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Nature and Science December 2025 |
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Purified: How Recycled Sewage Is Transforming Our Water
by Peter Annin
Water shortages are plaguing communities from coast to coast, and recycled water could help close that gap. In Purified: How Recycled Sewage Is Transforming Our Water, veteran journalist Peter Annin shows that wastewater has become a surprising weapon in America's war against water scarcity.
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We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate
by Michael Grunwald
From the author of New York Times bestseller The New New Deal, a groundbreaking piece of reportage from the trenches of the next climate war: the fight to fix our food system. He chronicles Searchinger's uphill battles against bad science and bad politics, both driven by the overwhelming influence of agricultural interests. And he illuminates a path that could save our planetary home for ourselves and future generations--through better policy, technology, and behavior, as well as a new land ethic recognizing that every acre matters.
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| The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us About How to Live Well With the Rest of Life by Rob DunnThe evolution of life is mainly a story of competition. But this has caused scientists to miss the cooperation between organisms happening everywhere in nature. These “mutualisms” (mutually beneficial relationships between species) occur between animals and plants of all types on every continent, and biologist Rob Dunn’s vivid descriptions enable the reader to envision the complex interdependencies in nature’s ecosystems in his “triumph of popular science” (Publishers Weekly). |
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| The Last Extinction: The Real Science Behind the Death of the Dinosaurs by Gerta KellerIn geologist Gerta Keller’s debut book, she shares her groundbreaking theory that the extinction of the dinosaurs did not stem from an asteroid colliding with Earth, but rather from extreme volcanic activity in present-day India. At first facing widespread criticism and now widely accepted as fact, her work is accessibly presented in a book that foregrounds women scientists and the difficulty of overturning entrenched theories. Try this next: Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds by Thomas Halliday. |
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The Well-Connected Animal: Social Networks and the Wondrous Complexity of Animal Societies
by Lee Alan Dugatkin
Drawing on work in animal behavior, evolution, computer science, psychology, anthropology, and genetics, Dugatkin enlightens readers about the role of social networks for animals in the wild. Readers will learn that social networks play a key role in the lives of giraffes, elephants, kangaroos, many a primate and bird species, Tasmanian devils, honeybees, whales, bats, badgers, field crickets, manta rays, and more.
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The Origins of Creativity
by Edward O. Wilson
An eloquent exploration of creativity, The Origins of Creativity grapples with the question of how this uniquely human expression--so central to our identity as individuals and, collectively, as a species--came about and how it has manifested itself throughout the history of our species.
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| The Big One: How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics by Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH and Mark OlshakerNot to sound alarmist or anything, but authors Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker concede that COVID-19 may have been merely a warm-up for the next pandemic. To that end, they construct some chilling real-world scenarios that they hope will urge government leaders to take communicable disease as seriously as any national security issue. For readers fascinated by World War C: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic and How to Prepare for the Next One by Sanjay Gupta. |
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| If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All by Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate SoaresAI researchers Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares sound a strident alarm over the race to design the ultimate machine intelligence. While corporations and governments everywhere push relentlessly toward the development of “artificial superintelligence” (ASI), the authors warn that current industry safeguards are insufficient to contain a program that is “optimized for efficiency and unconstrained by human ethics” (Booklist). For further predictions of terrifying techno-disasters, check out X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction by Thomas Moynihan. |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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