Hal Harris

Elizabeth Kolbert does her usual fine job of writing about environmental issues in this review of "Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth", by Alan Weisman (Little, Brown and Co., New York 2013, $28.00),

Why is it that there are so few women, and especially women faculty members in the physical sciences, engineering, and mathematics? Eileen Pollack argues that, even in the enlightened year of 2013, there remains conscious and unconscious bias against women in these fields, even by women faculty members.

Buzz Aldrin is one of a handful of men who have visited the moon, and of even a smaller number who have set foot on our satellite.  He relishes the memory of those glorious days, and proposes in this book that the US divert huge amounts of money from fruitful scientific investigation of space by robots toward human exploration projects.

Suppose that you could apply the methods of baseball's "Moneyball"http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=7520 to soccer.  Is it possible to assess the promise and the decline of soccer players on the basis of scientific evaluation of their performance?

Nobelist Roald Hoffman usually chooses an intriguing topic for his regular contributions to the Sigma Xi bimonthly, American Scientist. For the current issue, he has chosen to examine the question, "What would be the result of mixing a collection of the elements we find on earth and its nearby environment and heating them up enough to encourage them to