1. "Every creature in pairs", Olivia Judson
A fascinating story about the diversity of breeding strategies.
"In the vast majority of species, the frantic craving of females for promiscuous sex is completely meaningful and sensible. The females benefit greatly from this. In my records, you can find many examples. At least a few of them. Bunnies and prairie dogs Gunnison demonstrate a higher level of fertilization, if during the estrus couple with several partners. Dune lizards postpone the more eggs, the more they had partners. The female gubana cleaner has a faded fish living on coral reefs, more eggs will be fertilized if she starts to spawn in a crowd of lovers rather than staying with a single partner. These findings led to a reassessment of the behavior of male and female representatives, which is still ongoing. But one conclusion is inevitable. When a female mates with more than one partner, war enters the master's bedroom with the master's step, and the enrages of discord joyfully dance on the bed of passion. "

2. "Planet of Viruses", Carl Zimmer
A book that can bring to a nervous breakdown.
"In 2009, Curtis Suttle visited the Cave of Crystals. The cave was cut off from the living world for millions of years. Having prepared samples of crystalline water, he placed them under a microscope. In each drop of water from the cave contained up to two hundred million viruses. Wherever scientists are looking: deep under the earth, in the sands of the Sahara desert, under kilometer strata of Antarctic ice - they have found viruses. And in already familiar places discovered new. In 2009, Dana Villner, a biologist at San Diego City University, decided to conduct a study of the human body for virus detection. Ten people had to spit in a cup. Five of them were sick with cystic fibrosis (fibrocystic degeneration), and five others were healthy. From the resulting fluid, Villner and her colleagues isolated DNA fragments that were compared to databases containing millions of genes known to science. Before the study, conducted by Villner, it was believed that the lungs of healthy people are sterile. But Willner and her colleagues managed to prove that the lungs of all the people studied, both healthy and sick, were a hotbed of viruses. On average, 174 types of viruses live in every person in the lungs, and only 10% of them were related to viruses known to science, while the rest 90% were as unusual as those found in the Cave of Crystals. "

3. "Bones, rocks and stars," Chris Terni
How to date everything in the world with the help of DNA or pollen from plants.
"There were times - literally yesterday, by geological standards - when three-meter kangaroos were jumping in Australia, elephants were wandering in North America, and two-meter-long birds were walking about New Zealand. At about the end of the XIX century. Many researchers drew attention to the fact that in the world there are not so many animals whose weight would exceed 40 kg. Collectively, such large representatives of the animal world are called "megafauna." Alfred Wallace, who in parallel with Charles Darwin proposed essentially the same concept of evolution and natural selection, noted that "we live in a zoologically depleted world that has recently lost its largest, ferocious and unusual representatives." What happened to them all happened and is there not our fault? Now we know that the extinction of such creatures has been going on all over the planet and it happened relatively recently. Discovered by researchers and naturalists, the bones were not yet petrified, which means that the animals did not die out more than a few thousand years ago. However, apparently, extinction went in different parts of the world at different times. In some places the megafauna has survived. Australia lost 94% of the megafauna, while in the south of the Sahara, on the contrary, only 2% died. What happened? ».

4. "A Brief History of almost everything in the world," Bill Bryson
No one likes science as amateurs.
"Being a living being is not easy. We still know the only place in the whole universe, an inconspicuous settlement on the outskirts of the Milky Way, called the Earth planet, which supports our existence, and it is quite severe. From the bottom of the deepest ocean basin to the highest mountain peak - almost all the forms of life known to us live in this belt - only about twenty kilometers. Not so much if we compare it with what the space holds. For the representatives of the human race, things are even worse, because it so happened that we belong to that part of the living beings who 400 million years ago took a too hasty but bold decision to crawl out of the sea and become breathing oxygen inhabitants of the land. As a result, according to one estimate, we are denied access to at least 99.5% of the inhabited space. "

