HARVARD MAGAZINE (October 15, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Out of Reach’ – America’s housing affordability crisis…
America’s housing problem—and what to do about it by Jonathan Shaw
Latanya Sweeney confronts our all-consuming “technocracy.” by Lydialyle Gibson
College sports are changing. Will Harvard athletics? by Max J. Krupnick
Einstein’s Tutor
Lee Phillips PublicAffairs (2024)
Major studies of Albert Einstein’s work contain minimal, if any, reference to the role of German mathematician Emmy Noether. Yet, she was crucial in resolving a paradox in general relativity through her theorem connecting symmetry and energy-conservation laws, published in 1918. When Noether died in 1935, Einstein called her “the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began”. In this book about her for the general reader, physicist Lee Phillips brings Noether alive.
Silk Roads
Sue Brunning et al. British Museum Press (2024)
The first object discussed in this lavishly illustrated British Museum exhibition book reveals the far-ranging, mysterious nature of the Silk Roads. It is a Buddha figure, excavated in Sweden from a site dated to around ad 800, and probably created in Pakistan two centuries earlier. No one knows how it reached Europe or its significance there. As the authors — three of them exhibition curators — admit, it is “impossible to capture the full extent and complexity of the Silk Roads in a single publication”— even by limiting their time frame to only five centuries.
The Last Human Job
Allison Pugh Princeton Univ. Press (2024)
A century ago, notes sociologist Allison Pugh, people doing their food shopping gave lists to shop workers, who retrieved the goods then haggled over the prices. The process epitomized what she terms connective labour, which involves “an emotional understanding with another person to create the outcomes we think are important”. A healthy society requires more connective labour, not more automation, she argues in her engaging study, which observes and interviews physicians, teachers, chaplains, hairdressers and more.
Becoming Earth
Ferris Jabr Random House (2024)
According to science journalist Ferris Jabr, his intriguing book about Earth — divided into three sections on rock, water and air — is “an exploration of how life has transformed the planet, a meditation on what it means to say that Earth itself is alive”. If this definition sounds similar to the Gaia hypothesis by chemist James Lovelock and biologist Lynn Margulis, that is welcome to Jabr, who admires Lovelock as a thinker and personality. He also recognizes how the 1970s hypothesis, which evolved over decades, still divides scientists.
Into the Clear Blue Sky
Rob Jackson Scribner (2024)
Earth scientist Rob Jackson chairs the Global Carbon Project, which works to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and improve air and water quality. His book begins hopefully on a visit to Rome, where Vatican Museums conservators discuss the “breathtaking” restoration of the blue sky in Michelangelo’s fresco The Last Judgement, damaged by centuries of grime and visitors’ exhalations. But he ends on a deeply pessimistic note on a research boat in Amazonia, which is suffering from both floods and fires: the “Hellocene”.
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Research suggests swings in Pacific Ocean can account for planet’s sudden and perplexing temperature jump
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Algorithm homes in on wetlands and industrial sites linked to high emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas.
Turtle hatchlings, which can begin life up to a metre deep in sand, point their heads towards the surface and make their way out onto the beach.
Therapeutic T cells used to treat acute myeloid leukaemia secrete proteins that impair the cells’ own ability to attack cancer.
The parts of a 3D-printed device can be changed out, allowing for versatility as well as ultrahigh resolution.
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Ant larvae infected with a pathogenic fungus had better watch out for Mum.
Artefacts found in modern-day Germany suggest that northern and southern peoples clashed in the Tollense Valley millennia ago.
‘Soft cells’ — shapes with rounded corners and pointed tips that fit together on a plane — feature in onions, molluscs and more.
Environomics
By Dharshini David
Why should an orangutan care what toothpaste a person uses, asks economist Dharshini David, in her appealing book about how human lifestyle choices affect the planet. Answer: some toothpastes use palm oil to create foam, whereas others don’t, and palm-oil production requires the clearing of tropical forests, eliminating the habitats of creatures such as orangutans. “Nearly every issue that affects the environment comes down, in some way, to what someone, somewhere, is doing to make (or save) money,” she writes.
Mapmatics
By Paulina Rowińska
From world maps designed by geographer Gerardus Mercator for marine navigation in the sixteenth century to online maps created by Google for self-driving cars in the twenty-first century, maps rely on mathematics. “While different on the surface, the jobs of a mathematician and a cartographer are surprisingly similar,” writes mathematician Paulina Rowińska in her engaging and original history of ‘mapmatics’. Indeed, maps not only depend on mathematics but have also inspired many mathematical breakthroughs.
The Arts and Computational Culture
By Tula Giannini & Jonathan P. Bowen
This substantial, topical collection on the arts and computing, edited by information scientist Tula Giannini and computer scientist Jonathan Bowen, begins with polymath Leonardo da Vinci’s blending of art and science and ends with a survey of modern art exhibitions that involve computing. As the editors write, “facilitated by computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, algorithms, and simulated human senses, the arts are expanding their horizons”. Perhaps AI will eventually stand also for Artistic Imagination?
Women in the Valley of the Kings
By Kathleen Sheppard
Discussions of Egyptologists tend to focus on men — for example, Howard Carter, who excavated Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. Yet, women played an important part in Egyptology, as historian Kathleen Sheppard describes. She begins in the 1870s with Marianne Brocklehurst and Amelia Edwards’s A Thousand Miles up the Nile, and ends with Caroline Ransom Williams’s death in 1952. Lacking permission to find artefacts, these women “acquired, organized and maintained” the world’s largest collections of Egyptian objects.
This Ordinary Stardust
By Alan Townsend
Alan Townsend, dean of the college of forestry and conservation at the University of Montana in Missoula, calls himself a biogeochemist. This field can teach us, he remarks, about cornfields, fertilizers, lake colours, sea life and even planetary warming. It can also “nurture the soul”. He learnt this truth when both his beloved wife and four-year-old daughter fell ill with brain cancer, and only the child recovered. His moving memoir describes how scientific wonder rescued him from appalling grief and suicidal thoughts.
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Thwaites collaboration finds glacier has stabilized somewhat—in the short term
Nation appears to have upgraded its bombmaking capacity, experts say
Tens of thousands of fossils detail the sea’s dramatic loss and eventual rebound
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Primordial black holes, which are smaller than their better-known cousins, visit the inner Solar System once a decade, simulations suggest.
A bubble of air on its snout extends the water anole’s underwater time by more than a minute.
Severe nosebleeds caused by hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia dwindled in people who took a drug used to treat cancer
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Mining companies and others skeptical that metallic nodules electrically split seawater
Beneath Europa’s icy crust is a salty ocean, perhaps the best place in the Solar System to look for life. A NASA spacecraft will soon set off to probe the jovian moon
Reconstructing ancient Earth’s temperature reveals a global climate regulation system
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Discovery could help to identify ways to prevent relapse into opioid usage.
The aquatic mammals disperse seeds of their favourite foods as they migrate, according to a serendipitous study of their poo.
Scientists create textiles with just the right weave and yarn to keep biting insects at bay.
Extremely remote islands are more likely than less isolated ones to have a high number of endemic languages.
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