When we stopped understanding the world
Benjamín Labatut
Adelphi
The Chilean writer Labatut has a gift: he manages to transform complex scientific revolutions into exciting adventures, worthy of the pen of Wilbur Smith. The accidental discovery of arsenic, the distressing one of black holes and the lethal one of cyanide and more generally of toxic gases: these (and other) advances in modern science are due to brilliant and sometimes fragile men – from Fritz Haber to Karl Schwarzschild via Albert Einstein – portrayed to perfection by Labatut in this volume of just 180 pages. The title of the book is a kind of common denominator of the stories of these scientists: the greatest illumination, the most dazzling idea, came when they stopped understanding the world as it was intended up to that moment, to try new paths towards a totally new understanding.
Welcome to the anthropocene
John Green
Rizzoli
The book takes up and deepens the stories that the American John Green told in his successful podcast, Anthropocene, in which he tackles intriguing themes – many of them technological or scientific – under the ‘excuse’ of the review: the author assigns a grade from 1 to 5 for each topic, motivating his judgment through in-depth stories that intertwine historical facts and personal anecdotes. Reading slips away quickly, each chapter is a story in itself. In the end you learn everything: from the passage of Halley’s comet to the birth of the Internet, up to the invention of the Qwerty keyboard.
Facebook: the final investigation
Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
Einaudi
Even before the Washington Post Facebook Papers, and the revelations by whistleblower Frances Haugen on Facebook’s negative effects on teenagers and democracies, Frenkel and Kang – two reporters from the New York Times – they published an extraordinary report on Zuckerberg’s social network, which would have allowed – among other things – Russian interference in the 2016 American elections. This book, born from the articles of 2018, has become an in-depth investigation on Facebook: from its birth in the 2000s to the overwhelming power of our days. Over a thousand hours of interviews with more than 400 people including Facebook employees, former employees, investors, executives and consultants. The result is a magnificent fresco on one of the greatest (and most discussed) revolutions of our times and on the person of Mark Zuckerberg.
Numbers don’t lie
Vaclav Smil
Einaudi
In the age of fake news there is only one way to establish the truth: to use numbers. The data does not lie, this is the incontrovertible affirmation from which Smil starts for his essay full of statistics, graphs and infographics which will also appeal to those who have never loved mathematics. Smil, professor emeritus at the Faculty of Environmental Sciences at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, through “reliable data” – more difficult to recover than one might believe – intends to demonstrate “What truth do they convey”. And therefore in his book, figures and percentages help to understand, for example, “what happens when we have fewer children“, I know “life expectancy is almost at the limit” e “because diesel still deserves consideration”.
Mars. The last frontier
Sarah Stewart Johnson
Sparrow & copper
This essay arrived in Italy a year late included by the New York Times “among the best books of 2020”. It is a judgment that we do not find it difficult to share. Mars is the planet on which many dream of finding life forms and on which a visionary entrepreneur, Elon Musk, hopes to transport humans with SpaceX rockets as early as 2026. Never as in recent years have we seen “from near ”Mars, with Nasa rovers (and more) that transmit high-resolution shots from millions of kilometers away. Sarah Stewart Johnson, author of this book who took part in the missions, knows it well Spirit, Opportunity e Curiosity that have reached the Martian surface. Stewart Johnson, researcher in planetology at Georgetown University, wrote over 300 pages to tell why we are obsessed with Mars and to relive, with fascinating details and anecdotes, the long journey of researchers and scientists towards the knowledge of the red planet.
