells them the exact day. And so the rest of the book is them dealing with their own mortality.

Wow. Yeah. Hard thing to know the day you're going to. Yeah. Well, some of them don't believe it. So it's also a story about whether or not they believe in the supernatural. But the last story is about one of the kids who becomes a scientist, and she studies aging. And so that section of the book meant a lot to me because she felt like someone that I would run into in the hallway.

She feels like a real scientist, and she talks about her science in the same way that many of me and my friends do. So it was, I think, a good way to get a sense of why scientists do what they do and what they're interested in. Karen, what about your list, anything that's... It's not the standard nonfiction science story. Yeah, I guess I have a few. Let's see. A graphic novel and a book of poetry. Let's see.

Can you read a poem for us? I don't know that I could do it justice. I butcher poems all the time. So if you've got one, you know, we'll give you some time to do that. I'll give you my pick for one of my favorite books. One of my favorite books I recommended it last year, too, is Einstein and the Quantum by A. Douglas Stone. It's my top pick of this year's summer books, because, of course, it is the 100th anniversary of the solar eclipse that made Einstein famous. And, you know, we hear about all these famous scientists, but what Doug Stone does in this book is he makes a community out of them.

See, you see how they've all around the world interacted with each other. So it's a very personality heavy book with very little of equations and stuff. And it gives you an idea of what the period of life was like 100, 100, 20 years ago in science and what was going on and the theory of relativity and quantum so important. So, Karen, have I filled up enough air for you to... No pressure. I'm just, yeah, trying to pick here. but I'll say the book that I recommended of poetry,

Science Inspired Poetry, is called Radial Cemetery by Catherine Larson. And, yeah, I am not typically a person who, like, reads a lot of poetry. So for me, and maybe for people like me who don't read a lot of poetry, I think this is a really good way, if you like science, to start enjoying poetry. And I'm curious if it might also be good for people who aren't into some. science, but like poetry, to start getting into science. But it's, um, the poems are, are, uh,

like we often talk about what it means to think like a scientist, but these are definitely about like what it is like to feel, I guess, like a science, like to feel the curiosity, to feel the challenges and the frustrations, the fun. Um, it's not about communicating scientific knowledge or facts or methods or anything. It's really sensory. driven. I'm still trying to decide what to read here. They're not particularly short, so I'm thinking just a... Just read it, yeah, a couple of lines, a couple of lines.

One stands and one paragraph. Yeah. Yeah. So, Cripsis, for the way that things are hidden, how certain small truths disappear against a larger truth. The way my Cajun friends explains Boulabase as the synthesis of red snapper and crab,

oyster mussels and crawfish garlic and orange peel, dry white wine, the fusion of the senses. So autumn slips into the swamp lands with glossy alligator eyes. It goes on from there. That's nice.

But, um... Yeah. Yeah, you get that feeling. It is evocative of a feeling. Yeah, that's lovely. Yeah, you like that? Yeah. Yeah. Let's go to phones, to the phones,

because I'm sure a lot of people have a lot of suggestions we haven't gotten to and gosh, we have filled up. Let's go to San Francisco. Hi, Alan. Welcome to Science Friday. Hey. Hey there. Glad to be there. You'll be happy to know that it's about 54 degrees here. And so the heat wave is over. I'm at home with a sweater on. My book is Tides the Science and Spirit of the Ocean by Jonathan White. And I am an ocean geek. And I thought I knew every. thing there was to know about the tides, but this book is really incredible, and it's so informative and well-written.

That's great to hear. I'm an ocean geek, too, and you know, the physics of the tides is really hard to understand, you know, the interaction of the moon and the earth and gravity. It's not as simple as we think it is. No, not at all. And, you know, it's like, I'm used to having two tides a day and one being larger than the other, and that's not true everywhere. A lot of places have no tides,

and there are places like the Bay of Sunday that has huge tides. He also goes into tides as a way of generating electricity maybe in the future, and so it's a really fascinating, well-written book. That is a great book. Thank you, because I love the ocean myself. What do you think? Allison, Karen, Stephanie, what do you think? Yeah, yeah.

