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Nature and Science February 2026 |
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| Poppy State: A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings by Myriam GurbaLatine author Myriam Gurba’s poetic essay collection -- structured around 20 plants of her native California -- is intentionally designed to disorient the reader. The process of finding one’s way through the book’s “labyrinth” entails careful attention to Gurba’s observations about life and nature, which range from the scientific to the deeply personal. For fans of: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. |
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| Lab Dog: A Beagle and His Human Investigate the Surprising World of Animal Research by Melanie D.G. KaplanJournalist Melanie D.G. Kaplan was curious about her beloved rescue beagle Alexander Hamilton -- a.k.a. Hammy -- and his past as a test subject in an animal research lab. In the course of exploring Hammy’s history and the ways animals are used in biomedical research, product testing, and veterinary training, Kaplan poses thorny questions about ethics and animal rights in her moving debut. For more on these issues, try Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility by Martha C. Nussbaum. |
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The Hidden Seasons: A Calendar of Nature's Clues
by Tristan Gooley
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs: Learn to spot the endlessly unfolding clues and signs that reveal the hidden ways nature changes every day of the yearWe all notice the flowers of spring, longer days of summer, colors of autumn, and snowfalls of winter. But have you observed the way that water tends to run clearest in June? Did you know that at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, you can find Sirius due south in the night sky? And have you seen the poetic shadow compasses butterflies make on the hottest days, as they align their wings with the sun, their thin shadows pointing the way north?The sun, moon, stars, plants, fungi, animals, water, and weather all tell us secrets about the seasons--if we know how to read their clues. In this sense-awakening book, New York Times bestselling author Tristan Gooley reimagines the seasonal calendar not as four distinct phases but as a series of changes evolving moment by moment every day of the year. Each granular shift is an extraordinary microseason you won't want to miss. It's time to get out there and explore--the seasons will never look, sound, or smell the same again.
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Capturing Kahanamoku: How a Surfing Legend and a Scientific Obsession Redefined Race and Culture
by Michael Rossi
In 1920, Henry Fairfield Osborn, director of New York's American Museum of Natural History, traveled to Hawaii on an anthropological research trip. While there, he took a surfing lesson. His teacher was Duke Kahanamoku, a famous surf-rider and budding movie star. For Osborn, a fervent eugenicist, Kahanamoku was a maddening paradox: physically perfect, yet belonging to an imperfect race. Osborn dispatched young scientist Louis Sullivan to Honolulu to measure, photograph, and cast in plaster Kahanamoku and other Hawaiian people. The study touched off a series of events that forever changed how we think about race, culture, science, and the essence of humanity--
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The Place of Tides
by James Rebanks
A National BestsellerA modern classic, one we very much need right now. -George SaundersFrom the acclaimed author of The Shepherd's Life, a magical work of nonfiction in which James Rebanks reflects on a life-changing summer spent on a remote island off the coast of Norway, where his only companion was an old woman who practiced the ancient tradition of collecting eiderdown from birds that nest on this remarkable landscape each yearWe are all in need of lights to follow.One afternoon many years ago, James Rebanks met an old woman on a remote Norwegian island. She lived and worked alone on a tiny rocky outcrop, caring for wild Eider ducks and gathering their down. Hers was a centuries-old trade that had once made men and women rich but had long been in decline. Still, somehow, she seemed to be hanging on.Back at home, Rebanks couldn't stop thinking about the woman on the rocks. She was fierce and otherworldly--and yet strangely familiar. Years passed. Then, one day, he wrote her a letter, asking if he could return. Bring work clothes, she replied, and good boots, and come quickly: her health was failing. And so he travelled to the edge of the Arctic to witness her last season on the island.This is the story of that season. It is the story of a unique and ancient landscape, and of the woman who brought it back to life. It traces the pattern of her work from the rough, isolated toil of bitter winter to the elation of the endless summer light, when the birds leave behind their precious down for gathering, like feathered gold.Slowly, Rebanks begins to understand that this woman and her world are not what he had previously thought. What began as a journey of escape becomes an extraordinary lesson in self-knowledge and forgiveness.
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The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines
by Gaurav Suri
When we are trying to solve a problem, what happens? We find ourselves weighing arguments, or relying on intuition, then reaching a conscious decision about what to do. What is going on behind the scenes? In The Emergent Mind, Gaurav Suri and Jay McClelland show that our experience is the tip of an iceberg of brain activity that can be captured in an artificial neural network. Such networks-initially developed as models of ourselves-have become the engines of artificial neural intelligence. Suri and McClelland aren't reducing mankind to mere machines. Rather, they are showing how a data-driven neural network can create thoughts, emotions, and ideas-a mind-whether in humans or computers. The Emergent Mind provides a fascinating account of how we reach decisions, why we change our minds, and how we are affected by context and experience. Ultimately, the book gives a new answer to one of our oldest questions: Not just how do minds work, but what does it mean to be a mind at all?-- Provided by publisher.
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Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View
by Edward McPherson
A charming, idiosyncratic meditation on the human urge to see further, and more, in this cultural history of the 'aerial view' . . . McPherson makes an elliptical and enchanting case for reinserting wherever possible the ground-level, human perspective . . . Redolent with insights into the ethical quandary of history-making, as well as the author's own sense of awe at the full sweep of the human story, this is a wonder.--Publishers Weekly, starred review As if Borges and Didion took a tour with Sebald through the beauty and terror of our present and past, Look Out is a profound and prismatic investigation of taking the long view.Look Out is an exploration of long-distance mapping, aerial photography, and top-down and far-ranging perspectives--from pre-Civil War America to our vexed modern times of drone warfare, hyper-surveillance at home and abroad, and quarantine and protest. Blending history, reporting, personal experience, and accounts of activists, programmers, spies, astronauts, artists, inventors, and dreamers, Edward McPherson reveals that to see is to control--and the stakes are high for everyone. The aerial view--a position known in Greek as the catascopos, or the looker-down--is a fundamentally privileged perspective, inaccessible to those left on the ground. To the earthbound, (in)sights from such rarified heights convey power and authority. McPherson casts light on our fetishization of distance as a path to truth and considers the awe and apocalypse of taking the long view.
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| The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne by Chris SweeneyJournalist Chris Sweeney's richly detailed debut profiles pioneering forensic ornithologist and Smithsonian Institution taxidermist Roxie Laybourne (1910-2003), who utilized her avian expertise to solve murders, investigate poaching activities, and inspect bird-related plane crashes, the latter of which led to aircraft safety reforms. For fans of: The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk Wallace Johnson. |
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The Physics of Superheroes Goes Hollywood: An All-New Exploration of the Real Science of the Multiverse, the Quantum Realm, and Everything in Between
by James Kakalios
The multiverse and the quantum realm are fictional plot devices made popular by some of our favorite superheroes. But what if science-fiction may actually be science-fact? The truth is that many of the fantastical elements we see on the screen are based in real science. And in The Physics of Superheroes: Hollywood Edition, acclaimed physics professor and superhero nerd James Kakalios explains it all. From Spider-Man's webbing and Black Panther's kinetic suit to Superman's time-traveling speed and Captain Cold's cold gun (not a freeze gun!), there is plenty to learn about the real-life scientific advances that inspired the famous feats of our favorite heroes. Fearless readers will embark on a journey to discover the Theory of General Relativity, quantum chemistry, multiverse theory (both parallel and bubble varieties), and more, while fully immersed in the most popular cinematic universes of our time. Prepare to get educated in the nerdiest way possible--
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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