5. "Theory of relativity for millions", Martin Gardner
Very serious work on the main theory of the last century.
"When events occur in three-dimensional space, it is impossible to draw a graph in four-dimensional space-time, but mathematicians are able to handle such graphs without drawing them. Try to imagine a four-dimensional scientist who knows how to draw four-dimensional graphics with the same ease as an ordinary scientist draws two- and three-dimensional graphics. Three coordinates of its graph correspond to three dimensions of our space. The fourth coordinate is our time. If a spacecraft flies from Earth and lands on Mars, our imaginary scientist will depict the world line of this journey in the form of a curve on its four-dimensional chart. (The line will be curved, since the ship can not make such a journey without accelerations.) The space-time "interval" between departure and landing will be represented on this graph by a straight line. "

6. "Parallel Worlds", Michio Kaku
Many historical anecdotes and no too complicated explanation.
"Oddly enough, the first person in history who solved the Olbers paradox was the American author of detectives Edgar Allan Poe, who was fond of astronomy. Just before his death, he published many of his observations in an ambiguous philosophical poem called "Eureka: Prose Poem." Here is a wonderful passage: If the set of stars is infinite, the celestial vault would be completely flooded with light, the same as we see in the Galaxy, - because there would not be a single point on all this background, where there would be no star. The only way we could explain the voids, which we observe in large numbers with the help of telescopes, would be the assumption that the distance to the invisible part of the celestial vault is so great that no other ray of light from there could reach us. In conclusion, Po wrote that this thought "is too beautiful to not contain the Truth as an integral part of it." This is the key to the correct answer. The age of the universe is not infinite. The birth of the world was. Only a part of the starlight is visible to our eyes. The light of the most remote from us stars did not have time to reach our gaze. Cosmologist Edward Harrison, who first discovered that Poe had solved the Olbers paradox, wrote: "When I first read Po's words, I was amazed: how could a poet, at best an amateur scholar, catch the correct explanation 140 years ago, while in Our colleges still teach the explanation is wrong? "

7. "An imperfect person. Randomness of the evolution of the brain and its consequences, "Gary Marcus

The nature of pleasure and the origin of pleasure.
"Only some of our pleasures (such, perhaps, as a sense of satisfaction from a well-done work) come from the reasoning system, but most of them are not. Most of the pleasures come from an atavistic reflexive system, which, as we have seen, is rather short-sighted, and, if we compare these two systems, the latter is outweighed. Yes, I can get some satisfaction if I give up creme brulee, but this satisfaction fades in comparison with the buzz, let it be a short-term, which I'll get by eating it. My genes would be healthier if I missed the dessert. Arteries would last longer, which would allow me to earn more money and better care for my descendants. But these very genes, because of their short-sightedness, left me with a brain that lacks the wisdom that can prevail over the animal part of the brain that has come down from past eras.

8. "Gedel, Asher, Bach: This Endless Garland," Douglas Hofstadter

Music, mathematics, physics, biology, Zen Buddhism.
"Just as Lewis Carroll allowed himself a free treatment with Achilles and the Zeno Turtle, I allowed myself some liberties with Achilles and the Lewis Carroll Turtle. At Carroll, the same events are repeated again and again, each time at a higher level; This is a remarkable analogy of Bakhovsky's Naturally Growing Canon. If you deprive Carroll's dialogue of his brilliant wit, there will remain a profound philosophical problem: are words and thoughts subject to any formal rules? "

9. "On Intellect", Jeff Hawkins, Sandra Blakeslee
"The brain makes predictions about the very structure of the world in which we live, and does this using parallel forms. He is equally ready to recognize an unusual surface, a deformed nose or unexpected movement. It immediately becomes clear how widespread such unconscious predictions are and why they have not been paid so much attention for so long. They occur without the slightest hitch, automatically, and it's not easy for us to catch what's happening inside our skull. I hope this discovery will amaze you no less than me. The prognostic function is so organic to the brain that our perception of the world is not based solely on the signals that we continuously receive from the senses. In fact, the perception of reality is a combination of our sensations and predictions made by the brain on the basis of memories "
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