I was actually thinking, speaking of, I know he was based in California, too, So my next book was tying into California also. If I could talk about that really briefly. Sure, go ahead. Yeah, the Drempland by journalist Mark Arakz. And this is like part memoir, part California history, part kind of love letter to his home state of California. And he talks about his dad who grew up on a raisin farm and was a raisin farmer and friends and a family who work on almond and pistachio farms. And just the alternating periods of flood and drought and how they've affected California throughout the centuries even.

So this is just really interesting. It's really long, so it is really lengthy. I don't know if it's really a beach read, but it's just a really fascinating read, maybe like hiking or on an airplane or a long flight or anything. I talk to the lengths people go to to get water to keep their farms in existence. So it's really interesting. Very interesting. A tweet from Abigail Major who says,

I love when someone takes an object and analyzes the role it plays in history or culture. So the book, The World in a Grain, the Story of Sand, and how a transformed civilization is on my reading list this summer. Yeah, I am fascinated by sand also. And things that we think of sand, like the white clips of Dover really are diatoms. They were once all living things. They're the same. That's just me.

Yeah, it is interesting to think about. And Allison, how about for people who don't have the time to get through a whole book? Right, yeah. So I put on my list the best science and nature writing of 2018. and this year's edition was edited by Sam Keene. So this felt like a little bit of a cop-out because I've allowed Sam Keene to do all the hard work of finding the best science and nature writing

and then just put it in my own list. But it is, I think essays are a really great way to get introduced to science writing because if you don't want to commit to an entire book about a topic, you're not sure you're going to be super interested in. This is a great way to get a taste of a lot of different topics. It's like a short story. Yeah, exactly.

You don't want to read the whole book. You read Ed Grell and Poe or something. Yeah, exactly. Sure. Do you have a favorite? Yes. I'm so glad you asked because one of my favorite essays of all time is in this particular edition. It's called Fantastic Beasts and How to Rank Them by Catherine Schultz.

And it's about impossible creatures and how likely they are. So, for example, do you think that Bigfoot is more likely to exist than dragons? And why do we think that? So my lab has a running joke that Bigfoot probably does exist. and that is based on the fact that he's very similar to a lot of the creatures that exist in real life, unlike dragons, which don't have a analog in the real world. Jane Goodall would agree with you. Yeah. She believes in Bigfoot.

Really? I didn't know that. Many years ago, she was on our show and shocked everybody. We had a couple of minutes left, and she said, oh, yeah, I think it's real. Wow. No, I didn't know that. And she came on for all the years she's been coming on. She's been talking about it.

Let's go to the phones. Let's go to Oliver in Denver. Hi, Oliver. Hi there. Hi there. Hi there. Happy Plag Day. Thank you.

I wanted to recommend a book called Emergence. It's The Connected Lives of Ants, Brain, Cities, and Software by Stephen Johnson. Wow, that would be a connection, would it not? It's a great book. The Study of Emergence is the science of how non-hierarchical systems organize themselves, and it's kind of a paradigm-shifting book that talks. It's scientific, but it has a lot of implications outside of just science in terms of politics and just human organization and stuff. It's a really fascinating read.

I recommend it. Yeah, it's like big data, you know, if you think of ants and whatever. They all have some way that they predictably work. Exactly. And it's a really fascinating field because there's not a whole lot of research on it yet. It's pretty new, but it's really, really exciting to read about. Easy to read? It's a little bit dense, but it's fun to read because it just has so much implications for other fields.

Yeah, fun is good. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. You're welcome. Yeah, you know, we're starting to tie in all these different things, Allison. What do you think?

We have a lot of interesting things to make analogies. Oh, yeah. It's great to see how all of these books can connect to each other. I just generated a list based on what I'd read, but now I'm seeing all the... books that I want to read from you guys. Stephanie. I need to. One of the favorite vacations I've taken a couple of times to southern Utah, I've done

the east and the west sides of all those grand staircase, Escalante, beautiful national parks. And it's also where paleontologists head in the summer to dig up dinosaur bones. And one of my summer science book recommendations, if you like the history of dinosaurs, is the rise and fall of the dinosaurs by... Steve Broussadi, just a, he's a young scientist, and he writes so well, and he goes around the world finding other scientists and talking about how science is really done and the joy of discovery. Stephanie, I want to follow up with you with skeleton keys. Yeah, and I really like that book, too.

