In the next decade, single-celled animals might be some of the most important figures in high technology.

"We always overestimate the immediate impact and underestimate the long-term ones. The truly revolutionary stuff will take some time to mature."

Playing science's genetic lottery | CNET News.com

The booming science of comparative genomics is allowing researchers to investigate the origins of language in an entirely new way: by asking how the genes that underwrite human language relate to genes found in other species. And these new data provide a fresh example of the power of natural selection.

From Squeak to Syntax: Language's Incremental Evolution

Most prisons are notorious for the quality of their cuisine (pretty poor) and the behavior of their residents (pretty violent). They are therefore ideal locations to test a novel hypothesis: that violent aggression is largely a product of poor nutrition. Toward that end, researchers are studying whether inmates become less violent when put on a diet rich in vitamins and in the fatty acids found in seafood.

Could a salmon steak and a side of spinach really help curb violence, not just in prison but everywhere?

Does Eating Salmon Lower the Murder Rate?

The technical, ethical and emotional dialogue over stem cell research can be confusing and even contradictory at times. Yet the science is racing forward. Learning more about all kinds of stem cell research will help everyone make better choices.

Stem Cells, Explained and Explored

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This new entry in the Art of Mentoring series takes the form of letters from a fictitious mathematician to his niece. The letters span a period of 20 years, from the time the niece is thinking about studying mathematics in high school through the early years of her academic career. The format works wonderfully to introduce readers to the basics of the discipline of mathematics while providing a sense of what mathematicians actually do. Throughout, the prolific and talented Stewart (Does God Play Dice?), a British mathematician, entertains while educating. He explains how mathematics is so much more than mere calculations and how it's used in almost every facet of our lives. He also discusses the beauty mathematicians can find in the natural world, demonstrating that a focus on numbers and patterns can enhance rather than detract from an aesthetic appreciation of the environment. Stewart also does a superb job of examining the nature and value of both applied research and pure research, which, he shows, are not nearly as disparate as many think. Although the book must be read by anyone thinking about a career in mathematics, others simply interested in learning about the field and how mathematicians think will find it compelling reading.

Letters to a Young Mathematician, by Ian Stewart

The following catalog of misconceptions, along with responses, is therefore offered for scholars who may well find themselves confronting voices whose amplitude and frequency exceed their wisdom.

The Case for Evolution, in Real Life

Stop worrying about Avian flu already!

According to a significant study published in the prestigious British journal Nature recently, the H5N1 bird flu virus is at least two large mutations and two small mutations away from being the next human pandemic virus. This virus attaches deep in the lungs of birds but cannot adhere to the upper respiratory tract of humans. Since we can't transmit the virus to each other, it poses little immediate threat to us.

So why did the "flu hunter," world-renowned Tennessee virologist Robert Webster, say of bird flu on ABC that there are "about even odds at this time for the virus to learn how to transmit human to human," and that "society just can't accept the idea that 50 percent of the population could die . . . I'm sorry if I'm making people a little frightened, but I feel it's my role."

I'm sorry, Dr. Webster, but your role is to track influenza in the test tube, not to enter into broad speculation on national television. By your way of thinking, we should all be either building an escape rocket ship or killing every bird we see before it can kill us.

A Pandemic of Fear

Humans are aware, and we are aware that we're aware. But scientists still don't understand why.

The consciousness puzzle

Genetic engineering, nanotechnology, astrophysics, particle physics: We live in an engineered world, one where the distinctions between science and engineering, technology and research, are fast disappearing. This book shows how, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the goals of natural scientists--to discover what was not known--and that of engineers--to create what did not exist--are undergoing an unprecedented convergence.

Sunny Y. Auyang ranges widely in demonstrating that engineering today is not only a collaborator with science but its equal. In concise accounts of the emergence of industrial laboratories and chemical and electrical engineering, and in whirlwind histories of the machine tools and automobile industries and the rise of nuclear energy and information technology, her book presents a broad picture of modern engineering: its history, structure, technological achievements, and social responsibilities; its relation to natural science, business administration, and public policies. Auyang uses case studies such as the development of the F-117A Nighthawk and Boeing 777 aircraft, as well as the experiences of engineer-scientists such as Oliver Heaviside, engineer-entrepreneurs such as Henry Ford and Bill Gates, and engineer-managers such as Alfred Sloan and Jack Welch to give readers a clear sense of engineering's essential role in the future of scientific research.

Engineering--An Endless Frontier

The way we record knowledge, and the web of technical, formal, and social practices that surrounds it, inevitably affects the knowledge that we record. The ways we hold knowledge about the past -- in handwritten manuscripts, in printed books, in file folders, in databases -- shape the kind of stories we tell about that past. In this lively and erudite look at the relation of our information infrastructures to our information, Geoffrey Bowker examines how, over the past two hundred years, information technology has converged with the nature and production of scientific knowledge. His story weaves a path between the social and political work of creating an explicit, indexical memory for science -- the making of infrastructures -- and the variety of ways we continually reconfigure, lose, and regain the past.

At a time when memory is so cheap and its recording is so protean, Bowker reminds us of the centrality of what and how we choose to forget. In Memory Practices in the Sciences he looks at three "memory epochs" of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries and their particular reconstructions and reconfigurations of scientific knowledge. The nineteenth century's central science, geology, mapped both the social and the natural world into a single time package (despite apparent discontinuities), as, in a different way, did mid-twentieth-century cybernetics. Both, Bowker argues, packaged time in ways indexed by their information technologies to permit traffic between the social and natural worlds. Today's sciences of biodiversity, meanwhile, "database the world" in a way that excludes certain spaces, entities, and times. We use the tools of the present to look at the past, says Bowker; we project onto nature our modes of organizing our own affairs.

Memory Practices in the Sciences