homework

The New York Times

April 16, 2013 Tuesday
Late Edition – Final

Science Bookshelf
BYLINE: By THE NEW YORK TIMES
SECTION: Section D; Column 0; Science Desk; SCIENCE BEST SELLERS; Pg. 3
LENGTH: 377 words

1 SALT SUGAR FAT, by Michael Moss. Random House. A New York Times reporter reveals how food companies rely on scientific research to encourage people to consume more of their products.

2 QUIET, by Susan Cain. Crown. Drawing on social science research, the author argues that introverts — one-third of the population — are undervalued.

3 THE POWER OF HABIT, by Charles Duhigg. Random House. A Times reporter’s account of the science behind forming habits, and breaking them.

4 THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS, by Rebecca Skloot. Crown. The story of an African-American woman whose cancerous cells were extensively cultured without her permission in 1951.

5 BIG DATA, by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The science of making sense of vast collections of information to change the way we think about business, health, politics and more.

6 THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, by Gretchen Rubin. HarperCollins. In a hunt for happiness, the author consulted science, ancient wisdom and pop culture.

7 THE DRUNKEN BOTANIST, by Amy Stewart. Algonquin Books. The connection between plants and alcoholic spirits.

8 THE THEORETICAL MINIMUM, by Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky. Basic Books. An introduction to physics for the amateur.

9 THE GIRLS OF ATOMIC CITY, by Denise Kiernan. Simon & Schuster. Thousands of women took well-paid jobs in Oak Ridge, Tenn., during World War II, not knowing that they were working on the Manhattan Project, enriching uranium for the first atomic bomb.

10 UNLEASH THE POWER OF THE FEMALE BRAIN, by Daniel G. Amen, M.D. Crown. Biological, psychological and nutritional paths toward sustaining health, mood, sleep and peace of mind.

The titles ranked here are selected by the science editors from all adult nonfiction books reported to The New York Times for the month. These titles are fundamentally based on the sciences; those for which science is more tangential or peripheral are generally excluded. Rankings reflect combined print and e-book sales for March 2013. An asterisk (*) indicates that a book’s sales are barely distinguishable from those of the book above. A dagger (†) indicates that some bookstores report receiving bulk orders. More information on rankings and methodology: nytimes.com/science.

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2—The New York Times

December 18, 2012 Tuesday
The New York Times on the Web

Probes Crash Into the Moon’s Dark (Not Far) Side
BYLINE: By KENNETH CHANG
SECTION: Section ; Column 0; Science Desk; ASK SCIENCE; Pg.
LENGTH: 629 words

Ebb and Flow are no more. The two spacecraft of NASA’s Grail mission crashed on the Moon at about 5:28 p.m. Eastern time, about 30 seconds apart, one of the few times that cheers and claps have been heard in the control room to celebrate the loss of a spacecraft.

NASA also announced it had named the impact sites after Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.

The crashes into a lunar mountain brought the yearlong mission to map the Moon’s gravity field to an end. The twin spacecraft were running low on maneuvering fuel, and NASA wanted to make sure that they did not accidentally destroy a historical site like one of the Apollo landings — unlikely, but possible.

NASA broadcast live commentary of the impacts on its Web site, but provided no live video showing the probes hitting the Moon.

In my article last week about the impending demise of Ebb and Flow, I noted, ”Unfortunately, since the action will happen on the dark side of the Moon, there will be nothing for earthlings to see.”

About a gazillion people, including Robert Kirshner, a Harvard astronomy professor, wrote in to ask, ”Didn’t you mean to write ‘far side’ and not ‘dark side’?”

The more annoyed wrote: ”Dark Side of the Moon??? Come on now. You know that is not correct! You completely blew a potential teaching moment, to educate the public that the **FAR** side of the Moon is **NOT** dark! Instead you perpetuated yet another scientific misconception. No wonder we are facing a crisis in science literacy in the U.S. The New York Times can and should do better!”

Except I really meant, ”dark side” — the side of the Moon facing away from the Sun.

What was confusing to many was a remembered tidbit about the Moon, that there is always one face towards Earth, and the other always out of view, and they presumed that the crashes will be on the far side and therefore blocked from view.

If that were the case, ”far side” would be correct.

During the news conference last week, Maria T. Zuber, the principal investigator, said the probes would be crashing into a ”non-sunlit” part of the surface. I translated that into a more common word: dark.

Plus, it was a nice allusion to Pink Floyd.

