The next wave of science writing is here. Editor Max Brockman has talent-spotted 19 young scientists, working on leading-edge research across a wide range of fields. Nearly half of them are women, and all of them are great communicators: their passion and excitement makes this collection a wonderfully invigorating read. We hear from an astrobiologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena about the possibilities for life elsewhere in the
solar system (and the universe); from the director of Yale's Comparative Cognition Laboratory about why we keep making the same mistakes; from a Cambridge lab about DNA synthesis; from the Tanzanian
savannah about what lies behind attractiveness; we hear about how to breed plants to withstand disease, about ways to extract significance from the Interne's enormous datasets, about oceanography, neuroscience, microbiology, and evolutionary psychology.
The next wave of science writing is here. Editor Max Brockman has talent-spotted 19 young scientists, working on leading-edge research across a wide range of fields. Nearly half of them are women, and all of them are great communicators: their passion and excitement makes this collection a wonderfully invigorating read. We hear from an astrobiologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena about the possibilities for life elsewhere in the
solar system (and the universe); from the director of Yale's Comparative Cognition Laboratory about why we keep making the same mistakes; from a Cambridge lab about DNA synthesis; from the Tanzanian
savannah about what lies behind attractiveness; we hear about how to breed plants to withstand disease, about ways to extract significance from the Interne's enormous datasets, about oceanography, neuroscience, microbiology, and evolutionary psychology.
Max Brockman: Preface
1: Kevin P. Hand: On the Coming Age of Ocean Exploration
2: Felix Warneken: Children's Helping Hands
3: William McEwan: Molecular Cut and Paste
4: Anthony Aguirre: Next Step: Infinity
5: Daniela Kaufer and Darlene Francis: Nurture, Nature, and the
Stress That is Life
6: Jon Kleinberg: What Can Huge Data Sets Teach Us About Society
and Ourselves?
7: Coren Apicella: On the Universality of Attractiveness
8: Laurie R. Santos: To Err is Primate
9: Samuel M. McClure: Our Brains Know Why We Do What We Do
10: Jennifer Jacquet: Is Shame Necessary?
11: Kirsten Bomblies: Plant Immunity in a Changing World
12: Asif A. Ghazanfar: The Emergence of Human Audiovisual
Communication
13: Naomi I. Eisenberger: Why Rejection Hurts
14: Joshua Knobe: Finding the Mind in the Body
15: Fiery Cushman: Should the Law Depend on Luck?
16: Liane Young: How We Read People's Moral Minds
17: Daniel Haun: How Odd I Am!
18: Joan Y. Chiao: Where Does Human Diversity Come From?
Acknowledgements
Max Brockman is the vice president of Brockman, Inc. a literary agency, and the editor of What's Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science. He also works with the Edge Foundation, Inc., a nonprofit organization that publishes the Edge newsletter (www.edge.com). He lives in New York City.
`I would have killed for books like this when I was a student!'
Brian Eno
`This remarkable collection of fluent and fascinating essays
reminds me that there is almost nothing as spine-tinglingly
exciting as glimpsing a new nugget of knowledge for the first time.
These young scientists give us a treasure trove of precious new
insights.'
Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist
`Future Science shares with the world a delightful secret that we
academics have been keeping - that despite all the hysteria about
how electronic media are dumbing down the next generation, a tidal
wave of talent has been flooding into science, making their elders
feel like the dumb ones.....It has a wealth of new and exciting
ideas, and will help shake up our notions regarding the age, sex,
color, and topic clichés of the current public perception
of science.'
Steven Pinker
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