Quinn Fusting, PUP’s editorial assistant in the life sciences, has conducted a Q&A with Sönke Johnsen, the author of The Optics of Life: A Biologist’s Guide to Light in Nature.

Q: When, how, and why did you become interested in light?

FACT: “In 1975, the National Society for Autistic Children (NSAC, later the Autism Society of America,) lobbied to include autism as one of the developmental disabilities covered under the Education for All Handicapped Act. They succeeded. The bill, later revised and renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, entitled children with autism and other developmental disabilities to a ‘free, appropriate, public education.’ The NSAC also demanded autism’s inclusion in the Developmental Disabilities Act, a bill authorizing services and support. . . .”

Understanding Autism: Parents, Doctors, and the History of a Disorder
by Chloe Silverman

Autism has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years, thanks to dramatically increasing rates of diagnosis, extensive organizational mobilization, journalistic coverage, biomedical research, and clinical innovation. Understanding Autism, a social history of the expanding diagnostic category of this contested illness, takes a close look at the role of emotion—specifically, of parental love—in the intense and passionate work of biomedical communities investigating autism.

We were thrilled to read Jennifer Schuessler’s terrific story on the popular phenomenon of bar lecturing (and not in an intoxicated way, but a learned way!) Check out her story here. It looks like alcohol and science is a powerful (and successful) formula.

The Press is pleased to have had the pleasure of working with the Secret Science Club as they’ve hosted talks for a handful of our science authors. In particular, I was delighted to see friend-of-the-Press Dorian Devins at the SSC getting a mention!

FACT: “A flying bee expends energy at a rate of about 500 watts per kilogram (250 watts per pound), whereas the maximum power output of an Olympic rowing crew is only about 20 watts per kilogram (10 watts per pound). At any moment, however, only a small portion of the clustered bees will be shivering with maximum intensity, so the total heat output by the approximately two kilograms (four pounds) of bees in a winter cluster isn’t 1,000 watts, but is only about 40 watts, a rate of heat production like that of a small incandescent light bulb.”

Honeybee Democracy
by Thomas D. Seeley

Honeybees make decisions collectively—and democratically. Every year, faced with the life-or-death problem of choosing and traveling to a new home, honeybees stake everything on a process that includes collective fact-finding, vigorous debate, and consensus building. In fact, as world-renowned animal behaviorist Thomas Seeley reveals, these incredible insects have much to teach us when it comes to collective wisdom and effective decision making. A remarkable and richly illustrated account of scientific discovery, Honeybee Democracy brings together, for the first time, decades of Seeley’s pioneering research to tell the amazing story of house hunting and democratic debate among the honeybees.

‘Tis the season for giving—and we’re feeling very generous today! We’re hosting 2 book giveaways next week, one on our main PUP Facebook page, and the other on our Princeton Birds and Natural History Facebook page. 1 winner from each page will be selected Thursday, December 22 at noon. All you have to do is “like” our Facebook pages and you’ll be entered to win! Here are the details:

On our main PUP Facebook page, the winner will get to choose a prize from 3 of our bestsellers: On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt, Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays by Joel Waldfogel, and Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us by John Quiggin. The choice is yours! Just be sure to “like” us by next Thursday at noon!

Over on our Princeton Birds and Natural History Facebook page, we’re giving away a copy of The Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds by Richard Crossley. This stunningly illustrated book from acclaimed birder and photographer Richard Crossley revolutionizes field guide design by providing the first real-life approach to identification. “Like” this page by Thursday at noon if you haven’t already to win!

Good luck, and Happy Holidays from Princeton University Press!

How can scientists understand and predict the complex behavior of systems made up of unique, adaptive beings, or “agents”? These systems surround us every day: the traffic we drive to work in, the economic sectors that provide our food and energy, the financial markets we invest in, the ecosystems we depend on and work to preserve, and even our own bodies. These systems have complex and seemingly unpredictable behaviors that arise from the actions and interactions of the agents (the drivers, businesses, investors, plants and animals, genes and cells) that make them up. What makes agent-based systems complex is that the agents are all different from each other, interact with some but not all others, behave in ways that promote their own well-being, and are strongly affected by the system they make up. Each driver in traffic speeds up, slows down, or switches routes depending on the traffic ahead, the capabilities of its vehicle, and the driver’s relative motivation for safety vs. speed—which can depend on how much it has already been delayed by the traffic it is part of.

