New Books in Science

Alan J. McComas, emeritus professor of medicine and neurologist, discusses consciousness from a neurophysiological, reductionist angle. He explains self-awareness, ties memory and concept cells to recognition, and contrasts wakefulness with full conscious selfhood. He reviews historical debates, single-neuron evidence, Libet’s findings on free will, and critiques panpsychism and quantum claims.

Anna-Luna Post, historian at Leiden University and author of Galileo’s Fame, studies early modern science and reputation. She traces how others shaped Galileo’s renown through poets, patrons, universities, and rivalries. Short scenes explore contested discoveries, self-fashioning for patrons, institutional prestige, Dominican opposition, and how networks controlled or lost his story.

In this episode we discuss the paper "The Unreasonable Likelihood of Being: Origin of Life, Terraforming, and AI" (arXiv, 2025) with Robert Endres. Paper Abstract: The origin of life on Earth via the spontaneous emergence of a protocell prior to Darwinian evolution remains a fundamental open question in physics and chemistry. Here, we develop a conceptual framework based on information theory and algorithmic complexity. Using estimates grounded in modern computational models, we evaluate the difficulty of assembling structured biological in-formation under plausible prebiotic conditions. Our results highlight the formidable entropic and informational barriers to forming a viable protocell within the available window of Earth’s early history. While the idea of Earth being terraformed by advanced extraterrestrials might violate Occam’s razor from within mainstream science, directed panspermia—originally proposed by Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel—remains a speculative but logically open alternative. Ultimately, uncovering physical principles for life’s spontaneous emergence remains a grand challenge for biological physics. Full paper available here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Answers to the question 'what is medical progress?' have always been contested, and any one response is always bound up with contextual ideas of personhood, society, and health. However, the widely held enthusiasm for medical progress escapes more general critiques of progress as a conceptual category. From the intersection of intellectual history, philosophy, and the medical humanities, in Making Medical Progress: History of a Contested Idea (Cambridge UP, 2025) Dr. Vanessa Rampton sheds light on the politics of medical progress and how they have downplayed the tensions between individual and social goods. She examines how a shared consensus about its value gives medical progress vast political and economic capital, revealing who benefits, who is left out, and who is harmed by this narrative. From ancient Greece to artificial intelligence, exploring the origins and ethics of different visions of progress offers valuable insight into how we can make them more meaningful in future. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

The United Kingdom has sixteen nuclear power stations. Most go under the radar, but their presence is enormous, both physically and culturally. They divide opinion like nothing else. Are they relics of a past era, or a crucial part of our futures? Are they cathedrals of science or temples of doom? Atomic Albion: Journeys Around Britain’s Nuclear Power Stations (Strange Attractor, 2025) by Dr. Tom Bolton is a journey around Britain’s nuclear power stations and the country itself. From the Essex marshes to the Anglesey coast, from the Dungeness shingle to the far north of Scotland, Tom Bolton explores how nuclear sites shape the places around them, and enters the awesome world of nuclear power and weapons. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

A search for the meaning of one of nature's greatest riddles: why do so many creatures transform? “How many creatures walking on this earth / Have their first being in another form?” the Roman poet Ovid asked two thousand years ago. He could not have known the full extent of the truth: today, biologists estimate a stunning three-quarters of all animal species on Earth undergo some form of metamorphosis.But why do tadpoles transform into frogs, caterpillars into butterflies, elvers into eels, immortal jellyfish from sea sprigs to medusae and back again, growing younger and younger in frigid ocean depths? Why must creatures go through massive destruction and remodeling to become who they are? Tracing a path from Aristotle to Darwin to cutting-edge science today, Harman explores that central mystery in Metamorphosis: A Natural and Human History (Basic Books, 2025).Metamorphosis, however, isn’t just a biological puzzle: it takes us to the very heart of questions of being and identity, whatever kind of change we humans may undergo. Metamorphosis is a new classic of natural history: a book that, by unveiling a mystery of nature, causes us to relearn ourselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Tom Griffiths, cognitive scientist and head of Princeton’s AI Lab, blends history and math to track attempts to formalize thought. He covers three frameworks—symbols, neural networks, and probability. Stories range from Boole and Turing to Chomsky, neural learning rules, backpropagation, and the strengths and limits of large language models.

Friction, the force that resists motion, is synonymous with difficulty and complication. If you’ve ever replaced tires worn smooth by the road or reached for a can of WD-40 to fix a creaking door hinge, then you know the headache this force can cause. In Friction: a Biography (Harvard UP, 2026), Dr. Jennifer Vail reveals beneath the difficulty and complication a force as enigmatic and intriguing as it is central to the human story. She traces how, from the moment we first harnessed the power of fire to the Industrial Revolution and beyond, the quest to manipulate friction has driven innovation, culture, and even our own evolution. Today, as scientists study friction in the most unexpected of places, they’re learning why some viruses lie dormant for years while others devastate our cells immediately; where elusive dark matter might be found; and how the climate crisis ought finally be addressed. And yet, for all they’ve learned, scientists still haven’t cracked the greatest mystery of all: how to bridge the distinct laws that govern friction at its largest and smallest scales. Connecting the discoveries of historical luminaries like Newton, da Vinci, and the Wright brothers to the latest breakthroughs in engineering, Friction is a captivating biography of this unsung hero of the physical world. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Today I talked to John L. Rudolph about his book Why We Teach Science (and Why We Should) (Oxford UP, 2023).Few people question the importance of science education in American schooling. The public readily accepts that it is the key to economic growth through innovation, develops the ability to reason more effectively, and enables us to solve the everyday problems we encounter through knowing how the world works. Good science teaching results in all these benefits and more -- or so we think. But what if all this is simply wrong? What if the benefits we assume science education produces turn out to be an illusion, nothing more than wishful thinking?John L. Rudolph is Vilas Distinguished Achievement professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has affiliate appointments in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and the Robert and Jean Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies and is the past editor-in-chief of the Wiley & Sons journal Science Education. Prior to his faculty appointment, he taught physics, chemistry, and biology in middle schools and high schools across Wisconsin.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Are humans really fish? Why are we the only animals with chins? How much of our DNA do we share with the trillions of bacteria in our bodies? For centuries, scientists have chased the secrets of how life on our planet arose, how it assumed its dazzling diversity of forms, and how we humans are related to everything else on earth. With increasingly sophisticated genetic methods now bringing us ever closer to answers, leading evolutionary biologist Max Telford takes us inside one of science's greatest quests. In the intellectually thrilling The Tree of Life: Solving Science's Greatest Puzzle (W. W. Norton, 2025), Telford shows how reconstructing the web of relationships between all our planet's species, from birds and butterflies to mushrooms and moose, allows us to unravel the epic history of life on our planet. In Telford's hands, the many-branched evolutionary trees that biologists assemble--from Charles Darwin's first sketches to the vast computer-generated diagrams scientists are building today--become time machines that take us on a vivid journey through four billion years of life's history. We meet long-lost ancestors, picturing them in the environment of a much younger earth, and discover where we first acquired our backbones and nipples and, conversely, where we lost our tails. We learn how insects are "actually" crustaceans, and how dogs and wolves are more closely related to whales than to the recently extinct Tasmanian wolves they so resemble. Far from a dry representation of the dead, the tree of life is a living, shifting thing that constantly alters our perspective on the past, present, and future of life on earth. For any reader fascinated by evolution and natural history, The Tree of Life is an essential portal to the distant past and a window onto our collective origins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science