The Ganges has always been more than just an ordinary river. For millions of Indians, she is also a goddess. According to popular belief, bathing in “Mother Ganga” dissolves all sins, drinking her waters cures illness, and dying on her banks ensures freedom from the cycle of death and rebirth.

Yet there remains a paradox: while Ganga is worshipped devotedly, she is also exploited without remorse. Much of her water has been siphoned off for irrigation, toxic chemicals are dumped into her, and dams and barrages have been built on her course, causing immense damage. Ganga is in danger of dying -- but if the river dies, will the goddess die too?

The question took journalist Julian Crandall Hollick on an extraordinary journey through northern India: from the river’s source high in the Himalayas, past great cities and poor villages, to lush Saggar Island, where the river finally meets the sea. Along the way he encounters priests and pilgrims, dacoits and dolphins, the fishermen who subsist on the river, and the villagers whose lives have been destroyed by her. He finds that popular devotion to Ganga is stronger and blinder than ever, and it is putting her -- and her people -- in great risk.

Combining travelogue, science, and history, Ganga is a fascinating portrait of a river and a culture. It will show you India as you have never imagined it.

See also the web site for the project, along with radio programs.

Ganga: A Journey Down the Ganges River

Using nearly five hundred historical maps and many other illustrations--from rough sketches drawn in the field to commercial maps to beautifully rendered works of art--this lavishly illustrated volume is the first to tell the story of California's past from a unique visual perspective. Covering five hundred years of history, it offers a compelling and informative look at the transformation of the state from before European contact through the Gold Rush and up to the present. The maps are accompanied by a concise, engaging narrative and by extended captions that elucidate the stories and personalities behind their creation. At once a valuable reference and an exhilarating adventure through history, the Historical Atlas of California, featuring many rare and unusual maps, will be a treasured addition to any library. Distilling an enormous amount of information into one volume, it presents a fascinating chronicle of how California came to be what it is today.

Have you seen There Will Be Blood?

Paul Dano, who was the silent, philosophy-reading boy in “Little Miss Sunshine,” has a tiny mouth and dead eyes. He looks like a mushroom on a long stem, and he talks with a humble piety that gives way, in church, to a strangled cry of ecstatic fervor. He’s repulsive yet electrifying. Anderson has set up a kind of allegory of American development in which two overwhelming forces—entrepreneurial capitalism and evangelism—both operate on the border of fraudulence; together, they will build Southern California.

Historical Atlas of California

This is the first history of public health surveillance in the United States to span more than a century of conflict and controversy. The practice of reporting the names of those with disease to health authorities inevitably poses questions about the interplay between the imperative to control threats to the public's health and legal and ethical concerns about privacy. Authors Amy L. Fairchild, Ronald Bayer, and James Colgrove situate the tension inherent in public health surveillance in a broad social and political context and show how the changing meaning and significance of privacy have marked the politics and practice of surveillance since the end of the nineteenth century.

See also the preview in Google Books, including the very-cool "Places mentioned in this book" feature:

... Battles over the scope and goals of surveillance activities took place at CDC headquarters in Atlanta, at the Department of Health and Human Services ...

Read Chapter Two, Opening Battles: Tuberculosis and the Foundations of Surveillance.

Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America

Laurence Kotlikoff takes on healthcare. Pair this book with Intern, by Sandeep Jauhar.

The shocking statistic is that forty-seven million Americans have no health insurance. When uninsured Americans go to the emergency room for treatment, however, they do receive care--and a bill. Many hospitals now require uninsured patients to put their treatment on a credit card--which can saddle a low-income household with unpayably high balances that can lead to personal bankruptcy. Why don't these people just buy health insurance? Because the cost of coverage that doesn't come through an employer is more than many low- and middle-income households make in a year. Meanwhile, rising healthcare costs for employees are driving many businesses under. As for government-supplied health care, ever higher costs and added benefits (for example, Part D, Medicare's new prescription drug coverage) make both Medicare and Medicaid impossible to sustain fiscally; benefits grow faster than the national per-capita income. It's obvious the system is broken. What can we do?

