Science journalist Michael Brooks, a former editor at New Scientist and novelist, gave a talk based on his new book �13 Things That Don�t Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time.� He discussed such controversial topics as the accelerating expansion of the cosmos, homeopathy, cold fusion and free will.

John Jost, a psychologist at NYU, will present a pre-election talk titled �Ten Lessons from the New Political Psychology.� Jost studies the �cognitive and motivational differences between liberals and conservatives,� according to his website, and his research suggests that �uncertainty avoidance, need for cognitive closure, and death anxiety are associated more with conservative or right-wing political orientations than with other political orientations.�

Science journalist Carl Zimmer, a frequent contributor to the Science Times and author of the popular blog �The Loom,� will give a talk based on his new book �Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life.� New Scientist calls Microcosm �exciting, original and wholly persuasive of the beauty and utility of looking at the largest of issues from the smallest perspectives.�

The CSW presents its annual Green Book Award! Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger will receive the 2008 Green Book Award for their book Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, which argues that innovation rather than limitations is the key to solving environmental problems. The authors will also discuss their book in a conversation with New York Times environmental reporter Andrew C. Revkin.

A talk by Richard Reeves. The acclaimed presidential biographer Reeves will discuss his new biography of Ernest Rutherford, one of the discoverers of the atom and a titan of modern physics. As part of his research, Reeves, a Stevens graduate, returned to the campus to recreate place Rutherford's experiments.

This event will take place on Stevens campus in the Babbio Center, Room 122.

A talk by science journalist Gary Taubes. Taubes, an award-winning writer for Science, the New York Times Magazine and other publications, will discuss his controversial new bestseller Good Calories, Bad Calories, which argues that much of what we have been told about the relationship between body weight, diet and exercise is wrong.

This event will take place on Stevens campus in the Babbio Center, Room 122.

Journalist and author Jennet Conant discussed her two acclaimed histories of World War II-era research, 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos and Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II. This event will take place in the Babbio Center, Room 122.

For more information and multimedia of the event please go here.

Philosopher, neurobiologist, and psychologist Owen Flanagan, James D. Duke professor of philosophy Duke University, discussed his book The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World, which considers how we can preserve meaning in a world that is increasingly yielding to the reductionist explanations of science.

For more information and multimedia of the event please go here.

Journalist Chris Mooney, correspondent and blogger for SEED magazine and author of the controversial bestseller The Republican War on Science, discussed Storm World, his fascinating new book on politically fraught research linking global warming and hurricanes such as Katrina.

Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino University Research Professor, Emeritus, at Harvard University, and one of the world’s best-known scientists, will discuss his new book The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth. Written as a letter from Wilson to a Christian pastor, The Creation argues that secular scientists and people of faith can find common ground in the cause of conserving nature.

At this event, John Horgan, Director of the Center for Science Writings, will also give Wilson the first Stevens Center for Science Writings Green Book Award, created to draw attention to books that raise awareness of environmental issues. The author or co-author of 20 books, Wilson has received many prizes, including two Pulitzers (for The Ants, co-written with Bert Holldobler, and On Human Nature). He is also the recipient of the Crafoord Prize, the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for ecology.

The event will take place in the Bissinger Room, Howe Center.

Peter Davoren, Chief Executive Officer of Turner Construction Company, and two of his associates spoke about "green" construction, a trend that is revolutionizing the fields of architecture and civil engineering. One of the world’s largest builders, Turner is a leader in green construction, which attempts to minimize environmental impacts of buildings, as well as lowering operating costs and improving the quality of life of occupants and neighbors. Green construction incorporates features such as solar energy, water recycling and recycled building materials.

Davoren discussed how green construction is a natural outgrowth of Turner’s commitment to ethics and sustainable development and imperative engineering students face to consider the environmental impact of available methods in todays marketplace. The New York Times recently reported that green construction is “emblematic of a new consciousness among architects, developers and construction companies” that “sustainable structures will yield long-term benefits in efficiency and productivity.”

This event took place in Room 122 of the Babbio Center, located at the corner of 6th St. and River Terrace.

Genetic engineering, stem cells, cloning, pharmaceutical drugs, artificial organs, brain implants and other advances can not only help us overcome disease; they may also allow us to acquire superhuman mental and physical capacities and even to become immortal. This is the hope of so-called transhumanists, who eagerly anticipate a future in which we can transcend our physiological and cognitive limits.

“Redesigning Humanity” featured a debate over the transhumanist vision between two leading bioethicists: Thomas Murray, president of the Hastings Center; and James Hughes, executive director of the World Transhumanist Association and of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies at Trinity College.

More material relating to this event will be available in the coming weeks (including video footage, and external links to interviews with Hughes and Murray, done during their visit to Stevens). In the meantime, please respond to the debate, or offer your views on transhumanism in general.

Is war in our genes? That is, are militarism and war inevitable consequences of innate human (and primarily male) aggression? Or can we abolish war in the same way that we have eradicated once-common practices such as slavery and child labor? John Horgan discussed the implications of recent war-related studies in primatology, anthropology, archaeology, evolutionary psychology and other fields. This event was also part of the Humanities Forum series.

Suhas Sreedhar '07 prepared a summary of Horgan's arguments.

After hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans a year ago, President Bush and other government officials said no one could have anticipated such a catastrophe. Actually, in 2001 the veteran science journalist Mark Fischetti had predicted just such a disaster in a remarkably prescient Scientific American article, "Drowning New Orleans." Since Katrina, Fischetti has appeared on NBC and CNN and written articles for Scientific American and the New York Times to spell out how to protect coastal regions in an era of increasingly intense storms and rising seas. At Stevens, Fiscetti addressed the future of one of the great engineering challenges of our time in Solving Katrina: Preventing the Next Disaster.

