Science News - September 11, 2010

Packing for Mars: The Curious
Science of Life in the Void

Mary Roach

Consider everything you do in 24 hours. Now consider doing it without gravity. Roach’s new book explores just that, unveiling the “man” in “manned space exploration.” She’s not interested in heroes, but in humans — the dirty, hungry, sleep- and stimulus-deprived souls shot into the isolation of space, and the scientists who test every contingency to put them there. The resulting tale is a humorous and irreverent look at the innards of space travel.

Take the Apollo 12 astronauts, who were so plagued by sharp, clingy moon-dust particles that they took off their long johns and flew naked half the way home. Or the volunteers who, in ongoing experiments, are confined to three months of bed rest for studies of their shrinking bone mass. (Don’t feel too bad for them: $17,000 goes a long way toward credit card debt.)

Roach makes an art of interweaving

Here’s Looking at Euclid

Alex Bellos

Numberland is a topsy-turvy place. In his new book, Bellos follows math’s counterintuitive twists and turns with the surprise and delight of someone rediscovering a long-lost landscape.

After receiving a degree in mathematics and philosophy from Oxford University, Bellos left the world of numbers for the world of words — working as a journalist first in England and later in dent on assignment, except that my destination was an abstract one,” he writes.

Bellos doesn’t cover ground that readers will remember from the classroom. Instead he dabbles in the stories,

details. Her descriptions can make you
feel you’re floating in a NASA practice
flight or tear you apart with shearing
forces in a supersonic bailout. She has
certainly done her research — perhaps
too much. Nearly every page is foot-
noted with some factoid she couldn’t
quite fit in. While interesting (who knew
guinea pigs can’t get car sickness?), only
half these asides are
pertinent; others feel
like desperate inter-
jections.

Roach clearly
relishes every gory
detail, but some
might argue that the
nitty-gritty of sexual
practices in space would have been bet-
ter left undescribed. As Roach puts it,
manned space travel “forces people to
unlace certain notions of what is and
isn’t acceptable.” Just don’t read the
space sickness chapter while riding the
subway. — Camille M. Carlisle

W. W. Norton & Co., 2010, 334 p., $25.95.

debates and puzzles that most interest and in some cases confound him. To do so, he travels the globe, visiting India to understand how the concept of zero came to be and to Germany to experience a speed-arithmetic competition. He even stops in to see a fanatical devotee of the slide rule living near London.

When he can’t go in person, Bellos takes readers on virtual visits to numerical points of interest. He interviews researchers who study people such as the Munduruku in the Amazon, who have no words for numbers beyond five, and the people of medieval Lincolnshire who used a base- 20 counting system. He even ponders checking into the hypothetical Hilbert hotel, a destination with an infinite number of rooms.

In the end, the spirit of the book is as silly as its title, but with a serious mission — to offer readers a second chance to be surprised and inspired by math.

— Elizabeth Quill

The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean Susan Casey

The author interweaves
tales of scientists
and surfers who, whether for study
or an adrenaline rush, seek out
monster waves. Doubleday, 2010,
352 p., $27.95.

The Grand Design Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow

In his first major work
in nearly a decade,
Hawking ponders the
origins of the universe
and the pursuit of a unified theory.

Bantam Books, 2010, 208 p., $28.

Asleep

Molly Caldwell Crosby A historical account of the sleeping sickness pandemic of the 1920s and the science behind it.

Berkley, 2010, 291 p., $24.95.

Deep Blue Home:
An Intimate Ecology
of Our Wild Ocean
Julia Whitty
Underwater rivers
pulse with life in this
lyrical exploration of
ocean currents. Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, 2010, 246 p., $24.