BOOKS

The Day the World 
Discovered the Sun 

By Mark Anderson
Venus’s transit across the sun in 1769 gave astronomers their first chance to fix the dimensions of the solar system, a key to mastering global navigation. In this intense account of efforts to measure the rare celestial event, journalist Mark Ander­son follows three scientific expeditions to Tahiti, Baja California, and the Arctic. These pioneers sometimes had to abandon science to focus on survival, but at a time when humans couldn’t get more than a few feet off the ground, the data they obtained accurately reckoned the distance to the sun at 93 million miles.
—Eric A. Powell

Tubes
By Andrew Blum

After a squirrel in his yard gnawed through a vital Internet cable, journalist Andrew Blum set out to track down the structures underlying the Internet’s virtual world. He visited vast underground chambers housing network cables and shadowed the network engineers whose job it is to link these parts of the Internet together. Although Blum finds the physical Internet, engineering grandeur aside, often underwhelming, the journey itself and the characters he meets propel the story forward.
—Veronique Greenwood

DNA USA
By Bryan Sykes
Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes has made a career of illuminating Old World migrations and matings, tracing such subjects as the bloodlines of Scottish clans and the ancestry of Ötzi the Iceman. In his new book, he sets his sights across the Atlantic and embarks on a genetic tour of the United States. Since the topic is so wide-ranging, the book jumps frequently across centuries and continents, between personal anecdotes (and Sykes, who does much of his own testing, has many) and scientific analyses. But Sykes’s vast knowledge and the bemused enthusiasm of an outsider he brings to the project make him an insightful guide to America’s distant, and at times surprising, past.

—Valerie Ross

Roadside Picnic

By Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
When the Russian Strugatsky brothers published the initial version of their dark novel Roadside Picnic in 1972, they marked the vanguard of a new approach to science fiction. Their grim narrative lacked faith in technological progress and celebrated hardened fatalists rather than forward-looking scientists; it also served as the basis for Andrei Tarkovsky’s similarly dystopian 1979 film, Stalker. Such cynicism is now common in sci-fi, a mainstay of writers like William Gibson (Neuromancer) and Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game), but the Stru­gatskys’ worldview remains both uniquely cutting and replete with humanity. 
Back in print in the United States for the first time in 30 years, Roadside Picnic takes place in one of six zones on Earth where aliens once landed and left behind deadly gravitational pits, toxic slime, and technology that researchers risk their lives to obtain and study. The book’s main character is a black marketeer who breaks into the zone and pilfers alien objects such as a metal ring that defies the laws of physics and batteries that provide seemingly endless energy. He thinks there is little meaning to be found in the zones, and even the book’s scientists have bleak outlooks. One espouses the theory that the visitation was merely one stop on a journey—a roadside picnic—after which the aliens left a mess without taking notice of their surroundings. 
The characters’ conflicted views of their troubled world make for a read that still feels fresh today. It’s also a book that’s bound to make you feel a little less sure of humanity’s place in the universe. Available now.
—Tyghe Trimble

MUSEUM

MythBusters: The Explosive Exhibition
Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago

MythBusters, the Discovery Channel series that uses scientific method to deconstruct and debunk urban legends, is giving museumgoers the chance to join the program’s hyper­kinetic quest for truth. At a new traveling exhibit based on the show, visitors can conduct hands-on investigations of nearly a dozen myths. To determine whether running in the rain really keeps you drier than walking, visitors sprint or stroll through a 20-foot-long shed 
that rains down water droplets; 
results from thousands of 
soggy visitors will be combined to find the drier method. Or to test whether Clark Kent could really change into Superman so quickly, don a cape and boots in a phone booth–size enclosure (left).
—S. L.