From Brooke Jarvis on deep-ocean mining to Elizabeth Kolbert on New Zealand’s unconventional conservation strategies, this is a group that celebrates the growing diversity in science and nature writing alike. Altogether, the writers honored in this year’s volume challenge us to consider the strains facing our planet and its many species, while never losing sight of the wonders we’re working to preserve for generations to come. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015 includes Sheri Fink, Atul Gawande, Leslie Jamison, Sam Kean, Seth Mnookin, Matthew Power, Michael Specterand others  REBECCA SKLOOT's award-winning science writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and elsewhere. Her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, was an instant New York Times bestseller. It was named a best book of 2010 by more than sixty media outlets, including Entertainment Weekly and NPR, and by the National Academies of Science and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, among others. Skloot is currently writing a book about humans, animals, science, and ethics.   TIM FOLGER, series editor, is a contributing editor at Discover and writes about science for several magazines.

    Science in the Soul brings together forty-two essays, polemics, and paeans--all written with Dawkins's characteristic erudition, remorseless wit, and unjaded awe of the natural world.Though it spans three decades, this book couldn't be more timely or more urgent. Elected officials have opened the floodgates to prejudices that have for half a century been unacceptable or at least undercover. In a passionate introduction, Dawkins calls on us to insist that reason take center stage and that gut feelings, even when they don't represent the stirred dark waters of xenophobia, misogyny, or other blind prejudice, should stay out of the voting booth. And in the essays themselves, newly annotated by the author, he investigates a number of issues, including the importance of empirical evidence, and decries bad science, religion in the schools, and climate-change deniers.Dawkins has equal ardor for "the sacred truth of nature" and renders here with typical virtuosity the glories and complexities of the natural world. Woven into an exploration of the vastness of geological time, for instance, is the peculiar history of the giant tortoises and the sea turtles--whose journeys between water and land tell us a deeper story about evolution. At this moment, when so many highly placed people still question the fact of evolution, Dawkins asks what Darwin would make of his own legacy--"a mixture of exhilaration and exasperation"--and celebrates science as possessing many of religion's virtues--"explanation, consolation, and uplift"--without its detriments of superstition and prejudice.In a world grown irrational and hostile to facts, Science in the Soul is an essential collection by an indispensable author.Praise for Science in the Soul"Compelling . . . rendered in gloriously spiky and opinionated prose . . . [Dawkins is] one of the great science popularizers of the last half-century."--The Christian Science Monitor "Dawkins is a ferocious polemicist, a defender of reason and enemy of superstition."--John Horgan, Scientific American

    He was also a memoirist who wrote with honesty and humor about the remarkable and strange encounters and experiences that shaped him (Uncle Tungsten, On the Move, Gratitude). Sacks, an Oxford-educated polymath, had a deep familiarity not only with literature and medicine but with botany, animal anatomy, chemistry, the history of science, philosophy, and psychology. The River of Consciousness is one of two books Sacks was working on up to his death, and it reveals his ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless project to understand what makes us human.

    With his trademark clarity and humor, Holt probes the mysteries of quantum mechanics, the quest for the foundations of mathematics, and the nature of logic and truth. Along the way, he offers intimate biographical sketches of celebrated and neglected thinkers, from the physicist Emmy Noether to the computing pioneer Alan Turing and the discoverer of fractals, Benoit Mandelbrot. Holt offers a painless and playful introduction to many of our most beautiful but least understood ideas, from Einsteinian relativity to string theory, and also invites us to consider why the greatest logician of the twentieth century believed the U.S. Constitution contained a terrible contradiction--and whether the universe truly has a future.

