Tens of millions of Americans suffer from chronic pain — pain that lasts longer than six months. Chronic pain can be mild or excruciating, episodic or continuous, merely inconvenient or totally incapacitating. With chronic pain, signals of pain remain active in the nervous system for weeks, months, or even years.

We’ll discuss the rise of chronic pain and novel treatments derived from venomous organisms, such as Prialt, a treatment derived from snail venom.

Noted forensic anthropologist Maples, whose specialty is the study of bones, and freelance journalist Browning here recount Maples’s criminal and anthropological investigations over the past 20 years. The meandering text combines episodes from Maples’s personal life and education with discourses on his philosophy, his teaching at the Univ. of Florida and his work. The book’s strength is as a snapshot of the world of forensic scientists, vividly portraying the siege mentality of many of them when their objective data are used for purposes other than ascertaining the truth about how a victim died. Despite the two-dimensional depiction of the people who were the objects of Maples’s investigations-including the “likely” remains of Romanov Tsar Nicholas II-his memoirs should hold readers’ interest.

how, exactly, are stars born? How did this process forge our present-day Universe, and how will it shape our destiny? Within the last few decades, astronomers have unraveled many of the key elements in this cosmic mystery. We now understand how star formation underlies not only the creation of galaxies, but also how it leads, as a byproduct, to orbiting planets like the Earth. Despite such basic advances, deep questions remain in this active field of research.