What Plant Migrations Tell Us about Ourselves<\/p>\n
New insights into why animals play, how to hunt an asteroid, and more books out now<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
By Erica Berry<\/a><\/p>\n An underwater view of a kelp forest.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Brent Durand\/Getty Images<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging<\/b><\/a> As a child in Canada, Jessica J. Lee squirmed at the kelp her Taiwanese mother sprinkled in sparerib soup and at the laverbread her father’s Welsh parents made from pureed boiled seaweed. \u201cHow can I love something I remain afraid of?\u201d asks Lee, a memoirist and environmental historian. In this lyrical essay collection, she decides that she needs \u201cto think about seaweeds objectively\u2014hold them out in front of me like ideas.\u201d By rendering them as physical marvels while parsing the ideas we project onto them, Lee makes visible the entanglements between our lives and theirs.<\/p>\n If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing<\/a>. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.<\/p>\n Algae are everywhere, from biofuels to toothpaste, and Lee reveals how much our knowledge of them was shaped by 19th-century female algologists, who were encouraged to study the plant because its nonflowering structure made it \u201cpolite\u201d for women to research. \u201cLike seaweeds, how much of their lives went unnoticed?\u201d Lee asks. Dispersals<\/i> shows us that we cannot view the trajectory of a plant without bumping into trajectories of human power.<\/p>\n Weaving material from literary, personal, scientific and historical sources, Lee examines plants\u2014including seaweed and far beyond it\u2014that broach human borders, exploring their migrations alongside her own. \u201cWhat is it to be a world citizen amongst species?\u201d she asks. \u201cThe natural world presses against our tendency to lay arbitrary geopolitical boundaries upon it\u2014and we, by our own movements, likewise transgress the borders we apply.\u201d Calling something a weed is less about describing a plant than about naming a desire for the world around it, and Lee writes intimately about her own oscillating cravings for movement and rootedness against a backdrop of COVID and new motherhood. She devotes essays to plants encountered in the kitchen, such as soy and tea, as well as often overlooked ones, like the heath star moss: tiny, starlike and one of the world’s most invasive species.<\/p>\n Dispersals<\/i> asks readers to consider how plants challenge not only spatial borders but taxonomic ones. \u201cAll the citruses we value were shaped by human hands,\u201d Lee writes. \u201cAre they, too, human descendants?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Kingdom of Play: What Ball-Bouncing Octopuses, Belly-Flopping Monkeys, and Mud-Sliding Elephants Reveal about Life Itself<\/b><\/a> Although author David Toomey offers delightful examples of animal play\u2014snowboarding crows, tumbling piglets, sharks playing with a ball\u2014he argues that, despite all the apparent whimsy, \u201cnature takes play seriously.\u201d Scholars are using methods as unique as tickling rats and tallying the results of faux fights between meerkats to fill surprising gaps in our understanding of play; in doing so, they deepen our insight into what, exactly, play is. Toomey makes a compelling case that not only does play offer advantages in natural selection and serve as a potential generator of animal evolution, but the innovation it sparks may even help primates like us influence our own evolution. \u2014Dana Dunham<\/i><\/p>\n The Asteroid Hunter: A Scientist\u2019s Journey to the Dawn of Our Solar System<\/b><\/a> It’s rare that a book with such an epic premise delivers on the excitement teased by its cinematic title. The Asteroid Hunter<\/i> joins this elite club with its story of the OSIRIS-REx mission, definitively relayed by Dante S. Lauretta, its principal investigator since 2011. In September 2023 OSIRIS-REx culminated in nasa’s first-ever retrieval of samples from an asteroid. Lauretta’s at times poetic account relays what’s at stake: investigating the origins of life and preventing a calamitous asteroid impact in 2182. Heartbreak and intrigue abound, but what most stands out from Lauretta’s career\u2014which has included searching for meteorites in Antarctica, devising OSIRIS-REx’s \u201cbackronym\u201d and selecting a landing site on the asteroid Bennu\u2014is how joyfully fun science can be. \u2014Maddie Bender<\/i><\/p>\n Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean<\/b><\/a> Physicists often struggle to simplify complex concepts for nonexperts, leading to \u201cphysics fibs\u201d or \u201cphibs\u201d\u2014straightforward but inaccurate explanations. Writer and theoretical physicist Matt Strassler unveils how fundamental physics and human existence intertwine through an imaginative, piece-by-piece deconstruction of the greatest hits of phibs, from misconceptions about sound-wave vibrations to descriptions likening the Higgs field to a \u201csoup that fills the universe.\u201d Strassler urges readers who want to understand the cosmos to resist the alluring but misleading guides of observation and intuition. Abundant with analogies and anecdotes, this book exemplifies how experts should write about matter, motion and mass for the masses. \u2014Lucy Tu<\/i><\/p>\n![\"An](\"https:\/\/static.scientificamerican.com\/sciam\/cache\/file\/F808010A-5CAE-4E43-A58D40AA3670D865_source.jpg?w=600\")
NONFICTION<\/h3>\n
\nby Jessica J. Lee
\nCatapult, 2024 ($27)<\/p>\nOn supporting science journalism<\/h2>\n
IN BRIEF<\/h3>\n
\nby David Toomey
\nScribner, 2024 ($29)<\/p>\n
\nby Dante S. Lauretta
\nGrand Central, 2024 ($30)<\/p>\n
\nby Matt Strassler
\nBasic Books, 2024 ($32)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/static.scientificamerican.com\/sciam\/assets\/Image\/2023\/0324-bookCovers.jpeg?w=900)
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