In his innovative 2006 bestseller, This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, Daniel J. Levitin, a path-breaking McGill University neuroscientist and former world-class music producer, led readers on a trip inside their musical brain.

Music, he argued, was more than a fortunate evolutionary by-product of language development. The book made a persuasive case that our minds and our bodies would have evolved very differently without it. And it did so in an entertaining style with excursions into autobiography, popular culture, and every imaginable musical genre.

Now in The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature, Levitin extends that argument beyond individual brains to human civilization and culture. For fans of Brain on Music, this is a must-read. For other readers, this is a literary, poetic, scientific, and musical treat waiting to be discovered.

With a title and subtitle like Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend, Barbara Oakley's book was sure to get attention from a reviewer like me. Read on for my review and a link to her recent appearance on BookTV videotaped in a bookstore in my home town. I got to introduce her.

Disclaimer: I didn't know Barbara before writing the review, but we have become friends since, even though my review picks a nit or two with the book.

Read on for my review of Avery Gilbert's new book What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life. Who says science has to be dull?

See my latest published book review. Only a Theory is written by the scientist/author whose testimony was most critical in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case in which community members challenged a school board's decision to include Intelligent Design in the science curriculum and won.

Since September 11, U.S. politicians have repeatedly reminded us that the journalists in the Arab world are biased against America and the West. New research finds that much of the conventional wisdom about Arab journalists that has shaped U.S. public diplomacy toward the region lacks substance.

Using advanced functional imaging methods, New York University neuroscientists have found that certain motion pictures can exert considerable control over brain activity. Moreover, the impact of films varies according to movie content, editing, and directing style.

In the middle of the fourth century AD, a series of earthquakes struck the port of Kourion on the southern coast of Cyprus. The town had no doubt experienced its share of seismic events, but nothing prepared its inhabitants for the major earthquake and tsunami that struck just after dawn, most likely on July 21, AD 365.

When archaeologists excavated the site, among the many discoveries was the heartbreaking tableau of a skeletal family. The man holds his wife protectively while she cradles their one-year-old child. The image, both poignant and instructive, graces the cover of Stanford University Earth Science and geophysics professor Amos Nur's new book, Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology, and the Wrath of God, written with the assistance of his graduate student Dawn Burgess.

Gamers have devoted countless years of collective brainpower to rescuing princesses or protecting the planet against alien invasions. Researchers at the University of Washington are trying to harness those finely honed skills to make medical discoveries, perhaps even finding a cure for HIV.

I won't have time to post the latest newsletter for the Science Shelf Book Review Archive or mail it to subscribers for a few days, but here's a link.

Read on for a bit more.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing services, which connect individual users for simultaneous uploads and downloads directly rather than through a central server, are reported to account for as much as 70 percent of Internet traffic worldwide.