New Books in Science

An astrophysicist chronicles his quest to photograph a black hole and reflects on its spiritual ramifications in this international-bestselling memoir.

On April 10, 2019, award-winning astrophysicist Heino Falcke presented the first image ever captured of a black hole at an international press conference—a turning point in astronomy that Science magazine called the scientific breakthrough of the year. That photo was captured with the unthinkable commitment of an intercontinental team of astronomers who transformed the world into a global telescope. While this image achieved Falcke's goal in making a black hole "visible" for the first time, he recognizes that the photo itself asks more questions for humanity than it answers.
Light in the Darkness takes us on Falcke's extraordinary journey to the darkest corners of the universe. From the first humans looking up at the night sky to modern astrophysics, from the study of black holes to the still-unsolved mysteries of the universe, Falcke asks, in even the greatest triumphs of science, is there room for doubts, faith, and a God? A plea for curiosity and humility, Light in the Darkness sees one of the great minds shaping the world today as he ponders the big, pressing questions that present themselves when we look up at the stars.

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Dr. Marc Berman, the pioneering creator of the field of environmental neuroscience, has discovered the surprising connection between mind, body, and environment, with a special emphasis on the natural environment. He has devoted his life to studying it. If you sometimes feel drained, distracted, or depressed, Dr. Berman has identified the elements of a “nature prescription” that can boost your energy, sharpen your focus, change your mood, and improve your mental and physical health. He also reveals how central attention is to all of these functions, and how interactions with nature can restore it. Nature and the Mind is both an introduction to a revolutionary new scientific field and a helpful guide to better living.

In these pages, he draws on his original research and research from others and shares life-altering findings such as:
-Just eleven more trees on your street can decrease cardio-metabolic disorders like stroke, diabetes, and heart disease.
-A short walk in nature can improve attention by almost twenty percent, decrease depression symptoms, and make people feel more spiritual and self-reflective.
-More greenspace around schools and homes is related to better school performance, reduced crime, and improved working memory.
-Many of these effects can be achieved even if you don’t like nature.
With an engaging and approachable style, Dr. Berman offers the nature prescription for physical health, mental health, and social health. Importantly, you don’t have to pack up your house and move to the country to participate. The nature prescription includes practical ways to bring the outside indoors and to “naturize” our spaces, no matter where you live. The positive effects of nature don’t just end at the individual; contact with nature can make people more caring towards one another, encourage people to care more for the environment, and more.
This groundbreaking guide explains why and how nature is good for our brains and bodies and gives us a window into fundamental aspects of our psychology and physiology that can be improved through interactions with nature.

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In Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains (Crown, 2023), anthropologist Alexa Hagerty learns to see the dead body with a forensic eye. She examines bones for marks of torture and fatal wounds—hands bound by rope, machete cuts—and also for signs of identity: how life shapes us down to the bone. A weaver is recognized from the tiny bones of the toes, molded by kneeling before a loom; a girl is identified alongside her pet dog. In the tenderness of understanding these bones, forensics not only offers proof of mass atrocity but also tells the story of each life lost.

Working with forensic teams at mass grave sites and in labs, Hagerty discovers how bones bear witness to crimes against humanity and how exhumation can bring families meaning after unimaginable loss. She also comes to see how cutting-edge science can act as ritual—a way of caring for the dead with symbolic force that can repair societies torn apart by violence.

Weaving together powerful stories about investigative breakthroughs, histories of violence and resistance, and her own forensic coming-of-age, Hagerty crafts a moving portrait of the living and the dead.

Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University.

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Scientists are learning more and more about how brain activity controls behavior and how neural circuits weigh alternatives and initiate actions. As we probe ever deeper into the mechanics of decision making, many conclude that agency--or free will--is an illusion. In Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Princeton UP, 2023), leading neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell presents a wealth of evidence to the contrary, arguing that we are not mere machines responding to physical forces but agents acting with purpose.

Traversing billions of years of evolution, Mitchell tells the remarkable story of how living beings capable of choice arose from lifeless matter. He explains how the emergence of nervous systems provided a means to learn about the world, granting sentient animals the capacity to model, predict, and simulate. Mitchell reveals how these faculties reached their peak in humans with our abilities to imagine and to be introspective, to reason in the moment, and to shape our possible futures through the exercise of our individual agency. Mitchell's argument has important implications--for how we understand decision making, for how our individual agency can be enhanced or infringed, for how we think about collective agency in the face of global crises, and for how we consider the limitations and future of artificial intelligence.

An astonishing journey of discovery, Free Agents offers a new framework for understanding how, across a billion years of Earth history, life evolved the power to choose, and why it matters.

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Past human space missions were protected by Earth’s magnetic field and a measure of luck, but future missions beyond the Earth–Moon system will face far greater and longer-lasting radiation risks that cannot be managed by route planning alone. The authors argue that safe deep-space exploration will require major advances in understanding radiation, developing effective shielding, and mitigating both acute and long-term health effects, rather than relying on chance.

