Down to a Science Book Club, Junior: Grandmother Fish

Evolution can be a tricky subject for kids to understand, especially when it comes to concepts like the vastness of time and the slow, gradual changes that life undergoes. Such ideas often don’t seem to make intuitive sense, so what can a scientifically-minded parent tell their children when they ask why dogs and monkeys have …

Down to a Science Book Club: Archaeology from Space

If you’ve ever played with Google Earth, you can almost call yourself a space archaeologist. This is a fairly new and totally real career, Sarah Parcak explains in her book Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past. She describes how the “story of everyday past people across the globe, is only now better …

Down to a Science Book Club: Inconspicuous Consumption

Author Tatiana Schlossberg asserts that “our daily activities don’t exist in a vacuum,” and spends the next 236 pages of Inconspicuous Consumption digging into minutiae like the role athleisure plays in microplastic fibers entering our waterways. This is the product of a journalist who asks question after question. She investigates everything from how we are …

Down to a Science Book Club: The Uninhabitable Earth

How do you get people to care? That’s the question of the day when it comes to climate change. It’s asked by everyone from political organizers to authors like David Wallace-Wells, who grapples with this at length in The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future. Wallace-Wells comes to this topic as deputy editor of …

Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist: Down to a Science Book Club

Who are the scientists behind the research? What are their lives like? What are the stories of their discoveries, failures, and successes? To celebrate Pride Month, June’s book club read is Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist by Ben Barres. As a neuroscience masters student, I often read scientific articles on brain development written by Ben …

Down to a Science Book Club

If you’ve spent many afternoons getting lost in a good book, it’s not hard to imagine how a compelling narrative can transport you to another world. When it comes to science, both non-fiction and science fiction books can inspire you, freeing your imagination to explore limitless scientific possibilities. Reading a great science book can even …