But because there is a permanent near side and a permanent far side, many interpreted ”dark side” as ”permanently dark side.” As the readers pointed out, as the Moon rotates, the Sun rises over the entire surface during the course of a monthlong lunar day. That’s true. The crash sites, which are actually on the near side of the Moon, are not always dark, but what is relevant is that the crash sites were dark at 5:28 p.m on Monday. The crashes were not visible because the area was dark, not because they were out of the line of sight.

In a couple of weeks, it will come back into sunlight, and it’s at that point that NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will attempt to photograph the gouges left by the two Grail spacecraft.

This is easy to see if you sketch out three circles, for the Sun, Earth and Moon. Then it’s instantly clear that the dark side — the side facing away from the Sun — is different from the far side, the side facing away from the Earth.

Or just remember: Pink Floyd has nothing to do with Gary Larson.

Meanwhile, astronomers should come up with a term to describe the side of the Moon facing away from the sun. (Make your suggestions in the comments.)

A smaller number of readers wondered why the spacecraft will crash when the maneuvering fuel runs out. The Moon has no atmosphere and therefore there is no friction to slow them down. But the Moon’s gravity is uneven and the orbit is not perfectly circular. Without periodic course adjustments, it will become more chaotic and elliptical, and the ellipse will intersect with the surface of the Moon — i.e., crash.

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The New York Times

April 9, 2013 Tuesday
Late Edition – Final

Charting Her Own Course
BYLINE: By DENISE GRADY
SECTION: Section D; Column 0; Science Desk; PROFILES IN SCIENCE; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 2010 words

SAN FRANCISCO — Scientists are trained to be skeptics, and Elizabeth H. Blackburn considers herself one of the biggest. Show her the data, and be ready to defend it.

But even though she relishes the give and take, Dr. Blackburn admits to impatience at times with the questions some scientists have raised about one of her ventures.

”It’s just such a no-brainer, and yet people have such difficulty understanding it,” she said.

At issue is a lab test that measures telomeres, stretches of DNA that cap the ends of chromosomes and help keep cells from aging too soon. Unusually short telomeres may be a sign of illness, and Dr. Blackburn, who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine for her work on telomeres (TEEL-o-meers), thinks measuring them could give doctors and patients a chance to intervene early and maybe even prevent disease. A company she helped found expects to begin offering tests to the public later this year.

Other researchers have raised doubts about the usefulness of the measurement, which does not diagnose a specific disease.

But Dr. Blackburn, 64, a professor of biology and physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, says she has been convinced by a decade of data from her own team and others, linking short telomeres to heart disease, diabetes, cancer and other diseases, and to chronic stress and post-traumatic stress disorder. With studies that explore the connections among emotional stress, health and telomeres, she has delved into questions that she would have shied away from earlier in her career, as a woman trying to establish herself in science. But now, she has enough confidence and autonomy to follow the leads that intrigue her. The scope of her research has expanded tremendously, from a tight focus on molecular biology to broader questions about the implications of her work for health and public policy.

Elizabeth Helen Blackburn was born on Nov. 26, 1948 in Tasmania, the second of seven children, all of whom went on to successful careers in teaching, engineering, medicine, music and graphic design.

Her parents were family doctors who gave her ”a sense of the importance of serving people kindly and as well as one can,” she wrote in an autobiographical essay for the Nobel committee.

As a child, she scooped up jellyfish at the beach and examined ants, and the family home and yard teemed with pets — dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea pigs, chickens, canaries, goldfish and smelly jars of tadpoles that she had collected. She took lessons in music and elocution, and knew from an early age that she wanted to be a scientist.

But it was not an idyllic childhood. Her father was not at home much, and at times she craved his attention, she told a biographer, Catherine Brady. He drank, and that contributed to her parents’ separation when she was in her teens. Dr. Blackburn and her siblings remained with their mother, who began to suffer from severe depression that sometimes put her in the hospital. Dr. Blackburn rarely invited friends home, because she did not want to be judged or pitied for the family’s circumstances. Schoolwork became an escape, and she excelled.

She majored in biochemistry at the University of Melbourne and earned her doctorate at the University of Cambridge, where she became an expert in DNA sequencing.

As a graduate student, she loved being a ”lab rat,” Dr. Blackburn said, adding, ”I was just really focused on the science, the science, the science.”

