Episodi

  • Giuseppe Longo and Adam Nocek, "The Organism Is a Theory: Giuseppe Longo on Biology, Mathematics, and AI" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)

    Giuseppe Longo and Adam Nocek, "The Organism Is a Theory: Giuseppe Longo on Biology, Mathematics, and AI" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)
    Jan 20 2026
    A bold reimagining of life that bridges science, philosophy, cybernetics, and the complexities of biological existence The Organism Is a Theory: Giuseppe Longo on Biology, Mathematics, and AI (Giuseppe Longo and Adam Nocek, 2026) is an intriguing synthesis of decades of interdisciplinary research by eminent mathematician and biological scientist Giuseppe Longo. A unique collaboration between Longo and philosopher of technology Adam Nocek, the volume confronts foundational issues in the history of mathematics, computer science, physics, and theoretical biology. Challenging conventional approaches that apply computational and formalist models to the biological world, Longo reveals how the limitations of these models hinder the understanding of organismic complexity, development, and evolution. Through a critique of dominant scientific paradigms, he emphasizes the need for a new biological theory that accounts for the temporal and spatial intricacies of life. Enhanced by Nocek's comprehensive introduction and a fascinating three-part interview with Longo, The Organism Is a Theory offers a bold rethinking of the biosciences, integrating the work of Alan Turing, Bernhard Riemann, Henri Poincaré, Kurt Gödel, and others into Longo's vision of critical biology. Bridging scientific and philosophical discourses, this book creatively applies insights from mathematics, physics, and computing into the study of the organism to present a new theoretical approach to understanding biological complexity that resists reductive mechanistic and informatic explanations. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with image accompanied by short alt text and/or extended description. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
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    1 ora e 14 min
  • Steve Ramirez, "How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past" (Princeton UP, 2025)

    Steve Ramirez, "How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past" (Princeton UP, 2025)
    Jan 19 2026
    As a graduate student at MIT, Steve Ramirez successfully created false memories in the lab. Now, as a neuroscientist working at the frontiers of brain science, he foresees a future where we can replace our negative memories with positive ones. In How to Change a Memory, Ramirez draws on his own memories--of friendship, family, loss, and recovery--to reveal how memory can be turned on and off like a switch, edited, and even constructed from nothing. A future in which we can change our memories of the past may seem improbable, but in fact, the everyday act of remembering is one of transformation. Intentionally editing memory to improve our lives takes advantage of the brain's natural capacity for change. In How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past (Princeton UP, 2025), Ramirez explores how scientists discovered that memories are fluid--they change over time, can be erased, reactivated, and even falsely implanted in the lab. Reflecting on his own path as a scientist, he examines how memory manipulation shapes our imagination and sense of self. If we can erase a deeply traumatic memory, would it change who we are? And what would that change mean anyway? Throughout, Ramirez carefully considers the ethics of artificially controlling memory, exploring how we might use this tool responsibly--for both personal healing and the greater good. A masterful blend of memoir and cutting-edge science, How to Change a Memory explores how neuroscience has reached a critical juncture, where scientists can see the potential of memory manipulation to help people suffering from the debilitating effects of PTSD, anxiety, Alzheimer's, addiction, and a host of other neurological and behavioral disorders. Steve Ramirez has been featured on CNN, NPR, and the BBC and in leading publications such as The New York Times, National Geographic, Wired, Forbes, The Guardian, The Economist, and Nature. An award-winning neuroscientist who has given TED talks on his groundbreaking work on memory manipulation, he is associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
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    51 min
  • Justin Gregg, "If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity" (Little, Brown, 2022)

