A Science Book Compendium

BOOK ROUNDUP

Jennifer Washburn's opinion about the state of the U.S. higher education system, especially as it relates to commercial endeavors, is clear. She believes that commercial interests, both inside and outside the university, have too much influence on campus. She spends the bulk of her book University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of American Higher Education browbeating the reader, using recent headline-grabbing cases to make her point.

Washburn traces the current problems to the 1980 passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, which removed the restrictions on and even encouraged patenting of inventions underwritten by government funds. Universities began aggressively pursuing patent rights and licensing agreements, hoping to reap huge financial windfalls. This drive for profits has come at the expense of the university's core educational mission, Washburn says. Sadly for most institutions, this sacrifice has been for naught. Only a few universities have managed to turn technology transfer to their financial advantage.

She doesn't believe, however, that it is realistic to cut universities completely off from private industry. She offers a four-part plan to minimize, if not completely eliminate, conflicts of interest. Her suggestions include revamping Bayh-Dole, strengthening conflict-of-interest regulations, and providing federal oversight of drug trials. How realistic her suggestions are remains to be seen.

This book is extensively researched and documented. It may even be fair, but it's definitely not balanced. Few people who disagree with Washburn find their way onto the pages of her diatribe. In many of her points she's at least partially right, but the one-sided approach makes her message difficult to swallow. Nevertheless, people interested in higher education, intellectual property, or their intersection will find it worth reading .–Celia Henry

Have you ever wondered what it takes to be an astronaut? Or what happened to Skylab 1, the first U.S. space station? (It was allowed to fall to Earth in 1979.) Or how much thrust it takes to send humans to the moon? (7.5 million lb.) If these or any other questions about the history of the U.S. space program have ever crossed your mind, then The Complete Idiot's Guide to NASA is for you.

Written by former astronaut Thomas D. Jones in collaboration with Michael Benson, this book discusses everything from the U.S. space race with Russia to the space shuttle missions to our future in space. The text runs through Jones's experiences and adventures as an astronaut before detailing the history of NASA and paying homage to early space pioneers from the U.S. and abroad. Sidebars with interesting space facts and trivia, definitions of space terms, and personal observations are also sprinkled throughout. For example, one Cosmic Fact sidebar notes that the surface area of the moon is approximately equal to that of the continent of Africa, while another piece titled Space Talk explains that the apogee of an orbit is its maximum distance from Earth.

Although this book was written before the space shuttle Columbia tragedy, it does a good job of walking the reader through NASA's successes and failures, including the loss of space shuttle Challenger. The book is a light, easy read and good for anyone—young and old alike—who has a fascination with space travel.–Susan Morrissey

In his new book In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World, designer John Thackara laments over just how myopic modern society has become in its insatiable appetite for more and newer technology. Never-ending improvements in computing, transportation, and architecture aren't necessarily making the world a better place to live, he claims, but they are creating an environment that is constantly accelerating in speed and complexity.

An environmentalist at heart, Thackara frames his book around a deep concern over the pace at which humanity is using up the world's resources. In the Bubble is a sweeping overview of modern design dilemmas, filled with fascinating factoids about the hidden environmental costs of items, buildings, and infrastructures. Thackara also has a remarkable ability to weave developments in many disparate fields into his narrative.

Thackara isn't one to be easily dismayed by grim news, though; for him, solutions can be found in reflection and redesign. The premise of this book is simply stated, he writes. If we can design our way into difficulty, we can design our way out. Design choices account for 80% of a product's or service's environmental impact, he says, and better choices now might save modern society from disaster later. His enthusiasm is infectious.

His prose is also jargon-filled and abstract, and there is a definite lack of easily implemented ideas in his book. Still, everyone—especially scientists and engineers—will learn a lot about their contributions to global complexity from Thackara, and what they can do to help design a more sustainable future.–Aalok Mehta

The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter appears at first glance to turn on its head the conventional notion that pregnancy and care of young children reduce women's brainpower.

But author Katherine Ellison, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who is herself raising two young boys, isn't talking about passing calculus tests. Instead, she's focusing on perception, efficiency, resilience, motivation, and emotional intelligence. Pregnancy and early motherhood increase the ability to multitask and get things done, she argues. The sensory-rich life with a newborn improves the capacity to interpret new information. The increased levels of oxytocin that accompany childbirth help mothers combat stress, strengthening their resilience. And as new mothers bond with their babies, their empathy improves.

Ellison marshals a wealth of experimental evidence from rodent studies, showing that giving birth and raising pups alters the animals' brains, seemingly permanently. Mother rats are quicker at catching insects, better at finding their way out of mazes, and more adept at solving puzzles than virgin rats. The scientific evidence for changes in human mothers' brains is not as strong, but brain-scanning studies show that many regions of the brain activated during motherhood are the same in rats as in humans.

As a parent of three grown children, the book was fascinating to me, and it may give confidence to mothers who fear child care is taking a toll on their abilities. But as the author admits, employers probably care more about whether mothers will be stable workers and keep regular hours than whether motherhood boosts their brainpower.–Bette Hileman

Asbestos is infamous today as an occupational hazard that causes lung diseases. But it may eventually become even more infamous for the unbelievable spate of liability claims—many of them made before any injury has actually occurred—that have been filed against companies that mined and processed this family of fibrous silicate minerals.

