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Let me start with the TLDR for A City on Mars . It is, essentially, 400 pages of "well, actually…," but without the condescension, quite a bit of humor, and many, oh so many, details. Kelly and Zach Weinersmith started from the position of being space settlement enthusiasts. They thought they were going to write a light cheerleading book about how everything was going to be just awesome on Mars or the Moon or on a space station. Unfortunately for the Weinersmiths, they actually asked questions like “how would that work, exactly?” Apart from rocketry (e.g., the getting to space part), the answers were mostly optimistic handwaving combined with a kind of neo-manifest destiny ideology that might have given Andrew Jackson pause.

The Weinersmiths start with human biology and psychology, pass through technology, the law, and population viability and end with a kind of call to action. Under each of these sections, the Weinersmiths pose questions like: Can we thrive in space? reproduce in space? create habitats in space? The tour through all the things that aren’t actually known is shocking. No one has been conceived in low gravity, no fetuses have developed in low gravity, so we simply don’t know if there is a problem. Astronauts experience bone and muscle loss and no one knows how that plays out long term. Most importantly, do we really want to find this out by sending a few thousand people to Mars and hope it all just works out?

Then there are the problems of building a habitation and doing all the recycling. I was shocked to learn that no one really knows how to construct a long-term habitable settlement for either the Moon or Mars. Yes, there are lots of hand-wavy ideas about lava tubes and regolith shielding. But the details are just… not there. It reminds me of Europe’s dark days of depositing colonies on other people’s land. The stories of how unprepared the settlers were are sad, hilarious, and repetitive . And, now we learn that we are planning for at least one more sequel.

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The takeaway of Robert Sapolsky’s Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will is basically the same as that espoused by those Snickers commercials: You’re not you when you’re hungry. Except according to Sapolsky, there is no “you”—the hunger is what dictates your behavior, along with your stress level, whether or not you were born with fetal alcohol syndrome or grew up in a culture that valorizes individual freedoms versus one that prioritizes communal responsibility or in one that believes in an omniscient, omnipotent, vengeful deity.

Hormones, neurotransmitters, and how they are affected by your current and historical circumstances—these are the only things that determine how you will act and what decisions you will make at those inflection points when you're called upon to make impactful choices. And all of them are things you did not choose and cannot control.

Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford University, is not averse to the notion of our having free will; it’s just that he can’t find it. And he’s looked everywhere. He has studied—intensely—not only neurobiology but also endocrinology, behavioral science, philosophy, primatology, criminology, psychiatry, sociology, anthropology, evolution, and history. Not a single one of these disciplines precludes free will, but all of them together do. All there is to us is biology and the way that biology is affected by our environment. That’s it. We are not, as Yoda suggested, luminous beings; we are only crude matter.

Enlarge / Mock-up of Sleeping Beauties book cover. (credit: Simon & Schuster )

Andreas Wagner is interested in evolution, that of molecules, species, and ideas. He’s a biochemist at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zürich, so he knows that the engine of evolution is random mutations in DNA. But he also knows that these occur all the time. He is interested in deeper questions: Which mutations succeed, and why? In his newest book, Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture , he argues that “where” and “when” might be more salient questions than “why.”

Innovation comes easily

Genetic mutations constantly churn out molecular changes. “Innovation is not precious and rare, but frequent and cheap,” is how he puts it. Wagner says that most of these mutations are ultimately detrimental to the organism that harbors them; a few are beneficial, and many are neutral. But some of these neutral ones may become beneficial millions of years hence, when conditions change. These are the sleeping beauties of the title, just lying there, unknowingly waiting to be awoken by a kiss from Prince Charming.

Mammals had all of the genetic requisites to thrive in place for a hundred million years before we did so; we just didn’t get the opportunity to take over the planet until the dinosaurs were wiped out, the Earth warmed up, and flowering plants diversified. Grasses didn’t immediately become the dominant species blanketing the Earth, and ants didn’t instantly radiate into 11,000 different species; it took 40 million years after each burst onto the scene for them to flourish, although each had the biochemical tools to do so for all that time. And bacteria resistant to synthetic antibiotics existed millions of years ago—possibly even before humans did—but this trait didn’t benefit them (and threaten us) until we started throwing those antibiotics at them last century.

Enlarge / Once the future of travel, now a museum piece. (credit: Didier Messens )

Vaclav Smil reminds us that despite the onslaught of popular techno-pundits claiming otherwise, immense and rapid progress in one realm does not mean immense and rapid progress in all realms.

Let’s just get this out of the way at the start: Smil is Bill Gates’ favorite author. He’s written 40 books, all of them about some combination of energy, China, or the combination of food, agriculture, and ecology. His newest book, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure , is somewhat of a departure, although it does touch on all of these. Primarily, it is a tale of thwarted promise.

Smil is very intentional about the types of flops he highlights. He is not interested in embarrassing design failures (the Titanic, Betamax, Google Glass) or undesirable side effects of inventions everyone still uses despite them (prescription drugs, cars, plastic). Rather, he focuses on the categories chosen to demonstrate the limits of innovation. Although astoundingly rapid progress has been made in the fields of electronics and computing over the past 50 or so years, it does not follow that we are thus in some unprecedented golden age of disruptive, transformative growth in every field.

