The State of Science is a highly technical and informational book written by Dr. Marc Zimmer. This book identifies the current obstacles that are hindering scientific growth and what we can do to overcome them.

The book starts by mentioning the bias in the field of science. Women and minorities are often treated with less respect in general. This impedes the advancement of science as they are not given due respect for important discoveries.

The book then gives a brief overview of recent discoveries that have changed science. From gravitational waves to CRISPR, many recent breakthroughs will change the way science is done.

A formidable obstacle in current science is the spread of fake news and information. Many times, reports are often biased and manipulated to support a cause. People also fall victim to the the promises of quacks who claim to benefit others when its clear they aren't scientists in the first place. The book resolves this issue by noting that the only way we can only destroy information by attacking its root: we must prevent it from spreading in the first place.

The book then comments on the future of science. We must encourage the advancement of science, but we must also be careful with it. Carelessness will result in individuals exploiting science for evil causes. However, this must not dampen are enthusiasm for science. It is something that should be supported. It is only human nature to advance, which we have done throughout the course of history.

I sometimes did find this book a little challenging to read, but that may be due to the fact that I am just entering high school and don't have a vast knowledge of science. I recommend this book to those who already have solid background in the science and academic research.

For those looking for information on current science and what we must do to advance it, The State of Science is definitely an informational book to read.

Go look around your house. Do you have lots of stuff? Let me ask you this, do you need all the items you have? Probably not.

In this short yet wonderful book, Fumio Sasaki details the joy of having less, and how anybody can get there. I enjoyed how Sasaki backed up his argument for minimizing with interesting propositions. Why do we enjoy buying new things? It is because it gives a sense of novelty. This often misleads people to buying more. “It’s hard for us to accurately forecast how our feelings will change from our initial joy when we buy [something], to familiarity, and later to boredom,” writes Sasaki, “At the outset, when we don’t actually own the [item], it seems like the joy could simply go on forever.” He also notes the irony of the fact that during natural disasters such as earthquakes, the items that are supposed to make us happy actually threaten our lives.

Sasaki writes, “Happiness is basically something that each of us can measure only by declaring our own sense of contentment. A person might be in a difficult situation that looks rough to others, but if they feel that they’re happy, if they’re grateful for their condition, then that person is happy, That’s why our actions make up 40 percent of your happiness.” We need to stop trying to become happy, we need to start feeling happy. In the end, happiness is not having more; it starts with being grateful for what you have. Less, in the end, can really be much, much more

The story follows Selin, a freshman at Harvard, trying to figure out how to live. She ponders over what courses to take (the literature classes never discuss the things she considers to be actually important, like why something had to happen to someone, instead focusing on how the state of Europe affected the author’s writing), what it means to be a writer, and whether to live an ethical or aesthetic life. She winds up, among other things, sending cryptic e-mails back and forth with a fellow student from Russian class, spending a month teaching English in a Hungarian village, walking into a tree, and burying some strawberries in the dirt. It is wonderfully frivolous and insightful and bizarre, meticulously inspecting every nook and cranny of college life. This is complemented by Batuman’s great humour, which reminded me of a spider’s web?—?it is set up so well and delivered so dryly and matter-of-factly that you don’t see it coming until you walk straight into it.?

Elif Batuman wrote an essay years ago in which she urged authors to “Write long novels, pointless novels.” And she has done just that, serving up something that is almost entirely pointless?.?.?. which becomes the point, really. It is in direct defiance with the modern American novel and its emphasis on utility and conciseness, instead being something that is indulgently meandering. By avoiding the burden of having to have a point, the novel finds liberation in scrutinizing the little and big things along the way of life. The end result, therefore, is no less satisfying.?

In this hilariously unpractical self-help book, Randall Munroe takes the simple problems in life and solves them with a simple tool called physics. From common problems like How to Dig a Hole, Munroe provides brilliant solutions that nobody ever thought of trying. With his witty comics speckled throughout, How To provides a healthy mix of science and humor. This has become my go-to self help book for any real world problem that needs solving.

There was something magical about an island—the mere word suggested fantasy. You lost touch with the world—an island was a world of its own. A world, perhaps, from which you might never return.

Ten unsuspecting people invited to an island. One by one, each is murdered ruthlessly. They come to the conclusion that the murderer is one of them. As each one awaits inevitable death, their pasts come back to haunt them.

This was my first Agatha Christie novel. I was initially disappointed. I had come to the end of a harrowing tale and had also perused the epilogue. Had I stumbled upon another of those inconclusive books that unsettle me? And then . . . there was the letter. A few unobtrusive pages tucked at the end of the book. In it, the seemingly inexplicable mystery is explained in a way only Agatha Christie could have. I guess I had underestimated her brilliance.

The Gene: An Intimate History elegantly traces the history of genetics. Inside is the story of the gene.

