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

Academic papers, news articles and blog posts

• Laughlin, D. C. 2024. Letter to a Young Ecologist. Bull Ecol Soc Am 00(00): e2151. https://doi.org/10.1002/bes2.2151

• Wigner, E. The Unreasonable Effectivenss of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, 13 (1960). https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/wigner.pdf

• 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.

• The Serengeti Rules, Sean B. Carroll

  The Serengeti Rules explores the basic rules that dictate ecological interactions and animal populations throughtout the world. It's a light reading and the author writes in such a way that makes everything seem interesting. The national park of the Serengeti is the stage in which we can clearly see these rules in action.

• Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes

  On this book Naomi Oreskes shows us the history behind the misinformation industry, telling us how the narratives are present in almost every scientific advance that threatens big industries such as tobaco and fossil fuel. The book dives deep into the methods used to spread doubt around scientific knowledge and make it manipulatable. It is a book that triggers a feeling of indignation, yet excelent.

• Wonderful Life, Stephen Jay Gould

  The book tells the story of the Burgess Shale fossils discovery, and it's impact on the development of the theory of evolution. It is a book rich in details, thoughts and anecdotes. At some moments the reading is a bit slow due to the amount of details in anatomy and phylogeny, which are great for readers without a biology background, like me. However it does force you to have a slower pace. Stephen J. pauses the main topic to talk about his views of scientific knowledge here and then, which is a feature that I enjoy quite a lot. I love this book.

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.

• Percy Jackson & the Olympians 1 Collection, 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!

• Poppy War, R. F. Kuang

Sci-fi

• Foundation Collection, 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.

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.

• Love on the Brain, Ali Hazelwood

• Love Theoretically, Ali Hazelwood

Videos

• How We’re Fooled By Statistics

• Is Success Luck or Hard Work?

• O segredo da MERITOCRACIA

• This equation will change how you see the world (the logistic map)

• Bayes theorem, the geometry of changing beliefs

• When Time Became History - The Human Era

• LIGO Feel That Space (The Weeknd Parody) A Capella Science

• The Molecular Shape of You (Ed Sheeran Parody) A Capella Science

• POKÉMON E STAR WARS DENUNCIAM PREDADORES DA CIÊNCIA

• Tim Urban: Inside the mind of a master procastinator

• Global Warming: The Decade We Lost Earth

• The Most Misunderstanded Concept in Physics

• Math’s Fundamental Flaw

• What The Prisoner’s Dilemma Reveals About Life, The Universe, and Everything

• A History of Two Problem Solvers

• Bertrand’s Paradox (with 3blue1brown) - Numberphile