17 Of The Interesting Science Books To Read in 2020
For years, many influential personalities such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg have advised their followers and audiences to read books. For them, books don’t just help people become successful in life, but it also nurtures the reader’s personality.
Do you know that Zuckerberg reads about 25 books a year, while Bill Gates reads about 50 books a year? On numerous occasions, Bill Gates has publicly recommended a number of science or science-related books for all us to read and so as other personalities.
So, we thought, why don’t we make a list of our own. Here are a few of the interesting science books to read this year.
17. The Vital Question
the vital question
Author: Nick lane
How everything around us came into existence? From water, air, and rocks to complex life forms such as animals, plants, and us. Why we evolve the way we did? These are some of the fundamental questions author Nick Lane tries to answer not from a philosophical perspective but in scientific ways.
The book mainly revolves around mitochondria, the energy houses inside our bodies. At its very core, Nick’s work is an attempt to right a scientific wrong by getting people to fully appreciate the role that energy plays in all living things.
16. Sustainable Materials With Both Eyes Open
Sustainable Materials
Author: Jonathan M. Cullen, Julian M. Allwood, and Mark A. Carruth
15. House on Fire: The Fight to Eradicate Smallpox
house on fire
Author: Bill Foege
House on Fire narrates how smallpox, once the deadliest disease on the planet that eradicated millions and affected many over the centuries, was completely wiped out and marked a spectacular victory of medical science and vaccines.
Writer Bill Foege, the man who was one of the masterminds behind the life-saving vaccination program, recounts his very own experiences in eliminating the disease forever. The book gives you an ultimate feel of how it feels to contribute towards a life-changing initiative in some of the world’s impoverished countries.
14. Infections and Inequalities
infection& inequalities
Author: Paul Farmer
One should read this book, not because it’s widely appreciated by Bill Gates, instead, to witness the authors’ battle against deadly, drug hardened tuberculosis in Peru and equally lethal AIDS in Haiti. Paul Edward Farmer is one of the world’s renowned humanitarian, who is a physicist by profession, describes why these deadly and lethal diseases target only the poor.
This book explains the effects of having higher income and guaranteed health care access to individuals. According to this book, income plays a more decisive factor more than cultural or other anthropological factors in deciding and examining the causes and transmission of infectious diseases.
13. HomoDeus
homo dues
Author: Noah Harari
This book explores the very ideas, plans, and dreams that will make the 21st century overcome mortality and invent artificial life. The author asks a fundamental question: where would we go from here, and how we will protect the world from our own destructive thinking? This is the next stage in our evolution ladder, the Home Deus.
12. Paleoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past
paleoart
Author: Zoë Lescaze and Walton Ford
This book brings you an unprecedented mixture of modern paleoart accompanied by sharp essays by Lescaze. These paleoart are modern versions of prehistory, including drawings, scrupulous, murals, and mosaics. The collection gives you an in-depth understanding of art history. This book is sort of wholemeal, where a plethora of prehistoric animal art is served with a joyous piece of writing.
11. Code Girls
code girls
Author: Liza Mundy
Do you know during World War II, more than ten thousand female workers were recruited as codebreakers? Yes, during the World War, when most of the men took arms and knives, many of the women worked with the government agencies to break codes.
Code Girls unveil a hidden force of women codebreakers, who played an important role in ending the deadly War alongside their male counterparts. The book gives the amount of unpaid respect which was due to these brave and sharp women for their scientific accomplishments.
10. Big Chicken
big chicken
Author: Maryn McKenna
The global meat industry has surely increased, and so the chicken consumption. To keep up with the market demand, producers have come up with something. The book exactly explains what kind of tactics and means are used in the current meat industry and its dire results.
The book reveals how exposure to antibiotics and other drugs has heavily impacted the meat industry in the U.S.A. With all the needed historic, scientific, and cultural data, this book will shed a warning light on America’s one of the favorite foods and also shows us the healthy eating practices for us and our family.