In The Healthcare Fix, economist Laurence Kotlikoff proposes a simple, straightforward approach to the problem that would create one system that works for everyone--and secure America's fiscal and economic future. Kotlikoff's proposed Medical Security System is not the "socialized medicine" so feared by Republicans and libertarians; it's a plan for universal health insurance. Because everyone would be insured, it's also a plan for universal healthcare.

Participants -- including all who are currently uninsured, all Medicaid and Medicare recipients, and all with private or employer-supplied insurance -- would receive annual vouchers for health insurance, the amount of which would be based on their current medical condition. Insurance companies would willingly accept people with health problems because their vouchers would be higher. And the government could control costs by establishing the values of the vouchers so that benefit growth no longer outstrips growth of the nation's per capita income. It's a "single-payer" plan--but a single payer for insurance. The American healthcare industry would remain competitive, innovative, strong, and private.

Kotlikoff's plan is strong medicine for America's healthcare crisis, but brilliant in its simplicity. Its provisions can fit on a postcard -- and Kotlikoff provides one, ready to be copied and mailed to your representative in Congress. We're electing a new president in 2008; let's choose a new healthcare system, too -- one that works.

The Healthcare Fix: Universal Insurance for All Americans

The most comprehensive one-volume guide of its kind, this indispensable reference work presents information on teratogenic agents in a ready-reference format. The revised and expanded twelfth edition contains approximately three hundred new entries -- including one hundred newly listed agents and developmental genes that cause syndromes or congenital defects. Also included are overviews of recent literature on clinical and experimental teratology, including important Japanese literature not easily available to English-language researchers.

As in previous editions, this volume emphasizes human data and covers pharmaceuticals, chemicals, environmental pollutants, food additives, household products, and viruses. A special effort has been made to obtain as much information as possible on drugs and other agents to which pregnant women should not be exposed. Substances are listed alphabetically and each entry briefly summarizes research procedures and results. In addition, a complete list of references is included for each agent.

From the archive:

“Think of the kids you don’t have,” Mr. Levchin quoted them as saying. “Think of your unborn grandkids.”

It is best not to wear a denim miniskirt so short that when seated it practically disappears beneath the protuberance of one's pregnant belly, producing an image that is more gynecological than fashionable.

Lauer: How far along are you?
Spears: I don’t know. I think six to seven months.

Spears: That driving incident, I did it with my dad. I’d sit on his lap and I drive. We’re country.

Catalog of Teratogenic Agents

And here I had dismissed Sunshine as pseudo-science.

This book investigates the idea that the distant future evolution of our Sun might be controlled (literally, asteroengineered) so that it maintains its present-day energy output rather than becoming a highly luminous and bloated red giant star a process that, if allowed to develop, will destroy all life on Earth. The text outlines how asteroengineering might work in principle and it describes what the future solar system could look like. It also addresses the idea of asteroengineering as a galaxy-wide imperative, explaining why the Earth has never been visited by extraterrestrial travellers in the past.

The author is Martin Beech.

Rejuvenating the Sun and Avoiding Other Global Catastrophes

Intern is Sandeep Jauhar’s story of his days and nights in residency at a busy hospital in New York City, a trial that led him to question our every assumption about medical care today. Residency -- and especially the first year, called internship -- is legendary for its brutality. Working eighty hours or more per week, most new doctors spend their first year asking themselves why they wanted to be doctors in the first place.

Jauhar’s internship was even more harrowing than most: he switched from physics to medicine in order to follow a more humane calling—only to find that medicine put patients’ concerns last. He struggled to find a place among squadrons of cocky residents and doctors. He challenged the practices of the internship in The New York Times, attracting the suspicions of the medical bureaucracy. Then, suddenly stricken, he became a patient himself—and came to see that today’s high-tech, high-pressure medicine can be a humane science after all.

