The Ten Best Science Books of 2021 | Science| Smithsonian Magazine

This year the news cycle was dominated again by stories about Covid-19, and rightly so, but other big discoveries were made throughout the sciences. NASA landed another rover on Mars, researchers discovered a new possible species of human, and scientists found ways climate change is influencing the evolution of animals—all topics that may lend themselves to future books.

In 2021, with a year of the battle against the coronavirus behind us, several books related to the pandemic came out. One of those books, The Premonition, by Michael Lewis, is on this list. another important book dealing with how we fight disease, walter isaacson’s codebreaker is listed in the smithsonian scholars’ best books of the year selections. (we didn’t want to review it a second time here). the books we have selected feature dispatches from researchers on their scientific quests to find an elusive physical equation and learn about the connections between the trees and deep narratives of old science. journalists exploring everything from solutions to major environmental problems to the benefits of sweat. With so many informative and entertaining works to choose from, it was hard to pick just ten, but here are the books that most influenced our thinking in 2021.

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under a white sky: the nature of the future, by elizabeth kolbert

pulitzer prize winner elizabeth kolbert investigates the wild ways scientists are solving complicated environmental problems under white skies. As Kolbert points out, humans have directly transformed more than half of ice-free land into land and indirectly transformed the other half, with many negative consequences that need to be fixed. She takes the reader to a canal near Chicago, where officials have electrified the water so that harmful invasive carp do not travel up the canal and into the Great Lakes. She’s headed to Hawaii and Australia, where marine biologists are trying to engineer supercorals that can withstand rising water temperatures to save reefs. and she details a geoengineer’s plan to pump diamond dust into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight and reduce the impact of climate change. At the end of the book, she talks with Dan Schrag, a geologist who helped establish Harvard’s geoengineering program. she says, “I see a lot of pressure from my colleagues to have a happy ending. people want hope. and I’m like, ‘you know what? I am a scientist. My job is not to tell people the good news. My job is to describe the world as accurately as possible.’” And that’s exactly what Kolbert does in her book. she paints a realistic picture of exactly where we are. (spring joe)

the premonition: a pandemic story, by michael lewis

the premonition, by michael lewis, is a thriller, although you know from the beginning that its heroes lose. The book follows several public servants and scientists who saw covid-19 coming and did everything they could to stop the spread of the virus in the United States. Lewis sticks to his trademark: He parachutes readers into the lives of unconventional thinkers who challenged the so-called experts. In previous jobs, those experts were Wall Street traders and professional baseball scouts (the Big Short and Moneyball, respectively). Premonition’s antagonists are high-ranking government officials who ignore or muzzle our heroes, and bureaucratic systems that stand in the way of their success. In Part I, Lewis recounts the backstories of the protagonists, including a public health officer who was once sentenced to Hell by local church leaders for attending medical school; a microbiologist who injected a cousin of Ebola into the hearts of live pythons; and the Wolverines, a covert group of medical and military government members who drive pandemic preparedness. In Part II, set mostly in early 2020, the characters meet and try to contain covid. Lewis’s account then becomes a maddening page turner as politics, optics, and profits thwart our heroes and allow the virus to spread. (bridget alex)

finding the mother tree: discovering the wisdom of the forest, by suzanne simard

forest ecologist suzanne simard wrote our favorite book by a scientist this year with her deeply personal and captivating find of the mother tree: uncovering the wisdom of the forest. Simard grew up in Canada in a logging family, and at age 20, she worked as a seasonal employee for a logging company. But even from the beginning, she felt that cutting down forests and poisoning the land so monocultures could grow was the wrong approach. ella simard suspected that forests were made up of interconnected entities that help each other, so she pursued a career in science: she studied forestry for the forest service and eventually earned a doctorate in forestry at oregon state university. in experiments, she documented that birch and douglas fir trees exchanged carbon underground. established that the forest is a “wooden web,” with plants exchanging nutrients and chemical signals through their networks of roots and fungi, and found that large, old trees, or “mother trees,” were at the center of these networks often help their offspring.

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simard’s findings have implications for how governments should manage forests. felling strips and removing all but the desired species may not be the best approach; the environmentalist, on the other hand, advocates leaving mother trees and allowing the plants to grow together and support each other. But Simard’s science alone is not the reason this book impresses. Throughout it, he shares personal stories as he embarks on his scientific quest: his close relationship with his brother, the breakup of their marriage, and her battle with breast cancer. In the midst of all this, Simard continues to push the boundaries of what is known about how forests work. She takes the reader with her to scientific conferences where she discusses research that many in the audience dismiss, to her lab at British Columbia University where she conducts field experiments with graduate students, and to the forests of western Canada where grizzly bears roam. . Crafting a narrative that incorporates so many personal and professional relationships, she shows how connections as intricate as the web of roots and fungi beneath the forest floor shaped her scientific journey. (js)