It all started with Mendel's pea plants. Mendel: monk and scientist. In the 1850s, Mendel began experiments with hybrids. His experiments began to unfurl the keys of heredity: dominant trait and recessive trait, parent to offspring. One might imagine a fleeting thought entering Mendel's mind: the idea of a courier of heredity—the gene. He published his results, full of groundbreaking discoveries ready to be found . . . but nobody looked.

But Mendel had planted the seed for genetics, and, slowly but surely, it grew. Others discovered his paper and the field began to grow like Mendel's hybrid pea plants: gene, mutation, DNA, A-T and C-G, double-helix, replication, RNA, transcription, translation, protein. Scientists had soon found the essential function of the gene.

But how, scientists asked themselves, could an embryo give rise to life. How did gene know when to activate at the right times? The answer to this question lay in the genes itself:

Even though every cell contains the same set of genes—an identical genome—the selective activation or repression of particular subsets of genes allows an individual cell to respond to its environments. The genome was an active blueprint—capable of deploying selected parts of its code at different times and in different circumstances. Proteins act as regulatory sensors, or master switches, in this process—turning on and turning off genes, or even combinations of genes, in a coordinate manner . . . Genes specified proteins that switched on genes that specified proteins that switched on genes—and so forth, all the way to the very first embryological cell. It was genes, all the way.

Genes were Regulated through proteins. We also learned that DNA Replicates to form new cells. It was now time to begin Recombining. A breakthrough was made when scientists figured a way to "cut and paste DNA." With gene cloning, DNA from different organisms could be mixed and matched to create sequences that had never been found before. This would prove to be a crucial step in the merging of medicine and genetics.

So how could genetics be used in medicine? Imagine a disease. If the disease is linked to a polymorphism (a variant gene), call it VARIANT, individuals with the disease will have VARIANT. Using VARIANT as a marker, we could compare all the genes near the marker from a individuals with and without the disease. Through a technique pioneered Sanger, the individual base pairs could be read. Mutations in the gene of the individual with the disease could thus be found this way. This gene-mapping technique resulted in the finding of the gene responsible for Huntington's disease.

Through genetics, we have found that human genes are strikingly similar between races. Dr. Mukherjee says of race:

You can use genome to predict where X or Y came from. But, knowing where A or B came from, you can predict little about the person’s genome. Or: every genome carries a signature of an individual’s ancestry—but an individual’s racial ancestry predicts little about the person’s genome . . . The geneticist goes home happy; the racist returns empty-handed . . . In a society where black men and women experience routine, pervasive, and insidious discrimination, such a propensity could become fully self-reinforcing: black children do worse at tests because they’ve been told that they are worse at tests, which makes them perform badly in tests and furthers the idea that they are less intelligent—ad infinitum. (342–348)

Given that genes have the instructions of life, then what different are we from robots? But, on the contrary, identical twins inherit the same genome, but still wind down different paths in life. Epigenetics reveals the true drivers of our fate:

Illnesses. Accidents. Traumas. Triggers. A missed train; a lost key; a suspended thought. Fluctuations in molecules that cause fluctuations in genes, resulting in slight alterations in forms.III Rounding a bend in Venice and falling into a canal. Falling in love. Randomness. Chance. Is that an infuriating answer? After decades of musing, have we reached the conclusion that fate is, well . . . fate? (389)

But how does our genome "remember" our experiences? In other words, why can experiences shape our fate? Once again, we looked to the genes. With proteins, our experiences are etched into are genome, like footnotes on the instruction of life. These "footnotes" are modified in response to different stimuli. But how these "footnotes" affect our genes has yet to be resolved.

A general question held by scientists was how humans could effectively alter our own genes. Then, the 2000s, scientists working on yogurt discovered that certain bacteria had developed a system to maim their long-time enemies (viruses):

The bacterial defense system was soon found to involve at least two critical components. The first piece was the “seeker”—an RNA encoded in the bacterial genome that matched and recognized the DNA of the viruses. The principle for the recognition, yet again, was binding: the RNA “seeker” was able to find and recognize the DNA of an invading virus because it was a mirror image of that DNA—the yin to its yang . . . Once the viral DNA had been recognized and matched as foreign (by its reverse-image), a bacterial protein named Cas9 was deployed to deliver the lethal gash to the viral gene. (471)

We have now learned to replicate this technique, called CRISPR/Cas9, ourselves. Scientists have since learned to program it for specific purposes.

Since Mendel's time, we have learned to program our genes. Through the Human Genome Project, we have also read our genome. The problems that now confront us our not physical, but moral. Now that we as humans know our instructions, the gene has become a powerful yet dangerous tool. One step out of line, and we modern civilization topples.

I was entranced by the skill with which Dr. Mukherjee presented scientific concepts. His words convey feelings and ideas with stunning detail. Dr. Mukherjee is truly a brilliant scientist and writer. In this superlative book, Dr. Mukherjee presents the knowledge found in textbooks while articulating a literary masterpiece.