If you can’t join us today at the Princeton Public Library for Michael Nielsen’s TEDx talk, I hope you enjoy this great talk for Authors@Google.

If you would like details on the PPL event tonight, click here: http://tedxsalonopensourcing.eventbrite.com/

You can also read a free excerpt from Michael’s new book Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9517.pdf

FACT: “The largest bird known to have lived: The Giant Moa (Diornis maximus) of New Zealand, a wingless ratite that stood as high as 13 feet with neck extended and weighed over 500 pounds, is the tallest known bird, while the Elephant Bird of Madagascar (Aepyornis titan), which stood a mere 9-10 feet tall but probably weighed over 950 pounds, is the heaviest known.”

The Birdwatcher’s Companion to North American Birdlife
by Christopher W. Leahy
Illustrations by Gordon Morrison

The quintessential A-Z guide, this is a book that anyone interested in birds will want to have close at hand. First published more than twenty years ago, this highly respected reference volume has been fully revised and updated. It captures the fundamental details as well as the immense fascination of North American bird life in a style that is authoritative, yet fresh, witty, and eminently readable.

Both a practical handbook for amateurs and a handy reference for seasoned birders, it provides accounts of the basic elements of birdlife, as well as a wealth of easy-to-access information on such subjects as bird physiology and anatomy, terms and jargon, name definitions and etymology, and ornithological groupings.

Readers will discover everything from the color of a dipper’s eggs (glossy, white, and unmarked) to the number of species of woodpeckers in the world (216). They will also find more than one hundred of the best-known and most colorful colloquial names for birds, alphabetized and briefly defined. Collective nouns relating to birdlife—for example, “an exaltation of larks”—are included in the “Nouns of Assemblage” section. Biographical sketches of persons responsible for describing or naming a significant number of North American species are also included, as well as handsome and accurate illustrations by Gordon Morrison. And for those who want to go beyond reading about their favorite birds and take to the great outdoors, the book offers still more useful information: descriptive entries on a selection of the best-known birdwatching spots of North America.

“A thousand-page A-to-Z guide to all things avian. Leahy clearly loves birds, and this affectionate yet scholarly work offers everything from terse definitions and simple descriptions to thoughtful and authoritative essays. . . . There is much here that will engage every level of birder.”—American Scientist

“This is a reference book for the ages that transcends mere North American use. . . . The entries are informative, easily assimilated, and also written with spirit, humor, and charm as well as authority.”—Henry T. Armistead, Bird Watcher’s Digest

Want to learn more? Be sure to check out PUP’s newest Facebook page—Princeton Birds and Natural History. We’ll be featuring all of our great books, apps, and more on the page, along with some giveaways! There’s one going on right now—2 lucky winners will be selected Monday! Click here for details: http://www.facebook.com/PrincetonUPressBirds.NaturalHistory

We were thrilled to see economist and author Robert H. Frank discuss his new book THE DARWIN ECONOMY: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Check out the interview below!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This week’s book giveaway is twice the fun! We’ll be selecting two winners from those of you who have liked our newest Facebook page—Princeton Birds and Natural History.

The first winner will receive a great poster, along with an author-signed copy of The Crossley ID Guide by Richard Crossley.

The second winner will receive a different poster, featuring some more of the beautiful birds found in this book.

The Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds
by Richard Crossley

This stunningly illustrated book from acclaimed birder and photographer Richard Crossley revolutionizes field guide design by providing the first real-life approach to identification. Whether you are a beginner, expert, or anywhere in between, The Crossley ID Guide will vastly improve your ability to identify birds.

Unlike other guides, which provide isolated individual photographs or illustrations, this is the first book to feature large, lifelike scenes for each species. These scenes—640 in all—are composed from more than 10,000 of the author’s images showing birds in a wide range of views—near and far, from different angles, in various plumages and behaviors, including flight, and in the habitat in which they live. These beautiful compositions show how a bird’s appearance changes with distance, and give equal emphasis to characteristics experts use to identify birds: size, structure and shape, behavior, probability, and color. This is the first book to convey all of these features visually—in a single image—and to reinforce them with accurate, concise text. Each scene provides a wealth of detailed visual information that invites and rewards careful study, but the most important identification features can be grasped instantly by anyone.

