Scientific American - 11.2019

November 2019, ScientificAmerican.com 79

DAVID HOWELLS

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RECOMMENDED

By Andrea Gawrylewski

The Great Pretender:

The Undercover Mission That Changed

Our Understanding of Madness

by Susannah Cahalan.

Grand Central Publishing, 2019 ($28)

In a famed experiment, psy-

chologist David Rosenhan and

seven other “pseudopatients”

faked their way into psychiatric

hospitals, claiming to hear

voices. He subsequently published a 1973 paper in

Science detailing how hospital staff pathologized

normal behavior, mistreated pa tients and kept the

pseudopatients institutionalized for weeks. The

paper caused an uproar and confirmed widespread

mistrust of the mental health system. Although

Rosenhan’s work influenced the future of psychiatric

care in the U.S., his paper did not tell the whole sto-

ry. Writer Cahalan digs deeper—starting with the

charismatic Rosenhan and his mysteriously unfin-

ished book about the experiment. In her quest to

track down the facts, Cahalan discovers that some

of Rosenhan’s claims were, at best, overstated and

may have been completely untrue. —Leila Sloman

More Things in

the Heavens: How Infrared

Astronomy Is Expanding

Our View of the Universe

by Michael Werner and Peter Eisenhardt.

Princeton University Press, 2019 ($35)

Infrared light falls to the right

of visible light on the electro-

magnetic spectrum, with lon-

ger wavelengths than what

the eye can see. And because

the expansion of the universe stretches the wave-

length of light from distant objects, many of the

farthest, oldest things in the cosmos are visible

only in infrared. The best tool astronomers have

for seeing the infrared universe is the Spitzer

Space Telescope. Launched in 2003, it has

glimpsed galaxies, planets, asteroids, and, espe-

cially, “the youngest, most distant galaxies yet

discovered,” write Spitzer scientists Werner

and Eisenhardt. Now, before the telescope

shuts down in January 2020, the authors recount

the major sights that greeted Spitzer’s infrared

eyes on the skies. —Clara Moskowitz

You Look Like a Thing

and I Love You: How Artificial

Intelligence Works and Why It’s

Making the World a Weirder Place

by Janelle Shane. Voracious Books/

Little, Brown, 2019 ($28)

Training an AI to write

pickup lines—the source

of this book’s title—might

sound frivolous, but the

process can illuminate the

often opaque inner workings of these computer

constructs. Shane is an op tics re searcher who

also explores the strange creations of AI systems

on her blog, and here she brings an analytical

eye to explain how AIs operate, what problems

they can solve, and what will likely remain too

hard, or too dangerous, for them to tackle. The

programs tend to carry over and en hance bias

from data they are given, for instance, and their

black box nature makes it difficult to catch errors

and misinterpreted goals. Shane’s humorous but

weighty discussion reveals the promise and peril

of an AI future. —Sarah Lewin Frasier

For many, pollen is a nuisance, responsible only for sniffles and sneezes. For forensic ecologist Wiltshire, pollen is a portal, transporting her to

the scene of a crime. Microscopic pollen particles that cling to a suspect’s jacket or a victim’s hair can reveal critical clues about a crime scene’s

ecosystem. Using this evidence, Wiltshire can often re-create, in brilliant detail, where a victim spent his or her final moments—often to the

surprise of the detectives working with her. Between gripping case studies, Wiltshire weaves in charming tales from her childhood in Wales and

hard-won lessons on navigating the male-dominated fields of science and law enforcement. —Jennifer Leman

The Nature

of Life

and Death:

Every Body

Leaves a Trace

by Patricia Wiltshire.

Putnam, 2019 ($27)

ONE OF DOZENS of decaying bodies studied at the Uni -

versity of Tennessee’s Anthropological Research Facility.

© 2019 Scientific American