    Justin Gregg, "If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity" (Little, Brown, 2022)
    Jan 18 2026
    What if human intelligence is actually more of a liability than a gift? After all, the animal kingdom, in all its diversity, gets by just fine without it. At first glance, human history is full of remarkable feats of intelligence, yet human exceptionalism can be a double-edged sword. With our unique cognitive prowess comes severe consequences, including existential angst, violence, discrimination, and the creation of a world teetering towards climate catastrophe. What if human exceptionalism is more of a curse than a blessing? As Dr. Justin Gregg puts it in his book If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity (Little, Brown (US), 2022, Hodder (UK), 2023), there’s an evolutionary reason why human intelligence isn’t more prevalent in the animal kingdom. Simply put, non-human animals don’t need it to be successful. And, miraculously, their success arrives without the added baggage of destroying themselves and the planet in the process. In seven mind-bending and hilarious chapters, Dr. Gregg highlights features seemingly unique to humans – our use of language, our rationality, our moral systems, our so-called sophisticated consciousness – and compares them to our animal brethren. What emerges is both demystifying and remarkable, and will change how you look at animals, humans, and the meaning of life itself. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
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    31 min
  • Rafael Yuste, "Lectures in Neuroscience" (Columbia UP, 2023)

    Rafael Yuste, "Lectures in Neuroscience" (Columbia UP, 2023)
    Jan 16 2026
    The human brain is perhaps the most intricate and fascinating object in the known universe. Through a mysterious process, the activity of billions of neurons within a few pounds of matter generates the unfathomable complexity of the mind.Lectures in Neuroscience is a conversational and accessible introduction to the brain. Beginning from basic elements of neuroscience, the acclaimed scientist Rafael Yuste guides readers through increasingly sophisticated topics, developing a unified framework for how the brain functions. He describes how the brain is organized and how it develops, how neurons operate and form neural circuits, and how these circuits function as neural networks to generate behavior and mental states.Yuste challenges the traditional view that the brain is an input-output machine that reacts reflexively to sensory stimuli. Instead, he argues, the purpose of the brain is to make a predictive model of the world in order to anticipate the future and choose successful courses of action. He gives readers insight into the workings of sensory and motor systems and the neurobiological basis of our perceptions, thoughts, emotions, memories, and consciousness.Peppered with anecdotes and illustrated with elegant drawings and diagrams, this succinct and cohesive book is accessible to readers without previous background in the subject. It is written for anyone seeking to grasp the core principles of neuroscience or looking for a fresh and clear perspective on how the brain works. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
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    1 ora e 2 min
  • Dagomar Degroot, "Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Our Place in the Solar System" (Harvard UP, 2025)

    Dagomar Degroot, "Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Our Place in the Solar System" (Harvard UP, 2025)
    Jan 13 2026
    Our solar system is a dynamic arena where asteroids careen off course and solar winds hurl charged particles across billions of miles of space. Yet we seldom consider how these events, so immense in scale, influence our fragile blue planet: Earth. In Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Our Place in the Solar System (Harvard UP, 2025), Dagomar Degroot traces the surprising threads linking human endeavor to the rest of the solar system. He reveals how variability in planetary environments has shaped geopolitics, spurred scientific and cultural innovation, and encouraged new ideas about the emergence and fate of life. Martian dust storms altered the trajectory of the Cold War and inspired fantastical stories about alien civilizations. Comet impacts on Jupiter led to the first planetary defense strategy. And volcanic eruptions spewed sulfuric acid into Venus's atmosphere, exposing the existential risks of climate change at home. As we stand on the brink of a new era of space settlement, cosmic environments are becoming increasingly vulnerable to human activity. They may also hold the key to slowing the destruction of environments on Earth. Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean urges us to develop an interplanetary environmentalism across a vast mosaic of entangled worlds and to consider the profound connections that bind us to the cosmos and each other. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
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    1 ora e 16 min
  • Alison Bashford, "Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

