Science for the People Archives

Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage

A myth-busting voyage into the female body.

A camera obscura reflects the world back but dimmer and inverted. Similarly, science has long viewed woman through a warped lens, one focused narrowly on her capacity for reproduction. As a result, there exists a vast knowledge gap when it comes to what we know about half of the bodies on the planet. […Learn More]

The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I

Lindsey Fitzharris, the award-winning author of The Butchering Art, presents the compelling, true story of a visionary surgeon who rebuilt the faces of the First World War’s injured heroes, and in the process ushered in the modern era of plastic surgery. […Learn More]

Why Sharks Matter: A Deep Dive with the World’s Most Misunderstood Predator

Get submerged in the amazing world of sharks! Your expert host, award-winning marine biologist Dr. David Shiffman, will show you how—and why—we should protect these mysterious, misunderstood guardians of the ocean.

Sharks are some of the most fascinating, most ecologically important, most threatened, and most misunderstood animals on Earth. More often feared than revered, their role as predators of the deep have earned them a reputation as a major threat to humans. But the truth is that sharks are not a danger to us—they’re in danger from us. […Learn More]

Spark: The Life of Electricity and the Electricity of Life

A fresh look at electricity and its powerful role in life on Earth

When we think of electricity, we likely imagine the energy humming inside our home appliances or lighting up our electronic devices—or perhaps we envision the lightning-streaked clouds of a stormy sky. But electricity is more than an external source of power, heat, or illumination. Life at its essence is nothing if not electrical. […Learn More]

The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World

In The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, Riley Black walks readers through what happened in the days, the years, the centuries, and the million years after the impact, tracking the sweeping disruptions that overtook this one spot, and imagining what might have been happening elsewhere on the globe. Life’s losses were sharp and deeply-felt, but the hope carried by the beings that survived sets the stage for the world as we know it now. […Learn More]

Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery

An eye-opening exploration of how the human body can best recover and adapt to sports and fitness training.

In recent years recovery has become a sports and fitness buzzword. Anyone who works out or competes at any level is bombarded with the latest recovery products and services: from drinks and shakes to compression sleeves, foam rollers, electrical muscle stimulators, and sleep trackers. […Learn More]

The Cure for Catastrophe: How We Can Stop Manufacturing Natural Disasters

We can’t stop natural disasters but we can stop them being disastrous. One of the world’s foremost risk experts tells us how.

Year after year, floods wreck people’s homes and livelihoods, earthquakes tear communities apart, and tornadoes uproot whole towns. Natural disasters cause destruction and despair. But does it have to be this way? […Learn More]

Poached: Inside the Dark World of Wildlife Trafficking

An intrepid investigation of the criminal world of wildlife trafficking–the poachers, the traders, and the customers–and of those fighting against it

Journalist Rachel Nuwer plunges the reader into the underground of global wildlife trafficking, a topic she has been investigating for nearly a decade. Our insatiable demand for animals–for jewelry, pets, medicine, meat, trophies, and fur–is driving a worldwide poaching epidemic, threatening the continued existence of countless species. […Learn More]

The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

The gripping story of the most important overlooked commodity in the world–sand–and the crucial role it plays in our lives.

After water and air, sand is the natural resource that we consume more than any other–even more than oil. Every concrete building and paved road on Earth, every computer screen and silicon chip, is made from sand. […Learn More]

Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

A compelling and incisive book that questions the overuse of mental health terms to describe universal human emotions

Public awareness of mental illness has been transformed in recent years, but our understanding of how to define it has yet to catch up. Too often, psychiatric disorders are confused with the inherent stresses and challenges of human experience […Learn More]