Recommendations

Here you'll find my favorite books, articles and YouTube channels. I highly recommend all of them! :)

Academic papers, news articles and blog posts

Loeb, A. Benefits of diversity. Nature Phys 10, 616–617 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3089

Bergström, A., Frantz, L., Schmidt, R., Ersmark, E., Lebrasseur, O., Girdland-Flink, L., ... & Antipina, E. (2020). Origins and genetic legacy of prehistoric dogs. Science, 370(6516), 557-564. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aba9572
Harden, K.P., Koellinger, P.D. Using genetics for social science. Nat Hum Behav 4, 567–576 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0862-5
Krause, R. J., & Rucker, D. D. (2020). Can Bad Be Good? The Attraction of a Darker Self. Psychological science, 31(5), 518-530. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620909742
Friedrich, B., & Herschbach, D. (2003). Stern and Gerlach: How a bad cigar helped reorient atomic physics. Physics Today, 56(12), 53-59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.1650229
Iwasaki, A. Antidote to toxic principal investigators. Nat Med 26, 457 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-0831-6
Willcox, K. E., Ghattas, O., & Heimbach, P. (2021). The imperative of physics-based modeling and inverse theory in computational science. Nature Computational Science, 1(3), 166-168. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-021-00040-z
Greenland, S., Senn, S. J., Rothman, K. J., Carlin, J. B., Poole, C., Goodman, S. N., & Altman, D. G. (2016). Statistical tests, P values, confidence intervals, and power: a guide to misinterpretations. European journal of epidemiology, 31(4), 337-350. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10654-016-0149-3
Morrill, K., Hekman, J., Li, X., McClure, J., Logan, B., Goodman, L., ... & Karlsson, E. K. (2022). Ancestry-inclusive dog genomics challenges popular breed stereotypes. Science, 376(6592), eabk0639. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abk0639
How Nature contributed to science’s discriminatory legacy. Nature 609, 875-876 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-03035-6
The rise and fall of peer review: Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing. Adam Mastroianni. 2022. https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review
Things could be better: Eight studies reveal a (possibly universal) bias in human imagination. Adam Mastroianni. 2022. https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/things-could-be-better

Books

If you want to see more books I've read and my opinions about them, you can check my profile in Goodreads

Science Communication

The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution and the Origins of Complex Life, Nick Lane

The vital question is an amazing book describing life at the cellular level. One of the researches that worked with the author is a physicist, so there are many insights from physics. The book brings forth a question in each chapter and throughout the chapter work out the ideas that provide the solution for the question, explaining the consequences of each hypothesis and why some are not true or likely false, while others have resonable evidence in favor.

The Most Human Human, Brian Christian

Are machines alive? Does your phone deserve rights? How humans relate to machines and AIs, and what this relation teach us about ourselves is the main subject of this book. From the Turing test to social experiments between humans and AIs, the book is a light read on the subject and provides some philosophical insight on what it means to be alive, and to be a human.

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds, Daniel Dennet

A bit heavy on the read I guess, but nonetheless an excelent journey through the evolution of minds and how consciousness emerge naturally from social interactions. With a lot of examples and research, the book sometimes take on a big loop to explain a point, leaving the reader a little lost (At least that's how I felt), in order to later conclude the idea, making sense to the entire loop.

The Self Illusion, Bruce Hood

This one is definetly a must read, it too exploits consciousness, but in a lighter way and touching the subject of free will. When do we become counsciouss of ourselves? And counsciouss of others? The book start explaining the internal workings of the brain, to later discuss how the sense of "self" emerges as we develop from childhood to adulthood.

The Knowledge Illusion, Steven Sloman

The book is all about how humans build knowledge and why we never actually think alone. It is the first book I've seen that treats the topic of spread of misinformation and the creation of opinions in a scientific way, using experiments and stuff. The reading is very light, in my opinion, and the authors follow a intuitive way of thinking about the question of how humans acquire knowledge (or think they acquire knowledge). Really one of the best books I've read in 2021.

Fantasy

The Name of the Wind (The kingkiller chronicle: day 1), Patrick Rothfuss

This one was a recommendation from a friend, it took a few pages to catch me but when it did, oh man I could only thing about what would happend with Kvothe in the next chapter. Probably the second best fantasy book I have ever read. The amount of pages might be scary, but I assure you, it's all worth it.

A Wise Man's Fear (The kingkiller chronicle: day 2), Patrick Rothfuss

Somehow, the second book in the sequence manages to be better than the first. The first is just the second best fantasy book I have ever read because this is the first.

Lightening's Thief (Percy Jackson & the Olympians 1), Rick Riordan

The first time I read this book I was in high school. Back then, I didn't like reading much, so every time the school told me to read a book for literature or anything, I used to hate it. However things changed when it came to this book. The book creates this world in which greek mythology is real and the gods and titans are alive in our lifetime. It is an excelent way to get to know greek mythology, while having fun and feelling anxious about the main character at the same time!

The Sea of Monsters (Percy Jackson & the Olympians 2), Rick Riordan
The Titan's Curse (Percy Jackson & the Olympians 3), Rick Riordan
The Battle of the Labyrinth (Percy Jackson & the Olympians 4), Rick Riordan
The Last Olympian (Percy Jackson & the Olympians 5), Rick Riordan

Sci-fi

Foundation, Isaac Asimov

The predecessor of almost every sci-fi story. In it's universe, humanity is a galatic empire hundreds of years old. The book work out this scientific theory in which they call "psyco-history", which is a way of predicting the behaviour of large societies based on data, math and their cultural values. Asimov has a different way of writting, instead of narrating scenes and actions, the whole book series is written as conversations, each chapter is new conversation at some new situation and you figure out what is happening by the conversation.

Foundation and the Empire, Isaac Asimov
Second Foundation, Isaac Asimov

Romance

The Love Hypothesis, Ali Hazelwood

This book tells the story of this PhD student in biology and her fake relationship with an academic peer. I won't get it details of the story, but it was one of the best books I've read in 2022. The book is clearly meant for academia persons, there are just so many jokes and situations that all of us in academia can relate to. The main character is amazing and I saw myself on her so many times that I felt like I knew her completly. I actually cried in the end, which is something very difficult for me when reading romance.