Publishers Weekly Starred Review:

Edited by New York Times science writer Gina Kolata, this volume celebrates writing that captures the excitement of scientific discovery and also its human consequences. Tyler Cabot's The Theory of Everything spotlights theoretical physicists awaiting the greatest, most anticipated, most expensive experiment in the history of mankind. By contrast, Manifold Destiny by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber tells of Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman, who quietly announced a solution to one of the field's most elusive problems: Fermat's Last Theorem. Atul Gawande's The Score looks at the all-too-often painful history of obstetrics, and Truth and Consequences by Jennifer Couzin examines the bitter fallout for innocent graduate students and postdocs when their adviser is accused of falsifying data. Oliver Sacks's Stereo Sue explores the marvel of binocular vision, and Barry Yeoman's Schweitzer's Dangerous Discovery profiles unconventional paleontologist Mary Higby Schweitzer, discoverer of tissue remnants in dinosaur bones. These articles, culled mainly from general interest publications like the New Yorker but also from science magazines like Discover, showcase articles that show, in Kolata's words, how [a]dvances in science have changed who we are as human beings and... are changing what we will become, and readers will indeed find them as exciting as they are compelling.

See also further description from the publisher, and a review in the Globe.

The Best American Science Writing 2007

Remember when we learned that "the reality is that everything is made of chemicals"?

Now, you can learn even more!

Welcome to a tour of some of the recent advances in chemistry, taking in the cosmetic factory, the pharmacy, the grooming salon, the diet clinic, the power plant, the domestic cleaning company, and the art gallery along the way. Award-winning popular science writer John Emsley is our guide as he addresses questions of grooming, health, food, and sex. The trip is for all those of us wanting to know more about the impact of chemical products on our everyday lives.

Better Looking, Better Living, Better Loving: How Chemistry can Help You Achieve Life's Goal

Studying the new sequence of the canine genome shows how tiny genetic changes can create enormous variation within a single species.

Most dog breeds have only been in existence for a few hundred years.

In this article I highlight first our current understanding of what a dog breed really is and summarize the status of the canine genome sequencing project. I review some early work made possible by this project: studies of the Portuguese water dog, which have been critical to our understanding of how to map genes controlling body shape and size, along with studies aimed at understanding the genetics of muscle mass.

Genetics and the Shape of Dogs

From a review in American Scientist:

Sunless and airless, with pressures that can exceed a ton per square centimeter, the deep ocean is a forbidding place. But it is also a fascinating one, the Earth's largest living realm. Its novel denizens are the subject of The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss — a coffee-table-sized book edited by French journalist Claire Nouvian. It features 200 gorgeous color photographs and 15 short essays by eminent ocean scientists, on subjects ranging from gelatinous predators, seamounts and deepwater coral reefs to hydrothermal vents, methane seeps and deep trenches (some deeper than the height of Mount Everest). Nouvian took her inspiration from a trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, three of whose experts are contributors to the book. The essays, which are aimed at a lay audience, take a backseat to fantastic images of the inhabitants of this alien world. In the deep, biomass is 5,000 times less dense than at the surface, but the species diversity is great, as the book illustrates. Browsers will undoubtedly find the alluring photographs irresistible.

The Deep Book

NYT offers a brief overview of "biofabs" and synthetic biology.

Genetic engineers generally extract a gene from an organism. Then they might modify it or put it in a different organism. The gene for insulin, for instance, can be extracted from human cells and put into bacteria, which will produce insulin for use by diabetics. It is a cut-and-paste operation, like writing a phrase by snipping the necessary words out of magazines and gluing them together in the proper order.

Gene synthesis, by contrast, is like typing the phrase on a word processor. Scientists specify the sequence of the desired gene and have it “printed” at the foundry. They can do this because the complete genome sequences of humans and many other species are available in databases.

A new opportunity for foundries could come from synthetic biology, which involves designing cells almost from scratch to perform specific tasks, like producing biofuel. Synthetic biologists envision writing the DNA code for such cells the way computer programmers write software. Then the DNA would be manufactured and put into cells.

“The danger is not just bioterror,” ETC said in a report earlier this year, “but ‘bioerror.’"