9. Magnitude: The Scale of the Universe
magnitude
Author: Kimberly Arcand and Megan Watzke
Would you like to have an idea of the vastness of our universe? If yes, this is the perfect book for you. From the smallest particle to the largest galaxies in the universe, everything is extensively illustrated in this book. From distance and temperature to acceleration and density, everything is systematically organized to show us the world’s scale in a visual way. I am sure you would like that.
8. Numbers and the Making of Us
numbers
Author: Caleb Everett
The very concept of number is developed and nurtured by humans for centuries. They allow us to measure things more precisely. The book, Numbers and the Making of Us, is an extensive account of how numbers dramatically enhanced humans cognitive capabilities and strength and sparked a revolution in human culture.
7. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
sapiens
Author: Yuval Noah Harari
We weren’t always the only species of human beings on Earth. Roughly 100,000 years ago, there were actually six varieties of people, but h*m*sapiens were the only ones who made it to the present. How come?
“Both Melinda and I read this one,” Gates said, “and it has sparked lots of great conversations at our dinner table. Harari takes on a daunting challenge: to tell the entire history of the human race in just 400 pages.”
But Harari doesn’t dwell on the past. He looks toward a future in which genetic engineering and artificial intelligence make our definition of “human” even more fluid.
“I would recommend Sapiens to anyone who’s interested in the history and future of our species.” — Bill Gates
6. The Evolution of Beauty
the evolution of beauty
Author: Richard O. Prum
Darwin’s theory, “a taste for the beautiful” suggest that animals’ s*xual needs drive them to evolve features and abilities. For centuries, evolutionary scientists have neglected this theory, but through this book, author Richard O. Prum has reintroduced that concept rather successfully.
In this book, he makes some fascinating analogies between the s*xual behaviors of many birds and those between human’s. Be ready to get amused. In 2017, many critics, such as The New York Times Review, Smithsonian, and The Wall Street Journal, called it the best book of 2017.
5. What It’s Like to Be a Dog
what its like to be a dog
Author: Gregory Berns
Do you have a dog? If you do, then you should definitely read this book. Neuroscientist and a renowned writer Gregory Berns with his team, in order to study dogs, taught them to voluntarily walk inside an MRI scanner. After studying their brainwaves, the team discovered their complex cognition and sentience.
The book gives you a brief glimpse of how modern science is trying to understand our fellow creatures. It will also reshape your thinking towards the animals and how we should treat them. It’s a fascinating take on the study of the neuroscience of animals.
4. Why Time Flies
why time fly
Author: Alan Burdick
Do you ever wonder why time flows slower when you get bored or speed up when you are up to something interesting? In a humorous and thoughtful way, Alan Burdick tries to convey to the readers why we perceive time the way we do.
To do that, he went to witness the most accurate clock in the world (on paper) and found out that “now” already happened a second ago. Why Time Flies is an instant hit, a close investigation of the clock that’s running inside all of us.
3. Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words
thing explainer
Author: Randall Munroe
Randall Munroe, the brilliant mind behind the XKCD webcomic, came up with the idea of ‘Thing Explainer,’ where he would show how the most complicated things actually work.
‘If you can’t explain it simply, then you don’t understand it.’ Oh, it’s not me, but two of the pillars of the modern physics Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman. Randall Munroe took a step further and explained things with diagrams and minimum vocabulary.
2. The Gene: An Intimate History
The gene
Author: Siddhartha Mukherjee
There is no doubt that genome science can be a tricky business for a layperson. But, Mr. Bill Gates believes that the writer has successfully conveyed the importance of genetics to the common person. Half of the book is about the future of genetic science. The writer explains that today we can almost read the entire human genome.
But what happens when the machine starts to understand its own codes? How would it react? What does it do with its own code? The author won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for his “The Emperor of All Maladies.” He is currently an assistant professor at Columbia University.
1. Ripples in Spacetime
space time ripple
Author: Govert Schilling
Ripples in Spacetime marks one of the greatest scientific discoveries in the history of humankind, the detection of gravitational waves. The book presents an engaging account of the collective effort to accomplish what Einstein had predicted almost a century ago.
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