Early on, she said, that tight focus was essential to get her career started, particularly in an era when women were still far outnumbered by men in science and felt extra pressure to prove themselves. Her next stop after Cambridge, in 1975, was Yale. Part of America’s appeal was its burgeoning women’s movement, which made her think she could pursue a scientific career without being held back because she was a woman. But another attraction was that her fiancé, John Sedat, a biochemist and biophysicist, had been offered a post at Yale. She became a postdoctoral fellow there, and they married soon after moving to New Haven.

Not much was known about telomeres at the time, and she began studying them at Yale in a one-celled organism, Tetrahymena, that she cheerfully calls ”pond scum.”

Telomeres are often compared to the plastic tips that keep the ends of shoelaces from fraying. Scientists had long suspected that telomeres protected the ends of chromosomes, but no one knew how. Each time a cell divides, its telomeres shorten, and if they get too short, the cell cannot divide any more. But somehow, in healthy cells, the telomeres were being rebuilt.

Dr. Blackburn deciphered the structure, finding that telomeres consisted of six DNA units, repeated many times. She and a researcher at Harvard, Jack W. Szostak, determined that there must be an enzyme that keeps restoring the telomeres.

In 1978, Dr. Blackburn moved on to the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1984, Carol W. Greider, a graduate student in her lab, found the enzyme: telomerase.

Dr. Blackburn, Dr. Greider and Dr. Szostak shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009. Until then, only eight women had won Nobel Prizes in medicine.

Branching Paths

In the 1980s and 1990s, Dr. Blackburn’s interests widened. She describes herself as very visual, with a bent for analyzing graphs and the molecular patterns that emerge on X-ray films. In her mind’s eye she even diagrams her own life, broadening here, branching there.

The birth of her son, Ben, in 1986, helped force her to look up from the lab bench and realize that she could fill multiple roles at the same time. The demands of work and family also pushed her to make a major career change: Her commute from San Francisco to Berkeley had become untenable, and she joined the University of California, San Francisco, in 1990.

The move, to an institution with a medical school and a thriving world of clinical research, expanded her horizons even further. She began studying cancer, teaming her deep knowledge of cell biology with that of physicians who saw every day what mutated cells could do to patients.

”It really broadened my head,” Dr. Blackburn said. Her projects include studies in mice to find out whether blocking telomerase can fight cancer.

A little more than 10 years ago she began to collaborate with Elissa Epel, a psychologist at the university who studies chronic stress. One of their first projects involved mothers who were the main caregivers for children with chronic diseases.

”It really resonated with me as a mother,” Dr. Blackburn said. ”I just sort of felt for these women so much. A very nonscientific reason, if you will, but isn’t that an interesting question?”

Compared with the mothers of healthy children, those with sick ones had shorter telomeres and less telomerase, and the longer they had been caring for the children, the shorter their telomeres were. The findings were similar in people taking care of spouses with dementia. Other studies have suggested that traumatic events early in life may have effects on telomeres and health that persist for decades.

These studies, Dr. Blackburn said, have taken her far from her early days as a lab rat, to issues and segments of society that she considers neglected.

She has also become curious about the physical and mental effects of meditation, learning one of the techniques herself. And she has wondered whether it does anything to telomeres.

”When scientists get old they get interested in the brain, and I’m a little bit afraid I’m falling into that,” she said, laughing.

In 2004, Dr. Blackburn gained a bit of notoriety — which she regarded as a badge of honor. Two years before, she had accepted an invitation to serve on President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics. But she supported research using embryonic stem cells, dissenting from the views expressed by the president, the council’s chairman and the group’s reports.

”I kept saying, ‘You have to do research. You have to get the science right.’ So I was dismissed,” Dr. Blackburn said. (Technically, her membership was not renewed when her first term expired.)

The Bush administration and the head of the council insisted that her dismissal was not politically motivated. But she believed it was political, and argued publicly that politics should not influence scientific advice. Much of the scientific world rallied around her.

Diagnostic Test

As data linking telomeres to stress and health accumulated, more people began asking if their telomeres could be measured. Dr. Blackburn began to think it reasonable to offer a test to the public and she helped found a company, Telome Health, in May 2010.

”I like to say we’re an un-biotech company,” Dr. Blackburn said. Typically, she explained, biotech companies start out to meet some need, like the demand for new cancer treatments.

Describing the usual process, she said: ”I have this great idea. I don’t know if it will work, but give me millions of dollars and I’ll burn though tons of money and do a clinical trial for $50 million and then it will fail and then I’ll sell the company and people will make money but it won’t actually do anybody any good.”