the joy of sweat: the strange science of perspiration, by sarah everts

We all sweat, at least a little, all the time. that’s good. For one thing, sweat keeps our hot mammalian bodies from overheating, but the salty discharge is much more than that. In the joy of sweat, science journalist Sarah Everts has composed a weird and wonderful tribute to the bodily effluvia that keep us cool and yet carry so much information about ourselves. Sweat, Everts writes, is “an oddly extravagant way of controlling body temperature.” each person has two to five million sweat pores, part of a built-in temperature control system. But as Everts traces the natural and cultural history of sweat, from the ways other animals cool off to New Jersey scent makers and Russian speed dating based on body odor, it becomes so much more. sweat gives us personal scents that play a role in attraction and can convey signs that we are sick. As the repeated reinvention of the sauna suggests, sometimes it feels good to break a vigorous sweat. what begins as an exploration becomes an ode to our ever-present secretions. “We are going to have to learn as a species to appreciate our sweat,” Everts writes, “and perhaps embrace sweating even more than we already do.” (black riley)

the god equation: the search for a theory of everything, by michio kaku

In God’s Equation, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku writes of his nearly lifelong quest to find what he calls the “holy grail of physics,” a “theory of everything.” His ultimate goal is to write an equation that encompasses all of physics and can explain everything from the big bang to the end of the universe. Such an idea began with Isaac Newton and baffled Albert Einstein, who was unable to come up with a theory that would unify all the forces at play. If all that sounds too heavy, rest assured that kaku makes it accessible by taking the reader on its journey and writing about science in clear and concise language.

Kaku has been searching for a great equation ever since, at age eight, he saw a photo of Einstein’s desk and learned in the caption that the great scientist couldn’t finish the work he started. He moves from that anecdote to history, introducing the reader to the ideas of the Greeks and Newton. As Kaku moves through the scientists who discovered the world’s major forces through equations, he makes the reader understand the importance of such milestones by detailing the technologies that resulted from the discoveries. Newton’s laws were used to perfect the steam engine. mathematician james clerk maxwell’s equation for waves was proved by physicist heinrich hertz in 1886, using a spark and a coil of wire, and led to the revelation of radio by guglielmo marconi in 1894. finally, history and the quest de kaku to find “the equation of god” lead to string theory, the concept that the universe is not made of point particles but of tiny invisible strings that vibrate with a note corresponding to a subatomic particle. that theory is unproven, and kaku has skin in the game; he began studying string theory in 1968. but there is also no reason not to read the book, for at its heart it is a clear and engaging story of a difficult scientific quest. (js)

fuzz: when nature breaks the law, by mary roach

of all the authors on our list this year, mary roach is the one we most want to have a beer with. In her entertaining book Fuzz, she interviews and accompanies experts, from a wildlife biologist tracking cougars to a biological warfare specialist studying toxic peas, to learn how they deal with cases of animals and plants “breaking the law.” “. Roach heads to colorado to find out if bears can be stopped from rummaging through garbage and breaking into homes, to india to find out why elephants kill villagers, and to canada to see how “dangerous trees” are cut down. they could fall and kill hikers. the book is packed with peculiar facts and wild dispatches from the field. His discoveries range from the lighthearted – bears in Minnesota once raided a large number of mres, “which the bears apparently enjoy more than the soldiers” – to the ghoulish effigies, or dead hanging birds, hanging near debris recovered after the 11 of September. and deposited in a landfill. the effigies were meant to prevent seagulls from picking through body parts while inspectors combed through the remains for remains.

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roach details each topic with his trademark wit, filling the text with disturbing statistics and examples. Did you know that 40,000 people die each year from snake bites in India? Or that in one breeding season, 200 men spent six to seven hours a day beating and killing 80,000 albatrosses on an intermediate atoll that authorities wanted to prevent from hitting planes? Throughout his journey, Roach documents human responses to plant and animal “crimes,” from measures that are comical to more disturbing, leaving the reader occasionally shocked and always entertained. (js)

the messy cosmos: a journey into dark matter, space-time and & deferred dreams, by chanda-prescod weinsten

