By Elizabeth Svoboda/Undark

Walter Freeman was itching for a shortcut. Since the 1930s, the Washington, D.C. neurologist had been drilling through the skulls of psychiatric patients to scoop out brain chunks in the hopes of calming their mental torment. But Freeman decided he wanted something simpler than a bone drill – he wanted a rod-like implement that could pass directly through the eye socket to penetrate the brain. He’d then swirl the rod around to scramble the patient’s frontal lobes, the brain regions that control higher-level thinking and judgement.
Rummaging in his kitchen drawer, Freeman found the perfect tool: a sharp pick of the sort used to shear ice from large blocks. He knew his close colleague, surgeon James Watts, wouldn’t sanction his new approach, so he closed the office door and did his “ice-pick lobotomies” – more formally, transorbital lobotomies – without Watts’ knowledge.
Though the amoral scientist has been a familiar trope since Victor Frankenstein, we seldom consider what sets these technicians on the path to iniquity. Journalist Sam Kean’s The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science, helps fill that void, describing how dozens of promising scientists broke bad throughout history – and arguing that the better we understand their moral decay, the more prepared we’ll be to quash the next Freeman.

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Posted on July 25, 2021

By Ray Moynihan/The Conversation

There’s a great moment in George Eliot’s 1861 classic Silas Marner, where a young woman bemoans how people with “neither ache nor pain” want to be “better than well.” Written more than a century before the rise of the “wellness industry” of exclusive gyms, self-help and endless supplements, the phrase is prophetic.
Now comes So You Think You Know What’s Good For You?, a book promoted as the “ultimate health guide” from Australia’s highest profile doctor. A medical journalist with a global reputation, Norman Swan has been a broadcaster with the ABC for almost 40 years.
Despite it’s smug title, and a few possible flaws we will get to later, the book has lots of welcome common sense and evidence-based tips for living healthier. And some surprises too, such as suggestions for how young queer people might best come out.

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Posted on July 20, 2021

By SIU Press

“In 2003, Fred Delcomyn imagined his backyard of two-and-a-half acres, farmed for corn and soybeans for generations, restored to tallgrass prairie.
“Over the next 17 years, Delcomyn, with help from his friend James L. Ellis scored, seeded, monitored, reseeded, and burned these acres into prairie.
“In A Backyard Prairie, they document their journey and reveal the incredible potential of a backyard to travel back to a time before the wild prairie was put into plow rows.
“It has been said, ‘Anyone can love the mountains, but it takes a soul to love the prairie.’
“This book shows us how.

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Posted on June 30, 2021

By Victor Araneda Jure/The Conversation

Typically, comics are considered a silent medium. But while they don’t come with an aural soundtrack, comics have a unique grammar for sound.
From Wolverine’s SNIKT! when unsheathing his claws, to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in The Death of Stalin (later made into a film) the use of “textual audio” invites comics readers to hear with their eyes.

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Posted on June 10, 2021

By Popkin/Boing Boing

One of my friends gave me a copy of the book Siteless: 1001 Building Forms, by François Blanciak, as a gift a few years ago, and I use it often for reference images and inspiration for my drawings. Although I’m not an architect and this is an architecture-inspired book, the forms in it are great for drawing inspiration, creature parts, or just fun eye candy.

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Posted on June 1, 2021

By Chris Gibson and Andrew Warren/The Conversation

Musicians are often concerned about environmental problems, but entangled in them through the materials used in their instruments. The guitar industry, which uses rare woods from old-growth trees, has been a canary in the coal mine – struggling with scandals over illegal logging, resource scarcity and new environmental regulations related to trade in endangered species of trees.
We spent six years on the road tracing guitar-making across five continents, looking at the timber used – known in the industry as tonewoods for their acoustic qualities – and the industry’s environmental dilemmas. Our goal was to start with the finished guitar and trace it to its origin places, people and plants.
We first visited guitar factories in Australia, the United States, Japan and China. There we observed materials and manufacturing techniques. From factories, we visited the sawmills that supply them. And then we journeyed further, to forests, witnessing the trees from which guitars are made.

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Posted on June 1, 2021

By Joshua Roebke/Undark

Every community guards a creation story, a theory of cosmic origins. In much of sub-Saharan West Africa, for the past few thousand years, itinerant storytellers known as griots have communicated these and other tales through song.
Cosmologists also intone a theory of cosmic origins, known as the Big Bang, albeit through journal articles and math.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a cosmologist who is adept with both equations and “the keeper of a deeply human impulse” to understand our universe.
In her first book, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, & Dreams Deferred, Prescod-Weinstein also admits she is a griot, one who knows the music of the cosmos but sings of earthbound concerns. She is an award-winning physicist, feminist, and activist who is not only, as she says, the first Jewish “queer agender Black woman” to become a theoretical cosmologist, she is the first Black woman ever to earn a PhD in the subject.

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Posted on May 27, 2021

By Colin Bundy and William Beinart/The Conversation

There are two widely available views of Nelson Mandela, the first post-apartheid president of South Africa. The first is a reverential and uncritical celebration of his life and achievements. It resonated in the obituaries and eulogies when Mandela died in December 2013.
Madiba (his clan name) was “sent by God,” said Irish newspaper magnate Tony O’Reilly, who’s said to have been a friend of Mandela’s. His purchase of South Africa’s then largest newspaper company, Argus Newspapers, was made possible by Mandela’s support. Former American president Barack Obama declared that Mandela “changed the arc of history, transforming his country, the continent and the world.”
A second prevailing view is hostile and dismissive. By 2015, a reputation that had appeared invincible was being shredded in some media outlets, on the streets and especially on university campuses across South Africa. The critique centered on the 1994 negotiated settlement that ended apartheid. It accused Mandela of betraying the black majority to appease the economically powerful white minority.

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Posted on May 12, 2021

By SIU Press

When curator Diana L. Dretske discovered that the five long-gone Union soldiers in a treasured photograph in the Bess Bower Dunn Museum were not fully identified, it compelled her into a project of recovery and reinterpretation.
Utilizing an impressive array of local and national archives, as well as private papers, the author’s microhistorical approach records events that often go unnoticed, such as a farmer enlisting in the middle of a crop field, a sister searching her brother’s face for signs of war, and an immigrant dying in an effort to become a good American citizen.
This book, the most intensive examination of the 96th Illinois Volunteer Infantry since the regiment’s history was published in 1887, centers on immigrants from the British Isles who wished to be citizens of a country at war with itself.
Far removed from their native homelands, they found new promise in rural Illinois. These men, neighbors along the quiet Stateline Road in Lake County, decide to join the fighting at its most dangerous hour. The bonds of war become then the bonds of their new national identity.

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Posted on May 6, 2021

By Emily Cataneo/Undark

Animals as varied as sharks, salamanders, and duck-billed platypuses can detect electric fields around them, while some fish, including the South American knifefish and various species of African elephantfish, can actually generate unique, complex electric fields, which they use to communicate information about their social status, sex, and dominance position within their social group.
Could animals like these exist in space? On a celestial body with completely dark oceans, such as Saturn’s moon Enceladus, our notion of evolution would support this method of communication, leading us to believe that aliens on such a planet might concoct their language out of electric signals.
These are the kinds of musings that can help us postulate about alien life, according to The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens – and Ourselves, by University of Cambridge zoologist Arik Kershenbaum.

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Posted on April 13, 2021