She added, ”I mean, let’s be brutal.”

The result, she said, is that many companies wind up with a shelf full of cleverly designed, useless products.

”We’re the exact opposite,” she said. ”We’re saying we’ve got something really solid that actually works right now. How do you define the need for it?”

The approach is radically different, but she said, ”Smart people out there really get it.”

The plan is to begin offering telomere tests to the public sometime this year. A doctor’s prescription will be required. The price has not yet been announced, but will be ”competitive,” said the company’s president and chief scientific officer, Calvin Harley. Other companies with similar tests charge from $300 to $700.

The test is nonspecific: it does not diagnose a particular disease. Dr. Harley likens it to the ”check engine” light on a car — something may be wrong, but more tests are needed to find out what.

”It’s not a crystal ball to tell you how many years you’ve got left or any such nonsense,” Dr. Blackburn said.

Unusually short telomeres may indicate a health problem, and are a piece of information that should be factored into the bigger picture of a person’s health, she said. ”If you’re in the lowest percentile for your age group, you might really be interested in knowing why,” she said. ”It’s something physicians would be interested in, for just that reason.”

There are ways to protect telomeres, and maybe even lengthen short ones, Dr. Blackburn said. Exercise and a nutritious diet, losing excess weight and easing emotional stress may help. So, a low reading might be a wake-up call to take better care of oneself.

But some researchers are skeptical, arguing that the associations between short telomeres and illness do not prove cause and effect. Some scientists say there is so much individualvariability in telomeres that it can be difficult to draw conclusions from the lengths in any one individual. Among those who have questioned the test is Dr. Greider, Dr. Blackburn’s fellow Nobel winner.

Dr. Blackburn acknowledged that a worrisome result could put a seemingly healthy patient on the slippery slope to more tests, prodding and poking.

”You worry about that,” she said. ”But that’s not the fault of the test, is it? That’s the fault of the way medicine is practiced. Let’s not blame the messenger here.”

Her hope is that measuring telomeres will become part of a new direction in medicine, geared to what she calls ”intercepting” disease.

She enjoys being free to explore territory where she would not have ventured before.

”I would have been a little afraid to do things, because my male colleagues wouldn’t have taken me seriously as a molecular biologist,” she said.

But now, ”Being senior enough in the field, having enough solidity, I don’t feel afraid of being marginalized.”

Profiles in Science: An occasional series of articles and videos about leaders in science.

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The New York Times

January 29, 2013 Tuesday
Late Edition – Final

Digging Deep in the DNA
BYLINE: By JAMES GORMAN
SECTION: Section D; Column 0; Science Desk; PROFILES IN SCIENCE | HOPI E. HOEKSTRA; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1499 words

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — Hopi E. Hoekstra is standing in the attic of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology among horns and pelts, an elephant skin under a table here, giraffe parts over there.

She is handling lumpy pieces of something that looks like molded Styrofoam and that seems entirely out of place.

One has a long handle, like a cudgel. Another is shorter.

”It looks like a little sock,” she says, holding it up for a reporter to inspect.

The sock and cudgel do belong in the museum, however, every bit as much as the antlers and skins. They are key parts of a research program that is helping unlock one of biology’s elusive secrets — how genes control complicated behavior.

Each is a cast of a deer mouse burrow, and since each species has its own characteristic burrow, these lumpy molds embody inherited behaviors. Length, volume and shape are easily measured.

And that data, partly drawn from the field and partly from the lab, once combined with crossbreeding and advanced DNA analysis, may allow Dr. Hoekstra, an evolutionary geneticist, and her colleagues to trace the architecture of a mouse burrow right back to the genes.

Two weeks ago, in the journal Nature, Dr. Hoekstra and two colleagues — Jesse Weber, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas, Austin, and Brant Peterson, a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Hoekstra’s lab — reported on a major step toward that goal. They identified four regions of DNA that help control burrow design: three for length and one for the presence or absence of an escape tunnel.

Their report was hailed by other scientists as an elegant and inventive piece of research. Cori Bargmann, at Rockefeller University, who studies the neurobiology and genetics of behavior in nematodes, said, ”I think it’s a really exciting paper.”

The genetics are beautiful,” Dr. Bargmann added, ”But it is only the beginning.

Now comes the hunt for the genes themselves, and perhaps even the biochemical pathways that show, step by step, how a DNA blueprint is transmitted to the scrabbling paws of a tiny mouse and translated into a hide-out from foxes, hawks and other predators.