Theoretical cosmologist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein begins her visionary book The Messy Cosmos with a story about the origin of human existence that establishes our role in the universe as guardians and seekers of knowledge. Prescod-Weinstein then masterfully communicates her deep admiration for the night sky, what is known about the structure of space, and what remains to be discovered about the cosmos. Throughout the book, she intertwines groundbreaking discoveries made in physics with pivotal moments in her own career as the first black woman to hold a full professorship in theoretical cosmology: a journey to unravel the universe in a field that too often perpetuates the harm in ways that are both racist and sexist. she immerses herself in the historical context of scientific advances, she challenges the notion of who can be named a scientist and asks what responsibility researchers have to society. In the same way that Prescod-Weinstein teaches that matter shapes the space-time around it, she also details how the decisions physicists make shape the future of society. the messy cosmos is a fierce reminder that science does not exist in a vacuum; rather, it is a practice firmly rooted in humanity, and access to the night sky is perhaps the most fundamental human right of all. the book is a love letter to the wonderful universe we call home, and an impetus to think critically about how we explore its depths. (katrina miller)

deep time: a journey through our planet’s 4.5 billion years, by riley black

Our top pick for a coffee table book this year is Riley Black’s Deep Time. conceiving the stretch of time since the formation of the universe is difficult. This book helps the reader do so by selecting key historical moments, such as the dawn of the dinosaurs and the disappearance of Doggerland, connecting Britain with mainland Europe, and offering digestible explanations for them with compelling imagery. Black is an expert guide, having written several books on paleontology and articles on the subject for Smithsonian over the years. But this book isn’t limited to fossils and dinosaurs, it also covers key concepts in astronomy (the Hubble Deep Field), geology (the formation of the Grand Canyon), and biology (mitochondria), all in chronological order. for example, an entry titled “stones on the tongue” with the corresponding date of 450 million years ago, the beginning of sharks’ existence on earth, describes the evolution of how European experts thought about shark teeth and how the study of the remains led to a key scientific concept. Black explains that naturalists originally believed that such fossils were petrified tongues of snakes. It wasn’t until a great white shark was brought to an anatomist in 1666 that experts figured the relics came from ancient sharks, and that the teeth must have fallen to the bottom of the sea and been covered by sediment. (Many indigenous cultures had already identified fossils as coming from animals that lived long before). That understanding led to the geological principle now known as superposition: In rock layers, the oldest are at the bottom. A 1668 anatomist’s sketch of a shark, an image of a great white shark, and a photo of fossilized shark teeth dating to the Late Cretaceous illustrate this entry. The book consists of 50 such informative entries, allowing the reader to understand how scientists learned about key milestones in the evolution of our planet. (js)

on the edge of life: the search for what it means to be alive, by carl zimmer

We seem to intuitively know the difference between living things and inorganic matter, but as award-winning science writer Carl Zimmer makes abundantly clear in Life’s Edge, that line isn’t as sharp as one might imagine. is a blood cell alive? what about a virus? or a fertilized egg? the notion of death is equally confusing. tiny tardigrades that don’t grow larger than a fifteenth of an inch can be dried and frozen, but if water and heat are added, they come back to life after years or even decades. Scientists know that life took over our planet about 3.5 billion years ago, based on the oldest known fossils, but how exactly did it happen? Zimmer revisits a famous experiment carried out in the early 1950s by scientists who attempted to simulate conditions thought to prevail on early Earth. Although no creatures came out of his apparatus, the experiment produced amino acids, which are among the building blocks of life. Zimmer also explores a recent idea known as assembly theory, which attempts to give a precise measure of the complexity of chemical compounds as a way of fine-tuning the origins of life. and yet no precise moment has been found at which chemistry gives rise to biology. After reading Zimmer’s engaging book, the reader might even wonder if categories like “living” and “nonliving” are labels we impose on nature, rather than objective features of the world. (dan falk)

beloved beasts: fighting for life in an age of extinction, by michelle nijhuis

in beloved beasts, michelle nijhuis takes a captivating look at the history of the conservation movement since the late 19th century. The author weaves an intricate story detailing the efforts of key conservationists, complex individuals who Nijhuis writes sometimes “did the wrong things for the right reasons, and the right things for the wrong reasons.” The reader learns of William Temple Hornaday, who killed several rare bison in the West in 1886 for an A.D. diorama before starting a captive breeding program to save the species. nijhuis shares the story of rosalie edge, a bird lover who fought the audubon society in the 1920s and 1930s to gain more support for birds of prey and bought hawk mountain, a key migration spot in pennsylvania that has become become an important place to count birds. As Nijhuis introduces new characters, from Rachel Carson to Aldo Leopold, she makes her connections to the conservationists who came before them, and she fills the book with interesting facts. did you know, for example, that the us did you adopt ddt during world war ii after losing access to chrysanthemums grown in japan that had been a source of the insecticide pyrethrum? or that most species protection by state wildlife agencies is financed by hunting license fees and taxes on hunting equipment? today, as nijhuis writes, more than a million species are threatened with extinction, and in the last two decades more than 1,800 conservationists have been killed protecting species and habitats. To better understand how conservation could move forward to address these dire conditions, it helps to have this comprehensive history detailing the failures and successes of notable practitioners. (js)

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