What's Next?

May 25, 2009
Editor Brockman, an agent at a "literary and software agency," approached some of the world's rising science stars in a disciplines to explain how they're "tackling some of science's toughest questions and raising new ones." The 18 new essays that resulted evoke a fantastic cross-section of societal concerns, focusing largely on issues of ethics and the human mind. German neuroscientist Christian Keysers explains how mirror neurons, located in the brain's center of voluntary action and body-control, allow us to have vicarious experiences and use them to choose "good and not evil" when dealing with others. Psychologist Jason Mitchell expands this idea to "social thought," in which humans achieve sophisticated coordination with the actions of others in order to, for instance, "design, construct, and operate an airplane." Biologist Vanessa Woods and anthropologist Brian Hare team up to explain how dogs evolved an ability to read human minds superior to even our closest primate relatives. Other articles cover quantum field theory, climate change, the ecological niche of viruses, social insects and interdisciplinary science. This absorbing collection makes easy-to-read but thought-provoking material for even casual science buffs.

May 15, 2009
Young scientists reports on questions to which they are devoting the primes of their careers indicate in toto that neuroscience and fundamental problems in astrophysics are their major professional passions. Prefaced by summaries of the authors educations and research interests, the essays each condense the history of a problem, theories and methods of investigation, and vernacular explanation into 10 pages or so. None of the authors are yet on the popular-science readers radar, but editor Brockman, a literary agent, gives notice that some of them are writing books. If numbers of essays alone are the measure, neuroscience seems to be the most effervescent field, with 10 out of 18 essays discussing investigations enabled by brain-imaging technologies in the areas of morality, memory, language, child and adolescent development, and aging. The cosmos also bubbles in two essays that frame the problems of dark energy and quantum gravity, respectively, while articles on human evolution and climate round out the roster. Capaciously accessible, these writings project a curiosity to which followers of science news will gravitate.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)