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An award-winning mathematician shows how we prove what’s true, and what to do when we can’t.

Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong. In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. Ball explains that there is no unique place to look for an answer to this question: life is a system of many levels, each with its own rules and principles. How Life Works explains how these levels operate, interface, and work together (most of the time).

Why would anyone research how elephants pee? Or study worms who tie themselves into a communal knot? Or quantify the squishability of a cockroach? It all sounds pointless, silly, or even disgusting. Maybe it is. But in The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog, Carly Anne York shows how unappreciated, overlooked, and simply curiosity-driven science has led to breakthroughs big and small.

From one of the world’s most celebrated intellectuals, a brilliantly insightful work that explains how we think about each other’s thoughts about each other’s thoughts, ad infinitum. It sounds impossible, but Steven Pinker shows that we do it all the time. This awareness, which we experience as something that is public or “out there,” is called common knowledge, and it has a momentous impact on our social, political, and economic lives.

Like the alphabet, the calendar, or the zodiac, the periodic table of the chemical elements has a permanent place in our imagination. But aside from the handful of common ones (iron, carbon, copper, gold), the elements themselves remain wrapped in mystery. We do not know what most of them look like, how they exist in nature, how they got their names, or of what use they are to us. Periodic Tales isa dazzling tour through history and literature, science and art, in which you’ll meet iron that rains from the heavens and neon as it lights its way to vice.

Engaging, thought-provoking, and groundbreaking, The Immortal Mind shows here that some aspect of who we are is spiritual and immortal, transcending the physical body. Using science, he proves the existence of the human soul.

The Contrarians is a critical history of the scientific community, past and present, as Matt Kaplan shows how scientific breakthroughs often occur in spite of, rather than because of, the scientific community. Alternating between the past and the present, the book is anchored by the story of Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, who helped discover germ theory by realizing Puerperal fever—a devastating infection that most often strikes women who have recently given birth—was spread by doctors not washing their hands.

Quantum physics is the cornerstone of our world, offering a framework so expansive and precise that it underpins nearly every piece of modern technology. Yet, at the same time, it’s one of the hardest subjects to grasp. In Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics, a leading scientist and a literary mind unite to explain the revolutionary discoveries and astounding phenomena at the heart of quantum physics. From the greenness of grass to the solidity of matter, they unravel why the universe behaves in the peculiar ways it does and why it's so important.

“How many creatures walking on this earth / Have their first being in another form?” the Roman poet Ovid asked two thousand years ago. He could not have known the full extent of the truth: today, biologists estimate a stunning three-quarters of all animal species on Earth undergo some form of metamorphosis. But why do tadpoles transform into frogs, caterpillars into butterflies, elvers into eels, immortal jellyfish from sea sprigs to medusae and back again, growing younger and younger in frigid ocean depths?

In Human Nature, each chapter uses a different emotion to illustrate the science behind our changing climate. We feel the wonder of being able to use climate models to predict the future. We feel anger at those who have knowingly destroyed the planet for profit. We feel love for our beautiful Earth, the only good planet. With Marvel as our guide, we get to feel it all—and we can begin to turn our strong feelings into strong action.

What are the moments that make a life? In Francis Crick’s, the decisive moment came in 1951, when he first met James Watson. Their ensuing discovery of the structure of DNA made Crick world-famous. But neither that chance meeting nor that discovery made Crick who he was. As Matthew Cobb shows in Crick, it is another chance encounter, with a line from the writing of Beat poet Michael McClure, that reveals Crick’s character: “THIS IS THE POWERFUL KNOWLEDGE,” it shouted. Crick, having read it, would keep it with him for the rest of his life.

Today it's routine to take photos from an airplane window, use a camera underwater, or watch a movie or view an X-ray. But the photographic innovations more than a century ago that made such things possible were experimental, revelatory, and sometimes dangerous. In Flashes of Brilliance, New York Times photo editor Anika Burgess engagingly blends art, science, and social history to reveal the most dramatic developments in photography from its birth in the 1830s to the early twentieth century.

The relationship between science and religion has long been a heated debate and is becoming an ever more popular topic. Drawing on extensive research with over a hundred leading thinkers in the UK—including Martin Rees, Brian Cox, Susan Greenfield, A.C. Grayling, Ray Tallis, Linda Woodhead, Steve Bruce, Adam Rutherford, Robin Dunbar, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, and Iain McGilchrist—The Landscapes of Science and Religion takes the much-needed step of asking what science and religion actually are, before turning to the familiar question of how they relate to one another.

The epic stories of our planet’s 4.54-billion-year history are written in strata―ages-old remnants of ancient seafloors, desert dunes, and riverbeds striping landscapes around the world. In this brilliantly original debut work, science writer Laura Poppick decodes strata to lead us on a journey through four global transformations that made our lives on Earth possible: the first accumulations of oxygen in the atmosphere; the deep freezes of "Snowball Earth"; the rise of mud on land and accompanying proliferation of plants; and the dinosaurs’ reign on a hothouse planet

What began as a utopian environment, where mice had sumptuous accommodations, had all the food and water they could want, and were free from disease and predators, turned into a mouse hell. Science writer and animal behaviorist Lee Alan Dugatkin introduces listeners to the work of rodent researcher John Bumpass Calhoun. Dugatkin shows how an ecologist-turned-psychologist-turned-futurist became a science rock star embedded in the culture of the 1960s and 1970s.

In The Arrogant Ape, Christine Webb draws on years of research into the rich social, emotional, and cognitive lives of our closest living relatives to show that human exceptionalism is an ideology that relies more on culture, delusion and faith than on evidence. She exposes the ways that many scientific studies are biased against other species and reveals underappreciated wonders of nonhuman life—from the language of songbirds and prairie dogs, to the cultures of chimpanzees and reef fishes, to the acumen of plants and fungi.

In this lively, lucid book, science writer David Stipp ponders Darwinian puzzles about nine familiar creatures and things—bumblebees, dogs, sparrows, caffeine, earthworms, and sleep, among others—to show how rewarding it can be to look at nature in this deeper way. By revealing hidden depths of the ordinary, The Everyday Darwinist shows not only that fascinating intricacies lie just beneath the natural world's familiar surfaces, but also that noticing them lets us connect dots that in many cases we didn't realize existed. This is backyard biophilia at its most entertaining and enlightening.

Anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-reason beliefs seem to be triumphing over common sense today. How did we get here? Sick brings a huge missing piece to this puzzle—the experience of actually being ill. History tells us about human life and death, but there’s too often a blank spot in those stories. What did it feel like to be a woman or man struggling with illness in ancient times, in the Middle Ages, in the seventeenth century, or in 1920? And how did that shape our thoughts and convictions?

Traversal by Maria Popova is a forthcoming title from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

From the prize-winning and bestselling biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, and author of the landmark, critically acclaimed The Age of Wonder, this is a book about the new science and scepticism of the 19th century; about ideas of geology and deep time, the vast beauty and the terror looming before all those who saw deeper into the stars and studied the new cosmology.