    Wilson, promises to be another “eclectic, provocative collection” (Entertainment Weekly) that is both a science reader’s dream and a nature lover’s sustenance.Iterations of immortality / David Berlinski --To save a watering hole / Mark Cherrington --New life in a death trap / Edwin Dobb --Abortion and brain waves / Gregg Easterbrook --Baby steps / Malcolm Gladwell --In the forests of Gombe / Jane Goodall --The doubting disease / Jerome Groopman --The recycled generation --Stephen S. Hall --Endurance predator / Bernd Heinrich --Harpy eagles / Edward Hoagland --Why the future doesn't need us / Bill Joy --A killing at dawn / Ted Kerasote --Seeing scarlet / Barbara Kingsolver and Steven Hopp --The best clock in the world / Verlyn Klinkenborg --The wild world's Scotland Yard / Jon R. Luoma --Breeding discontent / Cynthia Mills --Ice station Vostok / Oliver Morton --Being prey / Val Plumwood --Troubled waters / Sandra Postel --The genome warrior / Richard Preston --Megatransect / David Quammen --Inside the volcano / Donovan Webster

    Sapolsky's acclaimed and successful Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers features new chapters on how stress affects sleep and addiction, as well as new insights into anxiety and personality disorder and the impact of spirituality on managing stress.As Sapolsky explains, most of us do not lie awake at night worrying about whether we have leprosy or malaria. Instead, the diseases we fear--and the ones that plague us now--are illnesses brought on by the slow accumulation of damage, such as heart disease and cancer. When we worry or experience stress, our body turns on the same physiological responses that an animal's does, but we do not resolve conflict in the same way--through fighting or fleeing. Over time, this activation of a stress response makes us sick.

    Each tale is true and borders on the unbelievable. It’s no wonder that throughout the years the column has become an unofficial textbook for medical students, interns, doctors, and anyone interested in human illness and staying healthy. Now, physician and “Vital Signs” editor Robert Norman has compiled the very best of the series into an intriguing and suspenseful collection for fans and new readers alike. A young woman carries a baby that wasn’t her own—and wasn’t even a human; Aretha Franklin gives a physician the insight needed to save a life; a modern gynecologist faces an ancient disease. These cases and more, representing a wide variety of unique medical anomalies and life-or-death situations, bring readers to the front lines of the medical fray.Fans of hit medical dramas such as House MD will savor the opportunity to read of the real-life cases that puzzled doctors, the gripping detective work that ensued, and the completely unexpected, often life-saving diagnoses. Discover Magazine’s Vital Signs is a glimpse into the exciting work of real medical professionals, told from their perspective, and revealing that anything can happen in medicine. Readers will never look at a “routine check-up” the same again.

    QED--the edited version of four lectures on quantum electrodynamics that Feynman gave to the general public at UCLA as part of the Alix G. Mautner Memorial Lecture series--is perhaps the best example of his ability to communicate both the substance and the spirit of science to the layperson.The focus, as the title suggests, is quantum electrodynamics (QED), the part of the quantum theory of fields that describes the interactions of the quanta of the electromagnetic field-light, X rays, gamma rays--with matter and those of charged particles with one another. By extending the formalism developed by Dirac in 1933, which related quantum and classical descriptions of the motion of particles, Feynman revolutionized the quantum mechanical understanding of the nature of particles and waves. And, by incorporating his own readily visualizable formulation of quantum mechanics, Feynman created a diagrammatic version of QED that made calculations much simpler and also provided visual insights into the mechanisms of quantum electrodynamic processes.In this book, using everyday language, spatial concepts, visualizations, and his renowned "Feynman diagrams" instead of advanced mathematics, Feynman successfully provides a definitive introduction to QED for a lay readership without any distortion of the basic science. Characterized by Feynman's famously original clarity and humor, this popular book on QED has not been equaled since its publication.

    Like you, the elements have lives: personalities and attitudes, talents and shortcomings, stories rich with meaning. You may think of them as the inscrutable letters of the periodic table but you know them much better than you realise. Welcome to a dazzling tour through history and literature, science and art. Here you'll meet iron that rains from the heavens and noble gases that light the way to vice. You'll learn how lead can tell your future while zinc may one day line your coffin. You'll discover what connects the bones in your body with the Whitehouse in Washington, the glow of a streetlamp with the salt on your dinner table. From ancient civilisations to contemporary culture, from the oxygen of publicity to the phosphorus in your pee, the elements are near and far and all around us. Unlocking their astonishing secrets and colourful pasts, Periodic Tales will take you on a voyage of wonder and discovery, excitement and novelty, beauty and truth. Along the way, you'll find that their stories are our stories, and their lives are inextricable from our own.

    Best-selling author Amy Stewart edits this year’s volume of the finest science and nature writing.