The investigation of the genetics of behavior is a huge scientific enterprise, with great progress being made in a variety of species — roundworms, fruit flies, lab mice, sticklebacks. Dr. Hoekstra’s work is unusual in that it deals with a naturally occurring, complicated behavior in mammals that is important for survival. And it is significant that she has been able to separate that behavior into two modules controlled by separate and independent DNA regions — burrow length, and escape tunnels.

Dr. Bargmann said she was impressed at Dr. Hoekstra’s success in unpacking the behavior into modules, a result that adds to the likelihood of one day finding simple genetic controls underlying the mystifying diversity of natural behavior patterns. The extraordinary variety of animal body shapes, after all, has been found to grow out of a relatively few master control genes.

”I really believe that there are rules for behavior that go all the way back,” Dr. Bargmann said.

One component of Dr. Hoekstra’s success has been oddly low-tech: the kind of fast-hardening foam that can be purchased in a hardware store for home repair. It quickly produces an easily measured mold — behavior solidified.

Another important factor is as high-tech as tech gets. Decades ago the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins suggested that one could study the evolution and genetics of behavior just the way one studies the evolution of body shape: concentrate on what animals build — birds’s nests, beaver dams, termite mounds — and treat them like beak length or coat color. Writing before the development of enormously powerful technology for analyzing DNA, he regretted that his proposals were hypothetical.

They are hypothetical no longer.

From Volleyball to Research

Dr. Hoekstra spends a lot of time explaining that her first name has nothing to do with the Native American Hopi tribe. It comes from a Dutch term of endearment, meaning a little bundle, that her grandmother called her when she was a baby.

”And it stuck,” she said.

Both her parents grew up in the Netherlands before coming to the United States, but Dr. Hoekstra is a true child of California. She went to high school near Palo Alto and college at the University of California, Berkeley.

”I had some scholarships to other places, but I went to Berkeley because I wanted to play Pac-10 volleyball,” she said. ”I got lucky because they also had a great biology department.”

She did play for Berkeley for a couple of years and started out studying political science. ”I wanted to be the ambassador to Holland,” she said. But things happen in college and she got distracted — by biology.

It was a class on biomechanics taught by Prof. Robert J. Full that hooked her and she ended up doing work in his lab. ”I was working on cockroach locomotion, running little cockroaches on treadmills,” she said. ”He taught me to love research, but I didn’t have a passion for cockroaches or biomechanics.”

She did, however, have a passion for fieldwork, and for mice, although she did take a detour to work on bears after graduation. ”I think I’m one of the few people,” she said, ”who have taken the rectal temperature of a grizzly bear.”

Her scientific path led her to the University of Washington, where she received a doctorate in zoology, and to stints at the University of Arizona as a postdoctoral researcher and the University of California, San Diego, as an assistant professor before arriving at Harvard in 2007. She received tenure in 2010, at the age of 37.

Although she still considers California home, she says, one part of Cambridge that appeals to her is the high concentration of other academics and researchers. And she not only has a thriving lab there, she and her husband, James Mallet, also an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, have a 10-month-old son.

In the lab or at a meeting, Dr. Hoekstra’s enthusiasm is contagious. Dr. Weber, who worked with her for eight years, starting in San Diego, said, ”She gives one of the best seminars of anyone I’ve ever seen,” and added that everyone wants to talk to her afterward.

A Team Player

In a basement room at Harvard, where the mice she studies are kept, Dr. Hoekstra encourages graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, and praises her experimental subjects as well, deer mice of two species: oldfield mice (Peromyscus polionotus), which dig a long entrance tunnel to a nest as well as an escape tunnel, and P. maniculatus, which dig a short simple tunnel to a nest.

She began by studying the genetics of coat color and its significance as an evolutionary adaptation, but moved quickly to the genetics of burrowing behavior. Crossbreeding these two species and comparing their genetics led to the recent published report. But a number of projects continue in her lab.

In one, mice are dropped into enclosures that look like giant ant farms and serve the same purpose. Drop a mouse in and it will tunnel as you observe it through the glass, digging away in what one of her researchers called its ”two-inch-wide world.” The behavior is videotaped and sorted by software to track how much time the mice dig and when they dig. The hope is that these details will help get at what motivates them to stop and start.

Other researchers are working on neurobiology, trying to learn whether reward systems in the brain (involving dopamine, for example) may play a role in both the urge to dig, and the signals that allow a mouse to stop. If such reward systems are involved, then the behavior may have some connection to human behaviors, including addiction.

