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“This book is an attempt to tell the stories behind sounds that might otherwise seem mundane or ordinary,” note nature writers Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen. This cosmopolitan sound collection opens with a background hiss that was detected in 1964: astronomers first blamed it on pigeons roosting in their antenna before realizing that it was cosmic background radiation from the Big Bang. The book also features icebergs crackling and music mysteriously created by tapping stone pillars in a medieval Hindu temple in India.
The Genius Bat
Yossi Yovel St. Martin’s Press (2025)
Bats are amazing, thinks neurobiologist Yossi Yovel. With almost 1,500 species, they are the most diverse order among mammals — making up more than 20% — and are the only mammals that “truly fly”. They live across six continents on Earth — in colonies of millions or alone in crevices. Most are insect eaters, but some eat fruits and pollen. Others dine on vertebrates, and three species drink blood. Yet, as Yovel admits in his wonderful book, we still cannot answer philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous question, “What is it like to be a bat?”
Charlatans
Moisés Naím & Quico Toro Basic (2025)
Although charlatans have existed since ancient times, the word is derived from ciarlatani, an Italian word — which roughly translates to ‘loudmouths’ — for hawkers of miracle cures in seventeenth-century Italy. Now, journalists Moisés Naím and Quico Toro observe that technologies such as the Internet, social media and artificial intelligence allow charlatans to target many more people, much more precisely. To the tech giants, “charlatans aren’t enemies; they are lucrative customers”, this compelling and disturbing book argues.
Lab Dog
Melanie D. G. Kaplan Seal Press (2025)
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