Thoughts of the fly with a crooked head
Giorgio Vallortigara
Adelphi
The title is bizarre and intriguing, the content is even more surprising: the consciousness – this unknown – and the ability to hear of living beings are at the center of this essay di Vallortigara, professor of Neuroscience and Animal Cognition at the University of Trento as well as skilled science communicator. “According to many of my colleagues, conscience, the fact of having experiences, of feeling something, is linked to the quantity or richness of structure of the elements of the nervous system ”writes Vallortigara, who with his book instead takes a totally opposite direction, in an attempt to demonstrate that“ the basic forms of mental life do not require large brains ”. To support his thesis, Vallortigara accompanies us on a path of studies and research on beings, such as insects, that common thought wants to be unable to hear, in short, to try experiences. You will be amazed to know that bees, despite having an infinitely small number of neurons (about 960 thousand) compared to humans, are able, just like us, to distinguish the difference between a Monet and a Picasso.
Deciphering life
Walter Isaacson
Mondadori
Former editor in chief of Time and former president (and CEO) of CNN, Isaacson has become the most acclaimed company in the field of biographies in recent years: what he told has become a milestone the life of Steve Jobs, the one he revived is extremely fascinating the genius of Leonardo da Vinci (both Mondadori volumes). In short, Isaacson is a guarantee in this sense: when he chooses a life to tell, it is worth reading. His latest work dedicated to Jennifer Doudna, the Nobel laureate scientist who revolutionized gene editing. The book’s attack is a preamble that makes the reader understand that he will have no escape, and that he will go to the bottom of the 562 pages that make up the biography: “Had Jennifer Doudna been born anywhere in America, she might have felt like a normal girl. But in Hilo, an old town in a volcano-studded region of the Big Island of Hawaii, the fact that she was blonde, blue-eyed and thin made her feel, she later said, “like I was a real circus phenomenon.” . Thus begins the story of the woman who, in 2012, reached a revolutionary discovery – the transfer of the Crispr technique to the editing of the human genome – which is now used by those facing genetic diseases, by cancer research and by those who fight and infectious diseases.
Chasing a ray of light
Amedeo Balbi
Rizzoli
It is definitely not the first essay accompanying the (re) discovery of the theory of relativity. Yet the astrophysicist – and associate professor at the University of Rome Tor Vergata – Amedeo Balbi, as often happened in the past with his publications, has once again found the right key to approach the reader, even the least trained in physics and mathematics. , to the most famous intuition of Albert Einstein, the one he redesigned the concepts of space and time. Balbi succeeds in this by alternating clear and precise scientific explanations with those he called “Science Fiction Breaks”, short chapters in italics in which the most complex concepts are reviewed and analyzed in the light of movies, tv series and comics set in Space, in other dimensions and generally in the very distant future.
When the Earth had two Moons
Erik Asphaug
Adelphi
It really is a “forgotten history of the night sky”The one told by Asphang, professor of planetary sciences at the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. It is the story of a very distant time when planets did not yet exist. But there is much more than the big bang in the pages of Asphang. There are studies, theories and analyzes of more or less giant impacts occurred in the universe. Like what would have happened between Theia, a celestial body similar in size to those of Mars, and the Earth: this is the theory most used by the scientific community when it is necessary to explain the formation of the Moon. Asphang’s words have the strength of slow motion images that allow us to visualize, with extreme clarity, the unimaginable bumps that have left their mark on the surface of the planet we inhabit and on those that we can only observe from afar.
Amazon. The empire
Brad Stone
Hoepli
Brad Stone strikes again. The New York Times reporter who recounted the genesis of Amazon and the career of its founder in the bestseller “Sell everything. Jeff Bezos and the era of Amazon”(Also published by Hoepli), returns to the life and empire of one of the richest men in the world who just this year abandoned the leadership of his creation, leaving the chair of CEO to Andy Smith. Almost ten years have passed since “Sell everything”, a time when Amazon and its services have grown out of all proportion. Stone’s book is dedicated to this transformation – from a ‘simple’ distribution giant to, among other things, a producer and distributor of streaming content. new background on the genius of Bezos. Like when, in January 2011, the entrepreneur wrote an email to the top of his company in which he announced: “We have to make a $ 20 device whose intelligence resides in the cloud and which can only be controlled through our voice”.
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