Several of his articles are available on our website, including the original article from 2001, and his follow up article from 2006, after Katrina. Also available is analysis of how the levees fell.

Update: Stevens professor Alan Blumberg's research on hurricanes also focuses on preventing future disasters of Katrina's magnitude. Specifically, Blumberg is interested in cooling water in the path of a hurricane, reducing the amount of energy available for the storm to build. Blumberg's research was recently featured on CBS, and last year, the Center for Science Writings' Prize for Excellent Undergraduate Science Writing was awarded to Brad Miller '06 for his essay on Blumberg's work.

Award-winning science and technology columnist, blogger and author (Emergence, Mind Wide Open, Interface Culture) Steven Berlin Johnson discussed his provocative new bestseller Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, which examines the effect of our increasing immersion in and interaction with complex multimedia.

For more information on Johnson, see his website/blog.

Award-winning New York Times reporter and author William J. Broad discussed his new book, The Oracle: The Lost Secrets and Hidden Message of Ancient Delphi, a scientific investigation of one of the most mysterious and potent symbols of ancient Greece. Co-winner of two Pulitzer prizes, Broad told a modern-day detective story that blended history and science to describe how a team of scientists, working from subtle clues scattered throughout the ancient literature, as well as from the latest findings in geology, uncovered scientific evidence to explain the Oracle’s powers.

Professor Lee M. Silver, Department of Molecular Biology and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, discussed his recent book Challenging Nature: The clash of science and spirituality at the new frontiers of life, published in May 2006 by Ecco, an imprint of Harper Collins. The philosopher and author Peter Singer called it "a provocative and sorely needed book," with a "rich array of arguments [that] will force you to think afresh about many cherished preconceptions." Silver challenged the audience to consider the ethics of genetic engineering.

Award-winning journalist Glenn Zorpette described his recent experiences embedded with an engineering team attempting to rebuild Iraq’s power grid in the midst of a violent insurgency. In an article in the February 2006 issue of IEEE Spectrum, the journal of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Zorpette called the effort one of the largest, most dangerous and most important engineering projects in history. A former editor at Scientific American and Red Herring, Zorpette has written about technology and national security issues for more than two decades. He won the prestigious National Magazine Award in 1993 for his reporting on Iraq’s nuclear program. He is currently executive editor at IEEE Magazine.

Zorpette's article can be found here.

Three of the most influential and widely read science journalists in the United States--Sharon Begley, then the weekly science columnist for The Wall Street Journal; Steven Petranek, then editor-in-chief of Discover Magazine; and John Rennie, editor-in-chief of Scientific American--came together for a lively discussion of "Science's Greatest Challenges," moderated by John Horgan, Director of the Center for Science Writings. Rennie spoke about about the challenges facing scientists who try to develop understandings of the origin of the universe, and of the human mind and consciousness. Petranek discussed a series of engineering challenges waiting just beyond the edge of our current capabilities, including likely genetic and transhuman advances. Begley took a slightly more difficult tack, criticizing the Bush administration's approach to science funding and to the role of scientific advances in developing well-informed and progressive policy.

Author and New York Times reporter George Johnson discussed his latest book, Miss Leavitt's Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe. Miss Leavitt's Stars tells the story of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who in the early 20th century worked as a human "computer" in the Harvard University Observatory. She was paid 25 cents per hour to examine photographic plates, checking for inconsistencies in variable stars. Through her observations, Leavitt discovered that a star's luminosity could be used to calculate its distance from earth. This gave astronomers a way to measure the Milky Way and the universe. Johnson's latest book has been hailed in The Economist, The New York Times, and Scientific American, among other publications. In addition to Miss Leavitt's Stars, his most recent books include A Shortcut Through Time: The Path to the Quantum Computer, Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics, and Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order.

Johnson lives in Santa Fe, N.M. For more information about the author, please visit his website.

John Stachel, who received his PhD in Physics from Stevens Institute of Technology in 1959, returned to campus in 2005 to discuss his most recent book, Einstein's Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics. The book focuses on the relationships between the five papers that Einstein published in 1905: "A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions", "On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in Liquids at Rest Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat", "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy Content?", and "On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light". Each of these was revolutionary in its own way, and each had lasting implications for physics. The second of them showed that Brownian Motion, an observed but as-yet unexplained phenomenon at the time of publication in 1905, was a natural consequence of the Molecular-Kinetic Theory, paving the way for modern Statistical Mechanics. The third paper introduced the theory of relativity, providing an explanation of Lorentz transformations in terms of a new theory about the relationship between space and time, while the fourth took relativity one step further, showing that energy output (in the form of a photon, for instance), resulted in mass-loss. This latter result forms the basis for the famous equation E=mc^2, relating energy and mass, and forming the foundation for nuclear power and weaponry. Perhaps the most important of all, the last of these papers introduced the idea of the photoelectric effect, whereby light could be interpretted as consisting of small particles of quantized energy levels, the basis for wave-particle duality and all of contemporary quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, and the discovery for which Einstein would later win the Nobel Prize.

Stachel is currently Professor Emeritus of Physics and Director of the Center of Einstein Studies at Boston University. His interests in physics circulate around modern approaches to the study of gravitation, and he has published many scholarly pieces on general relativity and quantum gravity. He has also published widely on the philosophy of science, taking a particular interest in Marxist interpretations of science and its development.