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The Necessities Underlying Reality: Connecting Philosophy of Mathematics, Ethics and Probability (Bloomsbury, 2025) is an open access book that covers four decades of work by the leading Australian philosopher, mathematician and historian of ideas, James Franklin.
These interlinking essays are connected by a core theme: the necessary structures in reality that allow certain knowledge of absolute truths. Franklin's Aristotelian realist philosophy of mathematics shows how mathematical truths are directly about physical reality, and at the same time certainly and provably true. Ranging from mathematics to evidence evaluation to ethics, his philosophy of probability sees the relation of evidence to hypothesis, such as in science and law, as purely logical, hence necessary.
Across ethics and the philosophy of religion, the theme of necessity is repeated: basic ethical truths (such as the worth of persons and the wrongness of murder) are shown to have the same certainty as mathematics. Focus on the history of ideas connects the philosophical work in the present with the medieval scholastic tradition, which defended similar necessities but is now neglected.
Here is an up-to-date introduction to Franklin's overall perspective. Recalling Western philosophy to its roots, it reveals the way absolute necessities are discoverable across the abstract fields of mathematics, logical evidence and ethics.

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With nearly 1500 species, bats account for more than twenty percent of mammalian species. The most successful and most diverse group of mammals, bats come in different sizes, shapes, and colors, from the tiny bumblebee bat to the giant golden-crowned flying fox. Some bats eat fruit and nectar; others eat frogs, scorpions, or fish. Vampire bats feed on blood. Bats are the only mammals that can fly; their fingers have elongated through evolution to become wings with a unique, super-flexible skin membrane stretched between them. Their robust immune system is one of the reasons for their extreme longevity. A tiny bat can live for forty years.
Yossi Yovel, an ecologist and a neurobiologist, is passionate about deciphering the secrets of bats, including using AI to decipher their communication. In The Genius Bat: The Secret Life of the Only Flying Mammal (St. Martin's Press, 2025), he brings to vivid life these amazing creatures as well as the obsessive and sometimes eccentric people who study them–bat scientists. From muddy rainforests to star-covered night deserts, from guest houses in Thailand to museum drawers full of fossils in New York, this is an eye-opening and entertaining account of a mighty mammal.

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In this episode from the Institute’s vault, we revisit an October 2007 presentation by theoretical physicist and Institute Fellow Jeremy Bernstein on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the atomic bomb, and the nuclear arms race that followed.

As a physicist, Bernstein made contributions to elementary particle physics and cosmology, working at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New York University, and Stevens Institute of Technology, where he became Professor Emeritus in 1967. He held visiting positions at CERN, Oxford, and the École Polytechnique, among others, and was the last surviving senior member of Project Orion, which studied the potential of nuclear pulse propulsion for space travel.

Bernstein was a staff writer for The New Yorker for over three decades. He wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, and Scientific American, and authored over two dozen books, including Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma (2004).

He passed away on April 20th, 2025 at the age of 95. Here he is in 2007, discussing the topics on which he made a great contribution and helped illuminate.

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Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Thomas Haigh, Professor and Chair of History and affiliate of the Department of Computer Science at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, about his forthcoming book on the history of artificial intelligence. The book, which has had the working title _Artificial Intelligence: The History of a Brand_ with the final title to be determined, examines how and why historical actors have decided to apply the term “artificial intelligence” to a variety of disparate computing technologies that often have very little to do with one another. Vinsel and Haigh also talk about how the book’s lessons apply to our current Generative AI bubble and an assortment of other fun topics along the way.

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A thrilling tour of Earth that shows the search for extraterrestrial life starts in our own backyard.
Is there life off Earth? Bound by the limitations of spaceflight, a growing number of astrobiologists investigate the question by studying life on our planet. Astronomer and author Jon Willis shows us how it’s done, allowing readers to envision extraterrestrial landscapes by exploring their closest Earth analogs in The Pale Blue Data Point: An Earth-Based Perspective on the Search for Alien Life (U Chicago Press, 2025). With Willis, we dive into the Pacific Ocean from the submersible-equipped E/V Nautilus to ponder the uncharted seas of Saturn’s and Jupiter’s moons; search the Australian desert for some of Earth’s oldest fossils and consider the prospects for a Martian fossil hunt; visit mountaintop observatories in Chile to search for the telltale twinkle of extrasolar planets; and eavesdrop on dolphins in the Bahamas to imagine alien minds.
With investigations ranging from meteorite hunting to exoplanet detection, Willis conjures up alien worlds and unthought-of biological possibilities, speculating what life might look like on other planets by extrapolating from what we can see on Earth, our single “pale blue dot”—as Carl Sagan famously called it—or, in Willis’s reframing, scientists’ “pale blue data point.”

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