New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

In the US we are nearing four million road deaths since we began counting them in 1899. The numbers are getting worse in recent years, yet we continue to accept these deaths as part of doing business. There has been no examination of why we engineer roads that are literally killing us. In Killed by a Traffic Engineer:

In 1997, a group of white pro-life evangelical Christians in the United States created the nation’s first embryo adoption program to “save” the thousands of frozen human embryos remaining from assisted reproduction procedures, which they contend are unborn children. While a small part of US fertility services, embryo a

A clarion call for justice in the quest for clean energy California’s Salton Sea region is home to some of the worst environmental health conditions in the country. Recently, however, it has also become ground zero in the new “lithium gold rush”—the race to power the rapidly expanding electric vehicle and renewable ene

A History of Fireworks from: Their Origins to the Present Day (Reaktion, 2024) by John Withington illuminates the glittering history of fireworks, from their mysterious beginnings to the dazzling big-budget displays of today. It describes how they enthralled the world’s royal courts and became a sensation across the Br

In this episode of the Blue Beryl Podcast, Dr Pierce Salguero sits down with the show’s producer, Lan A. Li, a historian of Chinese science, medicine, and the body. We talk about their life-long practice of qigong, the limits of academic critique, and the integration of divergent epistemologies in studying Chinese anat

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with MacArthur “Genius Prize” winning historian Pamela Long about her long career writing about the history of ancient and Medieval technologies. The pair use Long’s forthcoming book, Technology in Mediterranean and European Lands, 600-1600 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025), as a launchi