I’m a science journalist, podcaster and opinion columnist for the Bloomberg News Service. I’ve written for the New York Times, Science, Sky and Telescope, Psychology Today, New Scientist and other publications. I studied geophysics at Caltech, where I learned about climate change and the long history of our planet. I wrote about astrophysics and particle physics for Science Magazine before taking a job as a general science reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. There, I asked for the chance to write a weekly science column. The editors said they wanted a sex column. I made the best of it, creating a column about sex in the natural world.
I wrote
The Score: How The Quest For Sex Has Shaped The Modern Man
If you’ve ever wondered how the universe could have originated from a speck and expanded in a big bang, or why scientists came to believe such a thing, this book explains it all in an accessible, gripping story. Overbye, who is a science writer for the New York Times, paints a sweeping history of big bang cosmology through the colorful characters who put it together in the second half of the 20th century. The story revolves around astronomer Allan Sandage, who was a student of the famed Edwin Hubble. After Hubble discovered that the stars were arranged in galaxies that were speeding away from each other, he died, leaving Sandage to finish his quest to understand the implications of this expansion, measure the age of the universe, and determine whether the cosmos is eternally spreading out into an ever more sparse and lonely place.
In southern California, nearly a half century ago, a small band of researchers -- equipped with a new 200-inch telescope and a faith born of scientific optimism -- embarked on the greatest intellectual adventure in the history of humankind: the search for the origin and fate of the universe. Their quest would eventually engulf all of physics and astronomy, leading not only to the discovery of quasars, black holes, and shadow matter but also to fame, controversy, and Nobel Prizes. Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos tells the story of the men and women who have taken eternity on their shoulders…
From hiccups to hernias, the human body is rife with apparent design flaws. Why? Evolution, as it’s understood today, isn’t a ladder to perfection, and we humans can’t completely shake the anatomy of our distant ancestors – fish. Shubin describes his own work on Tiktaalik, a species that took part in the transition from fish to land animals. Its fossils hold clues to the evolution of our bodies – from the structure of our bones and joints to our organs and tissues.
This unusual look at our evolution is a reminder that while humans evolved from some common ape-like animal, our evolutionary path goes back to the very origin of life, and along the way, we incorporated many anatomical quirks that benefitted creatures with very different lifestyles.
The paleontologist and professor of anatomy who co-discovered Tiktaalik, the “fish with hands,” tells a “compelling scientific adventure story that will change forever how you understand what it means to be human” (Oliver Sacks).
By examining fossils and DNA, he shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our heads are organized like long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genomes look and function like those of worms and bacteria. Your Inner Fish makes us look at ourselves and our world in an illuminating new light. This is science writing at its finest—enlightening, accessible and told with irresistible…
Why would roses look beautiful to humans? Why would certain herbs create hallucinations in the human brain? Michael Pollan follows the deep back story of four species of desirable plants to explore many questions we take for granted about the world around us. This book is an example of the way great science writing can answer questions we didn’t even think to ask.
A farmer cultivates genetically modified potatoes so that a customer at McDonald's half a world away can enjoy a long, golden french fry. A gardener plants tulip bulbs in the autumn and in the spring has a riotous patch of colour to admire. Two simple examples of how humans act on nature to get what we want. Or are they? What if those potatoes and tulips have evolved to gratify certain human desires so that humans will help them multiply? What if, in other words, these plants are using us just as we use them? In blending history, memoir and…
Were the original humans warlike or peaceful, lazy or industrious, egalitarian or hierarchical, monogamous or promiscuous? This ambitious book uses archaeology and historical records to make a powerful case that humans have lived in diverse ways throughout prehistory. They argue that the overthrowing of traditional ways in the European enlightenment was inspired by the age of exploration and encounters with Native Americans and other indigenous people. Through them, Europeans learned about alternative ways to organize societies – where, for example, following leaders was optional. Europeans, even as they denigrated those they encountered, also recognized that there were better ways for humans to live and thrive.
A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction…
A journey into the way particle physics reveals the structure of inner space, told through the dramatic competition between two teams of physicists using the world’s first supercollider at CERN. The goal was to find two theoretical but never detected particles called the W and Z bosons. Jealousy, overbearing personalities, and the rush for glory.
A renowned science writer examines the work being done by high-energy physicists in their quest to understand how the universe began, what it is made of, and where it is headed
What really separates males from females in nature? What tendencies or traits would distinguish male willow trees, killer whales, bees, goldfish, mice, and men? The answer is simple – males have the smaller sex cell. Sperm are by definition smaller than eggs. The first life forms didn’t have sex or sexes. In my research, I went in search of the life forms that invented sexes(probably a form of algae) and explored the wide-ranging implications for life on earth. Along the way, readers learn why peacocks are polygamous and penguins are monogamous, why the male stick insect latches on to his mate for days on end, why some animals show homosexual behavior, why some clownfish change sexes, and why the male honeybee will try to mate with a queen even though his conquest causes him to die.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