Enlarge / Orbiting space station from 2001: A Space Odyssey . (credit: Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images )

Off-Earth will amaze you: On nearly every page, it will have your jaw dropping in response to mind-blowing revelations and your head nodding vigorously in sudden recognition of some of your own half-realized thoughts (assuming you think about things like settling space). It will also have your head shaking sadly in resignation at the many immense challenges author Erika Nesvold describes.

But the amazement will win out. Off-Earth: Ethical Questions and Quandaries for Living in Outer Space is really, really good.

The shortcomings of a STEM education

Nesvold is an astrophysicist. She worked at NASA; she can easily run the equations to calculate how much fuel we need to get people, life support, and mining equipment to Mars.

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Off the Edge is not a book about conspiracy theories, exactly. It does get there, but really it is a book about the history of the Flat Earth movement as the sort of original conspiracy theory. It is the second such book, in fact; Christine Garwood wrote Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea in 2007. But it is a whole different world now, conspiracy-theory-wise, so Kelly Weill thought an update was in order.

Weill covers extremism, disinformation, and the Internet for The Daily Beast , a website whose tagline is “a smart, speedy take on news from around the world.” (A previous editor-in-chief described it as a “high-end tabloid.”) Like the site, the book is well-researched and makes for quick and entertaining, if disturbing, reading.

The pull of conspiracy

Weill started Off the Edge when she noticed Flat Earthers repeatedly cropping up in the far and alt-right chat groups and websites she was covering. She said that she initially thought they were a joke because “how could anyone really believe anything so ludicrous?” To find out, she entered their world; the book is in first-person, with Weill frequently recounting her misadventures meeting Flat Earthers and attending their conferences.

Enlarge / Vintage illustration of medieval women wearing kirtles. A kirtle (sometimes called a cotte or cotehardie) is a garment that was worn by men and women in the Middle Ages. It eventually became a one-piece garment worn by women from the late Middle Ages into the Baroque period. (credit: duncan1890 )

In the illuminating and entertaining blog Going Medieval , Eleanor Janega, a medievalist at the London School of Economics, upends prevalent misconceptions about medieval Europe. These misunderstandings include that people didn’t bathe ( they did ) and that these were the Dark Ages *. Her new book, The Once and Future Sex , is subtitled “Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society,” and that's exactly what she does—if by “going medieval” you intend the pop culture meaning of "dismembering in a barbaric manner" which, despite her protestations , you probably do.

Her main thrust, in the blog and in the book, is that it's easy and convenient for us to envision medieval times as being backward in every way because that makes modern times seem all that much more spectacular. But not only is this wrong, it's dangerous. Just because life is definitely better for women now than it was then, that doesn’t mean our current place in society is optimal or somehow destined. It's not.

Progress did not proceed in a straight arrow from bad times then to good times now. Maintaining that things were horrible then deludes us into thinking that they must be at their pinnacle now. Janega lays out this argument in the introduction and then spends the bulk of the text citing evidence to bolster it.

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If you went to high school in the US, you may recall early morning extracurriculars, sleeping through first period algebra, or bleary-eyed late-night study sessions (as opposed to other wide-awake “study sessions” we told our parents we were having). As an adult, you might wonder if there’s a better time to explore Shakespeare than at 8 am, or expand a Taylor series right after you collapsed into your chair, half-asleep from your sunrise bus ride.

As it turns out, early school start times for US high schools are built on a shaky scientific foundation, as journalist and parent Lisa Lewis lays out in her new book, The Sleep-Deprived Teen . She details why high schools in the US tend to start early, the science behind why that’s bad for kids, and how later school start times can benefit not only teenagers, but, well… everyone. Perhaps most importantly, she provides a primer on advocating for change in your community.

The wheels on the bus go round and round

Our early start times are a bit of a historical accident. In the first half of the 20th century, schools tended to be small and local—most students could walk. Lewis points out that in 1950, there were still 60,000 one-room schoolhouses around the country. By 1960, that number had dwindled to around 20,000.

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If the spectacular images from the NASA James Webb Space Telescope have you hankering to learn more about what’s Out There—or at least to see more pretty pictures of it— The Short Story of the Universe arrives just in time to sate your craving.

Like all of the books in the Short Story of... series, Gemma Lavender's The Short Story of the Universe ( Amazon , Bookshop ) is organized into four cross-referenced sections. First is Structure, which begins with the Universe and ends with subatomic particles. Next is History and Future. It begins “Before the Beginning” (the "beginning" being the Big Bang, T=0, 13.8 billion years ago) and ends with “The Fate of the Universe” at T > 10 ¹⁰⁰ years.

The shape of that future depends on how dark energy behaves. If dark energy weakens over time, “it may cause gravity to lead the Universe slowly to contract back on itself in a Big Crunch.” Alternatively, if dark energy strengthens or even stays the same over time, the Universe will just keep on expanding forever until either all matter entropically decays into radiation or the fabric of space-time gets torn in a Big Rip. We don’t know which path dark energy will take because we don’t yet know what dark energy is.