By making identification easier, more accurate, and more fun than ever before, The Crossley ID Guide will completely redefine how its users look at birds. Essential for all birders, it also promises to make new birders of many people who have despaired of using traditional guides.

“[Richard Crossley] tries to squeeze in as much reality as he can onto every printed page…. Why put such images in an identification guide? Crossley calls it reality birding. He believes that you can become a better birder by studying the distant birds and comparing them to the larger close-up images. By noticing the similarities between the different images, you will learn to focus on the features that remain constant for a particular species. The rationale is compelling, and I think Crossley’s approach might actually work…. And, in case you were wondering, I love [this book].”—Michael Szpir, American Scientist

“What’s so different about the Crossley ID Guide? Everything. Crossley has designed his guide to reflect the way we see and identify birds. We identify birds by their size, shape, structure, behavior, habitat, and field marks. We [see] birds at close range, at middle and long distances, on the ground, in flight, in trees, and on the water…. If you want to be a better birder you will find the new Crossley ID Guide to be [a] major innovation and a valuable tool.”—Wayne Mones, Audubon.org

The two lucky winners will be selected next Monday, October 31^st. Be sure to like the Princeton Birds and Natural History page on Facebook if you haven’t already to be entered to win!

Read an exclusive excerpt from Reinventing Discovery: When Amateurs Rival Professionals [PDF].

This week, it seems as though everyone is talking about an amazing breakthrough in AIDS research that was made possible by an online game called Foldit. Foldit is a terrific example of how open science can be a “research accelerator” and illustrates the benefits of crowdsourcing in high level research. But how does it work? Why is it so successful? And how can we get more of it to happen? Foldit is part of a larger revolution happening in science and Michael Nielsen’s new book Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science explains it all.

“For many participants, Foldit … [isn't] a guilty pleasure, like playing World of Warcraft or other online games. Instead, [it's] a way of contributing to something important to society,” writes Michael Nielsen in this exclusive free excerpt from his new book Reinventing Discovery: When Amateurs Rival Professionals [PDF].

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science ships soon and you can pre-order a copy on our web site or via your favorite online retailer.

I also ran across a great web site at Scientific American where they profile these types of online collaborations. Check it out here.

Alan Boyle at Cosmic Log reports on the latest example of a growing trend in open science or collaborative science. It may seem unbelievable, but he writes, “Video-game players have solved a molecular puzzle that stumped scientists for years, and those scientists say the accomplishment could point the way to crowdsourced cures for AIDS and other diseases.”

However, before Call of Duty fans use this as an excuse to log even more hours in front of the tv, the video game in question isn’t a shoot ‘em up, XBOX 360 kind of game, rather it is a game called Foldit in which players

manipulate virtual molecular structures that look like multicolored, curled-up Tinkertoy sets. The virtual molecules follow the same chemical rules that are obeyed by real molecules. When someone playing the game comes up with a more elegant structure that reflects a lower energy state for the molecule, his or her score goes up. If the structure requires more energy to maintain, or if it doesn’t reflect real-life chemistry, then the score is lower.

Researchers posted the monkey virus puzzle to Foldit as “kind of a last-ditch effort,” according to Firas Khatib, the lead author of a paper reporting these findings in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. Not only did Foldit gamers solve the puzzle, they did so in record time — 10 days.

This feat is the latest real-world example of the power of Open Science — a new form of collaborative science that draws on “scientists” both professional and citizen and harnesses the power of the internet to collaborate over great distances. Science has traditionally rewarded solo endeavors, but increasing numbers of researchers are turning to these novel research methods.

Boyle describes the Foldit success as “a giant leap for citizen science — a burgeoning field that enlists Internet users to look for alien planets, decipher ancient texts and do other scientific tasks that sheer computer power can’t accomplish as easily.” Think you have what it takes to play Foldit and perhaps contribute to the next big medical breakthrough? You can join in the fun here: http://fold.it/

So, why does this matter to Princeton University Press? In November, we will publish the timely book Reinventing Discovery by Michael Nielsen. In the book, Nielsen, a leading proponent of Open Science, describes how the internet and crowd-sourcing are contributing to collaborative science and plots the way forward. He even has a section of the book devoted to the development of Foldit and why it is so successful. He describes concrete methods to encourage collaboration even in fields that have traditionally eschewed these forms of collaboration. If you would like to sample this book, a free excerpt is now available on our web site here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9517.pdf (PDF)