    When Dr Ben Goldacre saw someone on daytime TV dipping her feet in an 'Aqua Detox' footbath, releasing her toxins into the water, turning it brown, he thought he'd try the same at home. 'Like some kind of Johnny Ball cum Witchfinder General', using his girlfriend's Barbie doll, he gently passed an electrical current through the warm salt water. It turned brown. In his words: 'before my very eyes, the world's first Detox Barbie was sat, with her feet in a pool of brown sludge, purged of a weekend's immorality.' Dr Ben Goldacre is the author of the Bad Science column in the Guardian. His book is about all the 'bad science' we are constantly bombarded with in the media and in advertising. At a time when science is used to prove everything and nothing, everyone has their own 'bad science' moments from the useless pie-chart on the back of cereal packets to the use of the word 'visibly' in cosmetics ads.

    It can be microscopic, yet also accounts for the largest organisms ever recorded, living for millennia and weighing tens of thousands of tonnes. Its ability to digest rock enabled the first life on land, it can survive unprotected in space, and thrives amidst nuclear radiation.In this captivating adventure, Merlin Sheldrake explores the spectacular and neglected world of fungi: endlessly surprising organisms that sustain nearly all living systems. They can solve problems without a brain, stretching traditional definitions of ‘intelligence’, and can manipulate animal behaviour with devastating precision. In giving us bread, alcohol and life-saving medicines, fungi have shaped human history, and their psychedelic properties, which have influenced societies since antiquity, have recently been shown to alleviate a number of mental illnesses. The ability of fungi to digest plastic, explosives, pesticides and crude oil is being harnessed in break-through technologies, and the discovery that they connect plants in underground networks, the ‘Wood Wide Web’, is transforming the way we understand ecosystems. Yet they live their lives largely out of sight, and over ninety percent of their species remain undocumented.Entangled Life is a mind-altering journey into this hidden kingdom of life, and shows that fungi are key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel and behave. The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.

    According to revolutionary new research, some birds rival primates and even humans in their remarkable forms of intelligence. In The Genius of Birds, acclaimed author Jennifer Ackerman explores their newly discovered brilliance and how it came about. As she travels around the world to the most cutting-edge frontiers of research, Ackerman not only tells the story of the recently uncovered genius of birds but also delves deeply into the latest findings about the bird brain itself that are shifting our view of what it means to be intelligent. At once personal yet scientific, richly informative and beautifully written, The Genius of Birds celebrates the triumphs of these surprising and fiercely intelligent creatures.

    A renowned scientist and the best-selling author of Lab Girl, Hope Jahren selects the year's top science and nature writing from writers who balance research with humanity and in the process uncover riveting stories of discovery across disciplines.The art of saving relics / Sarah Everts --Altered tastes / Maria Konnikova --The secrets of the wave pilots / Kim Tingley --The billion-year wave / Nicola Twilley --The case for leaving city rats alone / Becca Cudmore --The battle for Virunga / Robert Draper --The new harpoon / Tom Kizzia --A song of ice / Elizabeth Kolbert --Something uneasy in the Los Angeles air / Adrian Glick Kudler --Dark science / Omar Mouallem --The parks of tomorrow / Michelle Nijhuis --How factory farms play chicken with antibiotics / Tom Philpott --The invisible catastrophe / Nathaniel Rich --The devil is in the details / Christopher Solomon --The physics pioneer who walked away from it all / Sally Davies --The DIY scientist, the Olympian, and the mutated gene / David Epstein --Inside the breakthrough starshot mission to Alpha Centauri / Ann Finkbeiner --He fell in love with his good student --Then fired her for it / Azeen Ghorayshi --The woman who might find us another Earth / Chris Jones --Out here, no one can hear you scream / Katrhryn Joyce --The amateur cloud society that (sort of) rattled the scientific community / Jon Mooallem --The man who gave himself away / Michael Regnier --Unfriendly climate / Sonia Smith --It's time these ancient women scientists get their due / Emily Temple-Wood

    Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected — and most popular — of its kind.The Best American Travel Writing 2012 includesBryan Curtis, Lynn Freed, J. Malcolm Garcia, Peter Gwin,Pico Iyer, Mark Jenkins, Dimiter Kenarov, Robin Kirk,Kimberly Meyer, Paul Theroux, and others