On the subject of bioterror, see Keeping Synthetic Biology Away from Terrorists, from Technology Review last year, as well as my post about Drew Endy from a few months ago.

How Do You Like Your Genes?

Douglas Hofstadter reviews Pinker's latest book, The Stuff of Thought.

Pinker would like language to be as precise a guide to the mind's machinery as the behavior of particles in force fields is a guide to the laws of physics. He sees linguistic regularities abounding, and he tries using them to penetrate the hidden "language of thought," whose most critical ingredients are "ethereal notions of space, time, causation, possession, and goals." Although I'm less sanguine than Pinker about language's regularity -- and, indeed, about the existence of a "language of thought" -- I find his thesis well worth contemplating.

I find it odd that the author of "How the Mind Works" never cites the authors of "The Way We Think."

For those of you in the DC area:

On Monday, 17 September, at 7 P.M. Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker presents a lecture, "How Everyday Words Reveal Who We Are," drawn from his new book, as part of the Smithsonian Associates Program being held at the National Academy of Sciences, 2101 Constitution Ave. NW. Admission is $25 for nonmembers; call 202-633-3030 or visit http://www.smithsonianassociates.org to RSVP.

Hofstadter reads Pinker

If you liked the story, Is There Anything Good About Men? And Other Tricky Questions, recommended last month, or today's thread, Men want hot women, study confirms, then you might be interested in this article from 2005, in which Steven Pinker reacts to the hubbub over controversial statements by then-President of Harvard, Lawrence Summers.

The analysis should have been unexceptionable. Anyone who has fled a cluster of men at a party debating the fine points of flat-screen televisions can appreciate that fewer women than men might choose engineering, even in the absence of arbitrary barriers. (As one female social scientist noted in Science Magazine, "Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works.") To what degree these and other differences originate in biology must be determined by research, not fatwa. History tells us that how much we want to believe a proposition is not a reliable guide as to whether it is true.

Sex Ed: The Science of Difference, by Steven Pinker

Microorganisms such as bacteria enjoy swapping genes, and the trades have made a big difference in how they've evolved. Now new research suggests that bacteria are also easygoing about passing genes on to more complex organisms. The findings have researchers rethinking the prevalence of interspecies gene transfer and its role in evolution; they may also change the way geneticists filter out bacterial "contamination" when they sequence a new genome.

Fukatsu calls the paper "exciting" but questions whether the Wolbachia genes are active because they didn't display any biological function. However, if future experiments confirm that expression really is occurring, he adds that it's an "unprecedented insight" into the process of evolution.

See also coverage in American Scientist.

(Note to authors: Whatever you do, don't write a children's book about this! Microbiology is rated NC-17!)

Bacteria Get Promiscuous

The genetic reversal problem lies at the intersection of biology, mathematics and computer science. For some time, the prospects for finding a simple and efficient solution seemed dim, even with the most powerful tools of all three disciplines. But the story has a happy ending. A little more than a decade ago, computing gene reversals was still a subtle research problem; now it can be done with such ease that it's a matter of routine technology. If you need to know the "reversal distance" between two genomes, you can go to a Web site and get the answer in seconds.

See also coverage in Science.

To put your genes in order, flip them like pancakes

Wellcome Trust scientists have identified for the first time how our brain's response changes the closer a threat gets. Using a Pac Man-like computer game where a volunteer is pursued by an artificial predator, the researchers showed that the fear response moves from the strategic areas of the brain towards more reactive responses as the artificial predator approaches.

When faced with a threat - such as a large bear - humans, like other animals, alter their behaviour depending on whether the threat is close or distant. This is because different defence mechanisms are needed depending on whether, for example, the bear is fifty feet away, when being aware of its presence may be enough, or five feet away, when we might need to fight or run away.

To investigate what happens in the brain in such a situation, researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London created a game where subjects were chased through a maze by an artificial predator – if caught, they would receive a mild electric shock. The researchers then measured their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The results are published today in the journal 'Science'.

See also Nathan Myhrvold's photo essay on African lions.

Free will takes flight: how our brains respond to approaching menace