The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009 (Best American Series) Book

This annual included a couple dozen examples of the best science and nature writing published in 2008. Arthur C Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey) died that year. The foreword to this volume remembered Clarke, who regarded science as a discipline that requires the questioning of received wisdom.

The science in this book goes back just seven years. But since then, scientists learned that Sapiens who migrated out of Africa thousands of years ago carry about three percent of Neanderthal DNA, thanks to what researchers call intermingling. And that comes as an update to the interesting article here, The Last of the Neanderthals.

Is Google Making Us Stupid? Nicholas Carr's now-famous essay first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly of July 2008. The editors of this collection chose the piece as one of the best of the year. Three years later, that article grew into his most famous book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, a general nonfiction finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Carr's column in this anthology, meanwhile, turned me onto an intriguing book, Technics and Civilization.

"We await the longterm neurological and psychological experiments that will reveal how Internet use affects cognition," wrote Carr in 2008. This status check pairs well with the thoughts of Maryanne Wolf in Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff writer at The New Yorker, edited this edition, and her name drew me to it. Her terrific book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, published last year. The paperback edition released this year.

In her introduction to this collection, Kolbert mentions the effort to rename our current epoch the Anthropocene, a term used by a Dutch chemist who received a Nobel prize for his work on ozone depletion. Kolbert's new book expands on the Anthropocene and why it should replace the current term, Holocene. Anthropocene would rename the era of the past twelve thousand years to reflect the impact of human activity. Scientists will vote next year on the name change.