From Colin Sage’s Environment and Food to Michael Carolan’s The Real Cost of Cheap Food, here are a handful of new food books from the fall season that are worth checking out.
Thirty-three light-years away, in the constellation Leo the lion, astronomers say they have found a world considerably smaller than Earth, orbiting a dim red-dwarf star. That’s something to think about. While scientists have confirmed the existence of more than 700 so-called exoplanets since 1995, most of them have been giant — many considerably larger than…
Learning a new language makes the brain grow, according to researchers who studied young recruits at the Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy by measuring the brains of participants before and after the language training.
The life of Ferdinand Tonnies, German sociologist and political activist, is a testament to the dramatic social changes which swept across Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. Born in 1855 to a wealthy farmer at the northern fringe of the German empire, Tonnies spent his childhood working on the family estate, sharing close quarters…
The highly influential environment activist Bill McKibben is proposing a fossil energy divestment campaign, on the model of the international anti-apartheid dis-investment campaign that successfully brought pressure on South Africa’s white-only regime. McKibben was among the organizers who brought the planned Keystone pipeline to a standstill last year, and he has been the leading figure…
We like to know where things come from. We like stories. We like nice tales. We need our myths, our origins, our creations. So uncomfortable is it for us if something doesn’t have a cause that we strive to determine one, one way or the other, even absent the necessary evidence. Psychologist Tania Lombrozo argues…
An international team of astronomers has found a brown dwarf that is more than 99% hydrogen and helium. Described as ultra-cool, it has a temperature of just 400 degrees Celsius and its discovery could be a key step forward in helping astronomers distinguish between brown dwarfs and giant planets. The researchers publish their work in…