These lawsuits have weighed heavily on the U.S. justice system, but they may have a positive side, in that asbestos litigation may change perceptions of how the risks of technology should be evaluated and how injury victims are compensated. In her excellent book Asbestos & Fire: Technological Trade-Offs and the Body at Risk, Rachel Maines has compiled dozens of examples of disastrous fires in theaters, factories, ships, and cities in war zones that prompted the use of asbestos as a material for fire protection, which saved thousands of lives during the past century. She also deftly describes observations, dating back to the early 1900s, of potential health concerns associated with occupational exposure to asbestos fibers. This led to the mineral's fall from grace beginning in the 1960s and our subsequent historical amnesia about the success of asbestos as a fire-prevention technology.

The book's timing unfortunately didn't allow Maines to include recent developments, such as the indictment of executives at asbestos producer W.R. Grace for concealing the dangers of a mining operation in Libby, Mont., or congressional efforts to pass legislation on asbestos litigation reform. A bill, set for a vote this fall, would establish a trust fund to compensate victims, rather than allow them to sue in court, and could be a model for product liability claims of all types.–Steve Ritter

Alanna Mitchell is an award-winning environmental journalist who, inspired by Oxford University ecologist Norman Myers, became a student and tourist of humanity's impact on the environment. The result is Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the World's Environmental Hotspots, in which Mitchell travels around the world in a quest to examine how aspects of human cultures constrict our ability to avoid looming environmental disasters.

The reader will eagerly go along to Madagascar in search of lemurs in a denuded landscape, the northern Rockies in search of dinosaur bones, and the desert of Jordan in search of water in a thirsty oasis. Mitchell leaves the laughably small-scale restoration project of the Azraq Oasis to venture to the vast lands of the high Arctic, where the melting of ice and permafrost causes rifts in the way of life of the Banks Island Inuvialuit.

Mitchell uses Darwinism, spun in two threads, to put these environmental crises in context. She imagines that humans need a shift in thinking similar to that brought about by Darwinism before environmental causes will take their place at the top of human agendas. She then postulates that, in depleted environments, the evolutionary adaptation that many species will make is to become extinct. However, these perspectives are not as convincing as her reporting, which has a bracing immediacy.

On Mitchell's return route, readers are treated to positive news about the protected Suriname rain forest and the geothermal energy successes of Iceland. The Suriname episode bypasses much of Mitchell's Darwin commentary in favor of the practical, political, and financial impact of the nonprofit organization Conservation International in helping the country preserve about 90% of its forest cover.–Melody Voith

There's no doubt that Michael Shermer has an amazing capacity for soaking up, synthesizing, and presenting knowledge, and he does this in aid of a worthy cause: debunking pseudoscience. A prolific writer and speaker, Shermer is president of the Skeptics Society, writes the Skeptic column in Scientific American, and has produced numerous books, including Why People Believe Weird Things and The Science of Good and Evil.

His latest offering, Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown, is a smooth collection of essays that illuminate sports psychology, lucidly explain cosmology, delve into the philosophy of science, and skewer intelligent design and biblical ethics. Shermer, who has an M.S. in psychology and a Ph.D. in the history of science, also sheds light on the insurgent behavior of Fletcher Christian recounted in Mutiny on the Bounty and the controversy surrounding anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon's oft-criticized studies of the Yanomamo Indians. The book goes down like an icy martini, leaving the reader feeling warm, validated, and just a tad self-righteous.

Yet there are signs that Shermer might be succumbing to the trappings of popularity. He's a bit too smug about his ability to fool desperate and nave psychic groupies into believing he can see their futures. And his careless reference to the bacteria Helicobacter pylori as a virus undermines his foundation of factual rigorousness. We need voices like Shermer's to help counteract the increasingly antiscience bent of our political Administration. If he can step away from the boundary of zealotry, his work will continue to be invaluable in fighting scientific ignorance.–Elizabeth Wilson

What's the key to American economic success? For Richard K. Lester and Michael J. Piore, authors of "Innovation: The Missing Dimension," it's new product development, emerging from a balance of two fundamental processes: rational problem solving, also known as analysis; and interpretation, a less-explored strategy that harnesses creativity and ambiguity. Drawing from case studies in the cell phone, medical device, and blue-jeans industries, Lester and Piore argue that the lessons gleaned from the 1990s economic boom undervalue creativity and ambiguity, and that the misguided application of these lessons is jeopardizing America's economic viability.

But Lester and Piore tend to do a better job defining problems than presenting solutions. For example, the authors make a convincing argument for the need of open-ended conversations in product development, but their metaphor of a manager as a hostess at a cocktail party facilitating conversation doesn't address communication barriers more complex than simple misunderstandings.

The authors do offer some ideas for sustaining an innovative economy, including stressing the difference between analysis and interpretation at engineering and management schools, reemphasizing the humanities in undergraduate and secondary education, and fostering public spaces in universities and the government regulatory arena, where the interpretative process of innovation can thrive. These are good suggestions, but for those in search of practical advice for achieving innovation, not just a list of important ingredients, this book will come up short.–Wesley Lindamood