One of the unusual aspects of Dr. Hoekstra’s management style is that she emphasizes teamwork and the personal interactions among people on her team. The current members of the lab have a veto over any new member, if they think the new person won’t fit in.

”That’s one of Hopi’s gifts and one of the reasons that the lab is so great to work in,” Dr. Weber said. ”She is really a master at being able to put together a team.”

The search for specific genes that control behavior is a new challenge, but she is confident that her group will be able to handle it.

Other scientists who have watched her career are hopeful, but aware of the pitfalls. Gene E. Robinson at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has used honeybees to study social behavior, praised her ”exciting, pathbreaking work” and said, ”It will be hard to get to the genes, but not impossible. She has established a powerful experimental system.”

Dr. Bargmann at Rockefeller said ”genetics and genomics tools developed over the past five years” are making it easier to get from a region of DNA down to one of the hundreds or more genes in that region.

But she added, ”The hardest thing about studying natural traits is that endgame.”

Profiles in Science: This is the 13th article in a series about leaders in science.

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5-The New York Times

December 11, 2012 Tuesday
Late Edition – Final

A Scrapbook of Our Relationship With the Universe
BYLINE: By DANA JENNINGS.

Dana Jennings is an editor at The New York Times.

SECTION: Section D; Column 0; Science Desk; BOOKS ON SCIENCE; Pg. 4
LENGTH: 603 words

In her excellent 2011 collection, ”Life on Mars,” the poet Tracy K. Smith writes of ”seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on at twilight.” That’s the kind of wonder I felt as Michael Benson’s ”Planetfall” carried me away.

Mr. Benson is a filmmaker, writer and photographer who specializes in letting the reader reach escape velocity from the terrestrial comfort of an easy chair. His previous books — both from Abrams — include ”Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes” (2003) and ”Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle” (2009).

His goal in ”Planetfall,” he writes, is to present ”a retrospective look at the visual legacy of 21st-century space exploration.” Mr. Benson reminds us that it has been just 50 years since the first spacecraft waltzed with another planet, when an American Mariner probe dipped past Venus in December 1962. He then takes us on an interplanetary pleasure cruise that stretches from the Sun to Saturn. All retrospectives, art and otherwise, should shock us awake the way this one does.

In a sense, Mr. Benson has scrapbooked an up-to-date album of our solar system using mostly primary-image data from NASA and European Space Agency missions from 2000 to 2012. And so, among dozens of striking images, we’re privileged to see Earthrise on the Moon and the restless sand seas of Mars; sunspots in bloom and the cryptic moons of Jupiter; and the rings of Saturn looking like the cosmic grooves of a very long-playing album.

Mr. Benson’s first definition of the word planetfall is ”the act or instance of sighting a planet after a space voyage.” And one of the delights here is that the reader makes planetfall too, joining the community of camera-bearing, spacefaring robots and their human handlers.

But the dynamics of observing are complex. In these photos we’re not just gazing at lunar barrens and the dunes and lakes of Titan, a moon of Saturn, but also, in a sense, looking at ourselves, turning the solar system into a mirror of human achievement.

The subtext of these images is our guts and intelligence as a species able to secure such photographs, in willing ourselves into outer space. We weren’t invited to the vast celestial prom, but we went anyway. From ancient times, the cosmos have colonized our inner space, but now we can abandon land rovers on Mars, blithely building our very own Martian junkyards.

Getting at that tension, Mr. Benson quotes the theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg to good effect: ”We have to remember that what we see is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”

In a book full of startling photographs — I gasped at the images of the Sun, the heat rising off the page making me feel as if something inside me were melting — the one that stunned me the most was taken in November 2006 by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter of frosted southern dunes on Mars in winter.

In a three-page gatefold spread those dunes are as lush as an Edward Weston bodyscape and make me want to shout Cézanne, Picasso, Tanguy all at once. But this abstract and alien Mars-scape is real, not a bug-eyed monster in sight.

”Planetfall” is a book of science through and through, but it also deepens our sense of the miracle and the mystery of the universe, of our eye-blink lives. We’re all bundled in bewilderment on this little blue bungalow between Mars and Venus, but Mr. Benson has given us a cozy front porch, a fine place from which to watch Ms. Smith’s high beams of a million galaxies.

A show based on ”Planetfall” will be on view Jan. 24 to March 9 at the Hasted Kraeutler Gallery, 537 West 24th Street, in Manhattan.

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