Main description:

The next wave of science writing is here. Editor Max Brockman has talent-spotted 19 young scientists, working on leading-edge research across a wide range of fields. Nearly half of them are women, and all of them are great communicators: their passion and excitement makes this collection a wonderfully invigorating read.

We hear from an astrobiologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena about the possibilities for life elsewhere in the solar system (and the universe); from the director of Yale's Comparative Cognition Laboratory about why we keep making the same mistakes; from a Cambridge lab about DNA synthesis; from the Tanzanian savannah about what lies behind attractiveness; we hear about how to breed plants to withstand disease, about ways to extract significance from the Interne's enormous
datasets, about oceanography, neuroscience, microbiology, and evolutionary psychology.

Contents:

Preface ; 1. On the Coming Age of Ocean Exploration ; 2. Children's Helping Hands ; 3. Molecular Cut and Paste ; 4. Next Step: Infinity ; 5. Nurture, Nature, and the Stress That is Life ; 6. What Can Huge Data Sets Teach Us About Society and Ourselves? ; 7. On the Universality of Attractiveness ; 8. To Err is Primate ; 9. Our Brains Know Why We Do What We Do ; 10. Is Shame Necessary? ; 11. Plant Immunity in a Changing World ; 12. The Emergence of Human Audiovisual Communication ; 13. Why Rejection Hurts ; 14. Finding the Mind in the Body ; 15. Should the Law Depend on Luck? ; 16. How We Read People's Moral Minds ; 17. How Odd I Am! ; 18. Where Does Human Diversity Come From? ; Acknowledgements