    Alison Bashford, "Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
    Jan 11 2026
    Why did Isaac Newton read books on chiromancy, the occult science of hand reading that revealed the secrets of the soul? Why did Charles Darwin claim that the hand gave humans dominion over all other species? Why did psychoanalyst Charlotte Wolff climb into the primate cages of the London Zoo, taking hundreds of delicate palm prints? Why did Francis Galton, the father of fingerprinting, take palm prints too? And why did world-leading geneticists study the geometry of palm lines in their search for the secrets of chromosomal syndromes? Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic (University of Chicago, 2025) is an astounding history of magic, medicine, and science, of an enduring search for how our bodily surfaces might reveal an inner self—a soul, a character, an identity. From sixteenth-century occult physicians influenced by the Kabbalah to twentieth-century geneticists, and from criminologists to eugenicists, award-winning historian Dr. Alison Bashford takes us on a remarkable journey into the strange world of hand readers, revealing how signs on the hand—its shape, lines, marks, and patterns—have been elaborately decoded over the centuries. Sometimes learned, sometimes outrageously deceptive, sometimes earnest, and, more often than we ever expected, medically and scientifically trained, these palm readers of the past prove to be essential links in the human quest to peer into bodies, souls, minds, and selves. Not only for fortune-telling palmists were the future and the past, health, and character laid bare in the hand, but for other experts in bodies and minds as well: anatomists, psychiatrists, embryologists, primatologists, evolutionary biologists, geneticists, and more. Drawing telling parallels between the divination promised by palmistry and the appeal to self-knowledge offered by modern genetic testing, Decoding the Hand also makes clear that palm-reading is far from a relic or simple charlatanism. Dr. Bashford’s sagacious history of human hands touching and connecting opens wide the essential human pursuit of what lies within and beyond. 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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
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    45 min
  • Kenneth Aizawa, "Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation: A Granular Approach" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

    Kenneth Aizawa, "Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation: A Granular Approach" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
    Jan 10 2026
    How do scientists reason when they posit unobservables to explain their observed results? For example, how did Watson and Crick reason that DNA had a double-helix structure when they observed Franklin’s image 51, or how did Hodgkin and Huxley reason that sodium ions carried the current flowing into the membrane of a voltage-clamped giant squid axon? In Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation: A granular approach (Cambridge University Press), Kenneth Aizawa argues for an account of such reasoning as singular compositional abduction: explaining particular experimental results in terms of lower-level entities, such as the bonds between nucleotides or the positive charges of sodium ions. Aizawa, who is professor of philosophy at Rutgers University—Newark, draws on close examination of scientific practice to argue that dominant views in philosophy of science regarding abduction do not capture what scientists are actually doing. Instead, he articulates compositional abduction as a specific form of inferential practice in science distinct from eliminating alternative hypotheses, employing hypothetical-deductive confirmation, or identifying mechanism components. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
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    1 ora e 1 min
  • Heino Falcke and Jörg Römer, "Light in the Darkness: Black Holes, the Universe, and Us" (HarperCollins, 2021)

    Heino Falcke and Jörg Römer, "Light in the Darkness: Black Holes, the Universe, and Us" (HarperCollins, 2021)
    Jan 9 2026
    An astrophysicist chronicles his quest to photograph a black hole and reflects on its spiritual ramifications in this international-bestselling memoir. On April 10, 2019, award-winning astrophysicist Heino Falcke presented the first image ever captured of a black hole at an international press conference—a turning point in astronomy that Science magazine called the scientific breakthrough of the year. That photo was captured with the unthinkable commitment of an intercontinental team of astronomers who transformed the world into a global telescope. While this image achieved Falcke's goal in making a black hole "visible" for the first time, he recognizes that the photo itself asks more questions for humanity than it answers.Light in the Darkness takes us on Falcke's extraordinary journey to the darkest corners of the universe. From the first humans looking up at the night sky to modern astrophysics, from the study of black holes to the still-unsolved mysteries of the universe, Falcke asks, in even the greatest triumphs of science, is there room for doubts, faith, and a God? A plea for curiosity and humility, Light in the Darkness sees one of the great minds shaping the world today as he ponders the big, pressing questions that present themselves when we look up at the stars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
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    1 ora e 14 min