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Nature and Science October 2025 |
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| The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World... by Samuel ArbesmanScientist Samuel Arbesman waxes rhapsodic about the power and possibilities of code, the digital building block of intelligence, communication, and innovation. Arbesman looks back on what has been accomplished in the past several decades to inform his hopeful predictions for the future, concluding that code is a modern-day metaphor for magic and wizardry. Try this next: Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson. |
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The age of outrage : how to lead in a polarized world
by Karthik Ramanna
Based on his popular Oxford leadership program and deep-dive case studies on organizations such as IKEA, Nestlâe, the London Metropolitan Police, the Vatican, and others, Karthik Ramanna offers a set of practices for leaders to navigate this age ofpolarization-steps leaders can take to make sense of the outrage they encounter, work with relevant stakeholders to progress through it, and emerge stronger for it. Ramanna's practical framework, developed through years of experience with organizations, helps leaders "turn down the temperature," analyze root causes, develop and implement distinctive organizational responses that are mission consistent, and build individual and organizational resilience. Just as governments have systems for managing regular adverse-weather events such as hurricanes, organizations and their leaders now need an equivalent for managing the stakeholder hostilities that contextualize nearly all their decisions. This book is the essential guide for managing in the age of outrage.
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The last dangerous visions
by Harlan Ellison
Provocative and controversial, socially conscious and politically charged, wildly imaginative yet deeply grounded, the thirty-two never-before-published stories, essays, and poems...stand as a testament to Ellison's lifelong pursuit of art.
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Unreliable : bias, fraud, and the reproducibility crisis in biomedical research
by Csaba Szabâo
In this book, biomedical researcher Csaba Szabo summarizes the causes and consequences of this so-called "reproducibility crisis" in biomedical research. The range of causes is wide, from the specificities of the methods used, through various pitfalls in the design of experiments and analysis of experimental data (e.g., confirmation bias), plagiarism and deliberate data falsification, to the systematic publication of fictitious experiments that have never been performed. Through a few blatant examples - e.g. Anil Potti (Duke University); Piero Anversa (Harvard University) - Szabo describes the damaging impact that blatant fraud can have on the development of an entire field of science, and introduces some of the maverick "science investigators" - often working in anonymity - who devote their lives to tracking down and exposing scientific fraudsters. The book also answers the questions (a) what individual and systemic factors are involved in allowing these phenomena to occur, (b) why the appropriate steps have not been taken to control them, and (c) what the implications of the crisis are for the future of medicine and, within it, for the development of new drugs.
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Memory lane : the perfectly imperfect ways we remember
by Ciara Greene
Making Memories describes the science of how memories are constructed and reconstructed, revealing how this process of making (and remaking) memories - which has strengths, but also introduces vulnerabilities - is central to the formation of our identities. Rather than retrieving memories fully formed from long-term storage, memories are reconstructed every time we attempt to recall them. The way in which memories are reconstructed can lead to errors and distortions and even to entirely false memories. The authors describe the consequences of these memory errors, including faulty eyewitness identifications and susceptibility to misinformation. Greene and Murphy also discuss the effects of memory distortion in our lives, both negative and positive. The downsides of memory distortions are considerable; however, the authors make the point that they arise not as some anomaly or failure of evolution but rather as a by-product of a "perfectly imperfect" process that evolved to solve problems in our ancestral environment. These "flaws" are perhaps better thought of as "features," as they help to make us who we are and enable us to go about our lives and make sense of our experiences. The problems arise when we have unrealistic expectations of our memories - for example, if we expect them to record our experiences like a video camera, perfectly preserving the past, which they do not.
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How to be a living thing : meditations on intuitive oysters, hopeful doves, and being human in the world
by Mari Andrew
A luminous collection of essays exploring the lessons we can incorporate from the animal world in order to live more fully as humans A shelter cat teaches us that our damaged parts, too, are worthy of love... a captive orca shows us that inconvenience and difficulties are the blessing of a full life... a gorilla teaches the universal language of grief... a group of oysters who prove that magic and science can and do coexist... In How to Be a Living Thing, Mari Andrew reflects on the ways animals mirror,challenge, and deepen our experiences as living creatures in the world.
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Water Bodies : Love Letters to the Most Abundant Substance on Earth
by Laura Paskus
The human experience has always been shaped by water, by its absence and its abundance. Now, as the climate crisis worsens, dry riverbeds and record floods remind us that water was never merely a resource to be managed or a commodity to be sold. It wields the power to reshape continents and capture our imaginations, a force as beguiling and as it is seductive. In Water Bodies , some of the West's most thoughtful writers remind us why stories about water stretch back as far as we can remember: where we find water, we find ourselves.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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