Now a thriving cardiologist, Jauhar has all the qualities you’d want in your own doctor: expertise, insight, a feel for the human factor, a sense of humor, and a keen awareness of the worries that we all have in common. His beautifully written memoir explains the inner workings of modern medicine with rare candor and insight.

See also the NYT review.

Intern, by Sandeep Jauhar

With impressively clear prose, Lehrer explores the oft-overlooked places in literary history where novelists, poets and the occasional cookbook writer predicted scientific breakthroughs with their artistic insights. The 25-year-old Columbia graduate draws from his diverse background in lab work, science writing and fine cuisine to explain how Cézanne anticipated breakthroughs in the understanding of human sight, how Walt Whitman intuited the biological basis of thoughts and, in the title essay, how Proust penetrated the mysteries of memory by immersing himself in childhood recollections. Lehrer's writing peaks in the essay about Auguste Escoffier, the chef who essentially invented modern French cooking. The author's obvious zeal for the subject of food preparation leads him into enjoyable discussions of the creation of MSG and the decidedly unappetizing history of 18th- and 19th-century culinary arts. Occasionally, the science prose risks becoming exceedingly dry (as in the enthusiastic section detailing the work of Lehrer's former employer, neuroscientist Kausik Si), but the hard science is usually tempered by Lehrer's deft way with anecdote and example. Most importantly, this collection comes close to exemplifying Lehrer's stated goal of creating a unified third culture in which science and literature can co-exist as peaceful, complementary equals.

Proust Was a Neuroscientist

What does it mean to hear music in colors, to taste voices, to see each letter of the alphabet as a different color? These uncommon sensory experiences are examples of synesthesia, when two or more senses cooperate in perception. Once dismissed as imagination or delusion, metaphor or drug-induced hallucination, the experience of synesthesia has now been documented by scans of synesthetes' brains that show "crosstalk" between areas of the brain that do not normally communicate. In The Hidden Sense, Cretien van Campen explores synesthesia from both artistic and scientific perspectives, looking at accounts of individual experiences, examples of synesthesia in visual art, music, and literature, and recent neurological research.

Van Campen reports that some studies define synesthesia as a brain impairment, a short circuit between two different areas. But synesthetes cannot imagine perceiving in any other way; many claim that synesthesia helps them in daily life. Van Campen investigates just what the function of synesthesia might be and what it might tell us about our own sensory perceptions. He examines the experiences of individual synesthetes--from Patrick, who sees music as images and finds the most beautiful ones spring from the music of Prince, to the schoolgirl Sylvia, who is surprised to learn that not everyone sees the alphabet in colors as she does. And he finds suggestions of synesthesia in the work of Scriabin, Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Nabokov, Poe, and Baudelaire.

What is synesthesia? It is not, van Campen concludes, an audiovisual performance, a literary technique, an artistic trend, or a metaphor. It is, perhaps, our hidden sense--a way to think visually; a key to our own sensitivity.

From the archives:

When the Senses Become Confused

Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant

Vilayanur Ramachandran: A journey to the center of your mind

The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science

The author is a Hacker.

The growth of American engineering and science has affected military technology, organization, and practice from the colonial era to the present day -- even as military concerns have influenced, and often funded, domestic engineering programs and scientific development. American Military Technology traces the interplay of technology and science with the armed forces of the United States in terms of what the authors view as epochs:

1840--1865, the introduction of modern small arms, steam power, and technology, science, and medicine;

1900--1914, the naval arms race, torpedoes and submarines, and the signal corps and the airplane; and

1965--1971, McNamara's Pentagon, technology in Vietnam, guided missiles, and smart bombs.

The book is an excellent springboard for understanding the complex relationship of science, technology, and war in American history.

American Military Technology: The Life Story of a Technology