I know we talked about it last year when I was on, The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs. Yeah, and Skeleton Keys by Brian Sweatuck. I know he was on a show recently, and he was great then. And this is just a really fun book. Like, I would actually give this to someone who isn't really interested in science because there's this kind of so much fun trivia in the year about our bones, like how they have their own character, and they're just really dynamic and flexible more so than we would think.

And just I really like the part at the end a little about bone collecting and how it's kind of a status symbol now and the ethics of that and selling bones on like Instagram and Pinterest, which I'm like always on. So I was just like really fascinated by that part specifically. So this is just a really interesting book overall. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios at the studios of KUNC in Greeley, Colorado, talking about books. As we wind down, got a few more minutes to go. Anything, any book that, let me start with you, Allison, we shouldn't live without, you know, a book that's a great read that may not even be on your summer book list or any, you know, what book?

All right. I really enjoyed Ed Yong's book about microbes. I contain multitudes. So that's not on my list because it's fairly old, and I know you have talked about it before. But I think that that is a really good example of science writing. But there's no reason why you can't read the classic books. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that and Rachel Carson, and you've got it going.

Karen, what's your must read of all time books? That's really a tough one. Well, so this is a heavy book, and it's partly heavy because it's a little bit academic, so I hope it can count. But it's also heavy because of the topic, which is environmental racism. So kind of the way Rachel Carson's Silent Spring set in motion the environmental movement, this book, Dumping and Dixie by Robert Bullard set or really helps spur the environmental justice movement, which is sort of, of the intersection of the environmental movement with the civil rights movement. But it is a tough read, and a depressing read, I guess in some ways, or in many ways, that it's really is, he's just shining a light on in examples in several cities about the

sort of racial and economic disparities in environmental quality. and I think the book was first published in the early 1990s, and so there's some things that have changed since then, but for the most part, things really, I guess in many ways, haven't changed. I think it's a must just for people interested in environmentalism because it's a whole different way to look at race and environmentalism and who environmental leaders are and made me think differently about what it takes to have a sustainable plan.

planet, which really does involve social justice. I need to read that one, too. That's a heavy book. Stephanie, do you have any? Oh, yeah. I also really love the truth about animals by zabologist Lucy Clark. I'm Lucy Cook, sorry about that. And I really like this because she dedicates like one chapter each about myths and misconceptions

about animals that we kind of think are creepy, crawly, or just like, kind of like, you know, we like shudder a little bit. So, like, there's, like, bats, frogs, like hippos, sloths. And it's just really fun, popular science and just talking about how they're misunderstood and really, just really fun things that we should know about them. I think it's great for adults and teens and just, like, a really good, that's a really good beach read more so than the drums land a little bit. Yeah, and there are, I can't think of them off the top of my head. Maybe you can.

There are some really good graphic novels out there about science. Well, I have one on my list. Yeah, go ahead. which is the thrilling adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. So that's A. Love Lace and Charles Babbage. And it's, you know, and so they were sort of laying the groundwork for computers back in the day and hoped to make this analytical engine.

You know, that would use punch cards for programming. And anyway, so it tells their story and does have a lot of primary, like, especially letters and whatnot that it draws on in references. But then I think because they never made that machine, the author, I guess, wants, it starts to go into fiction and then takes the graphic novel into just like, she just has so much enthusiasm for these two characters that takes them and plops them down into other stories.

And it's really hilarious. And it's, I mean, it's super interesting about the science that goes into computing. But anyway, it's pretty fun. Like, Love Lace in Wonderland. You've got the last word today, Allison Gilchrist, graduate student researcher at C.U. Boulder, Karen Cooper,

Van C. State, and Stephanie Sendala, associate editor for Library General of Views. Thank you all for taking time to be with us today. Oh, thank you. Thank you. And you can see all of the books we talked about on our website at ScienceFriiday.com slash summer books. BJ Leatherman composed our theme music.

I want to thank all the folks here at KUNC, Ryan Thompson, Robert Leija, Neil Best, and all the great folks, as they say, who welcomed us into their studios and great food they gave us today also. And if you missed any part of the program, you'd like to hear it again. You can subscribe to our podcast, all the social media, everything. And what we do is up there on our website. You know how to find it. We'll see you back next week in New York. I'm Ira Flato in Greeley, Colorado.