Tag Archives: science

In My Hands Today…

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Slow Death by Rubber Duck: How the Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Life Affects Our Health – Rick Smith, Bruce Lourie

Pollution is no longer just about belching smokestacks and ugly sewer pipes – now, it’s personal.

The most dangerous pollution has always come from commonplace items in our homes and workplaces. Smith and Lourie ingested and inhaled a host of things that surround all of us all the time. This book exposes the extent to which we are poisoned every day of our lives. For this book, over the period of a week – the kind of week that would be familiar to most people – the authors use their own bodies as the reference point and tell the story of pollution in our modern world, the miscreant corporate giants who manufacture the toxins, the weak-kneed government officials who let it happen, and the effects on people and families across the globe. Parents and concerned citizens will have to read this book.

Key concerns raised in Slow Death by Rubber Duck include flame-retardant chemicals from electronics and household dust polluting our blood; toxins in our urine caused by leaching from plastics and run-of-the-mill shampoos, toothpastes and deodorant; mercury in our blood from eating tuna; and the chemicals that build up in our body when carpets and upholstery off-gas.

Ultimately hopeful, the book empowers readers with some simple ideas for protecting themselves and their families, and changing things for the better.

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How to Survive History: How to Outrun a Tyrannosaurus, Escape Pompeii, Get Off the Titanic, and Survive the Rest of History’s Deadliest Catastrophes – Cody Cassidy

A detailed guide to surviving history’s most challenging threats, from outrunning dinosaurs to making it off the Titanic alive

History is the most dangerous place on Earth. From dinosaurs the size of locomotives to meteors big enough to sterilize the planet, from famines to pandemics, from tornadoes to the Chicxulub asteroid, the odds of human survival are slim but not zero—at least, not if you know where to go and what to do.

In each chapter of How to Survive History, Cody Cassidy explores how to survive one of history’s greatest threats: getting eaten by dinosaurs, being destroyed by the asteroid that wiped them out, succumbing to the lava flows of Pompeii, being devoured by the Donner Party, drowning during the sinking of the Titanic, falling prey to the Black Death, and more. Using hindsight and modern science to estimate everything from how fast you’d need to run to outpace a T. rex to the advantages of different body types in surviving the Donner Party tragedy, Cassidy gives you a detailed battle plan for survival while helping you learn about the era.

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Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong – Paul A. Offit


What happens when ideas presented as science lead us in the wrong direction?

History is filled with brilliant ideas that gave rise to disaster, and this book explores the most fascinating—and significant—missteps: from opium’s heyday as the pain reliever of choice to recognition of opioids as a major cause of death in the U.S.; from the rise of trans fats as the golden ingredient for tastier, cheaper food to the heart disease epidemic that followed; and from the cries to ban DDT for the sake of the environment to an epidemic-level rise in world malaria.

These are today’s sins of science—as deplorable as mistaken past ideas about advocating racial purity or using lobotomies as a cure for mental illness. These unwitting errors add up to seven lessons both cautionary and profound, narrated by renowned author and speaker Paul A. Offit. Offit uses these lessons to investigate how we can separate good science from bad, using some of today’s most controversial creations—e-cigarettes, GMOs, drug treatments for ADHD—as case studies. For every “Aha!” moment that should have been an “Oh no,” this book is an engrossing account of how science has been misused disastrously—and how we can learn to use its power for good.

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Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World – Marcia Bjornerud

Why an awareness of Earth’s temporal rhythms is critical to our planetary survival

Few of us have any conception of the enormous timescales in our planet’s long history, and this narrow perspective underlies many of the environmental problems we are creating for ourselves. The passage of nine days, which is how long a drop of water typically stays in Earth’s atmosphere, is something we can easily grasp. But spans of hundreds of years–the time a molecule of carbon dioxide resides in the atmosphere–approach the limits of our comprehension. Our everyday lives are shaped by processes that vastly predate us, and our habits will in turn have consequences that will outlast us by generations.

Timefulness reveals how knowing the rhythms of Earth’s deep past and conceiving of time as a geologist does can give us the perspective we need for a more sustainable future.

Marcia Bjornerud shows how geologists chart the planet’s past, explaining how we can determine the pace of solid Earth processes such as mountain building and erosion and comparing them with the more unstable rhythms of the oceans and atmosphere. These overlapping rates of change in the Earth system–some fast, some slow–demand a poly-temporal worldview, one that Bjornerud calls “timefulness.” She explains why timefulness is vital in the Anthropocene, this human epoch of accelerating planetary change, and proposes sensible solutions for building a more time-literate society.

This compelling book presents a new way of thinking about our place in time, enabling us to make decisions on multigenerational timescales. The lifespan of Earth may seem unfathomable compared to the brevity of human existence, but this view of time denies our deep roots in Earth’s history–and the magnitude of our effects on the planet.

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Who Sought to See the Future – Peter Moore

In 1865 Admiral Robert FitzRoy locked himself in his dressing room and cut his throat. His grand meteorological project had failed. Yet only a decade later, FitzRoy’s storm warning system and “forecasts” would return, the model for what we use today.

In an age when a storm at sea was evidence of God’s wrath, nineteenth-century meteorologists had to fight against convention and religious dogma. Buoyed by the achievements of the Enlightenment, a generation of mavericks set out to decipher the secrets of the atmosphere and predict the future. Among them were Luke Howard, the first to classify clouds; Francis Beaufort, who quantified the winds; James Glaisher, who explored the upper atmosphere in a hot-air balloon; Samuel Morse, whose electric telegraph gave scientists the means by which to transmit weather warnings; and FitzRoy himself, master sailor, scientific pioneer, and founder of the U.K.’s national weather service.

Reputations were built and shattered. Fractious debates raged over decades between scientists from London and Galway, Paris and New York. Explaining the atmosphere was one thing, but predicting what it was going to do seemed a step too far. In 1854, when a politician suggested to the Commons that Londoners might soon know the weather twenty-four hours in advance, the House roared with laughter.

Peter Moore’s The Weather Experiment navigates treacherous seas and rough winds to uncover the obsession that drove these men to great invention and greater understanding.