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Bertrand Russell once observed that 'Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about.' That sense of kaleidoscopic complexity is half the [...]

In the spring of 1993, a curriculum supplement focusing on water in the environment was tested in two middle school classrooms (grades 7 and 8) in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. Taught by preservice (student) teachers, the supplement was developed with the assistance of a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign environmental scientist and an Illinois State Water Survey atmospheric scientist. The curriculum included hands-on demonstrations, a computer simulation in which middle school students actively participated, and the use of simple techniques for the analysis of water. The program culminated in collection and analyses of rainwater and tap-water samples over a three-week period. The rainfall collection program was designed so that rainfall data collected by middle school students could be integrated with data gathered by a local network operated by the Illinois State Water Survey. This pilot program has highlighted a well-defined role for scientists in science education.

Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life. Georgina Ferry vi + 423 pp. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press (first published in Great Britain by Granta Books, 1998). $25. You may remember Dorothy Crow [...]

Turn Right at Orion (Perseus, $25), by astrophysicist Mitchell Begelman, is a fictional travelogue of one man's journey through our Galaxy (and then some) in a relativistic spacecraft. The traveler, [...]

The Chronological Encyclopedia of Discoveries in Space (Oryx Press. $85) is no passionless compendium of information. Robert Zimmerman's fact-filled reports, which cover virtually every spacecraft or probe to have ventured [...]

On opening Life at the Extremes: The Science of Survival (University of California Press, $27.50), a practitioner of extreme activities might expect a recitation of familiar themes in a scientific [...]

The bathtub has always been a great place for exploring physical phenomena, from vortices to waves to propulsion. Physicist-writer Sidney Perkowitz would remind you to add some bubble bath next [...]

Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture (Bloomsbury USA, $19.95), by Apostolos Doxiadis, is fiction that is bound to appeal to scientists and engineers. The novel weaves a brief history of 20th-century [...]

Highlights include Elion's description of the satisfaction of saving children's lives; Gadgil's infectious delight in finding a simple, inexpensive way to disinfect water in developing countries; Kaku's figure skating ('When [...]

Harmony and Conflict in the Living World. Alexander F. Skutch. Illustrated by Dana Gardner. xii + 288 pp. University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. $24.95. No savvy ecotourist headed for Central [...]

Building Planet Earth: Five Billion Years of Earth History and The Climate Revealed (both from Cambridge University Press at $39.95 each), sized for the coffee table, offer visually rich forays [...]

In The Relationship Code: Deciphering Genetic and Social Influences on Adolescent Development (Harvard University Press, $55), David Reiss and colleagues propose that patterns of family relations-between siblings, mother and child [...]

Trained in entomology, Benita L. Epstein doodled in her lab notebooks for two decades before her cartoons began appearing in magazines and newspapers. Readers who have enjoyed her work since [...]

In Absolute Zero and The Conquest of Cold (Houghton Mifflin, $24), Tom Shachtman explores the science and history of humankind's increasing control of cold. He opens with the remarkable story [...]

Does evolution have a direction? Does human history have meaning? These classic questions have troubled more than one wretched undergraduate who finds himself without a date on a Saturday night. [...]

I've always wanted to have a twin brother. Among the perks, I imagined, would be the opportunity to see oneself from the outside, as others might. For all the twin [...]

In Gobi: Tracking the Desert (Yale University Press, $24.95), John Man mixes the travel-writing spirit of Peter Matthiessen and Bruce Chatwin with his own wry sense of humor to take [...]

According to Tom Siegfried's The Bit and the Pendulum: How the New Physics of In formation Is Revolutionizing Science (Wiley. $27.95), the computer has become the same sort of 'superparadigm' [...]

The 'engines' of Robert Buderi's Engines of Tomorrow: How the World's Best Companies Are Using Their Research Labs to Win the Future (Simon & Schuster, $27.50) are intellectual, and both [...]

THE CARTOON GUIDE TO CHEMISTRY. Larry Gonick and Craig Criddle. HarperResource, $16.95. For teachers on the lookout for accurate and entertaining classroom material, cartoonist Larry Gonick's wonderful series of guides [...]

In Boiling Point (Basic Books, $22), Ross Gelbspan, the Pulitzer-prizewinning journalist who in 1997 wrote The Heat Is On, presents an updated offering to join the growing library of recent [...]