“Informative and entertaining…Rogers is a seasoned raconteur, unreeling an eons-spanning tale with skill.”¬†‚ÄîWall Street Journal

A lively account of our age-old quest for brighter colors, which changed the way we see the world, from the best-selling author of Proof: The Science of Booze

From kelly green to millennial pink, our world is graced with a richness of colors. But our human-made colors haven’t always matched nature’s kaleidoscopic array. To reach those brightest heights required millennia of remarkable innovation and a fascinating exchange of ideas between science and craft that’s allowed for the most luminous manifestations of our built and adorned world.
 
In Full Spectrum, Rogers takes us on that globe-trotting journey, tracing an arc from the earliest humans to our digitized, synthesized present and future. We meet our ancestors mashing charcoal in caves, Silk Road merchants competing for the best ceramics, and textile artists cracking the centuries-old mystery of how colors mix, before shooting to the modern era for high-stakes corporate espionage and the digital revolution that’s rewriting the rules of color forever. 
 
In prose as vibrant as its subject, Rogers opens the door to Oz, sharing the liveliest events of an expansive human quest—to make a brighter, more beautiful world—and along the way, proving why he’s “one of the best science writers around.”*
*National Geographic

A spirited narrative on the fascinating art and science of alcohol sure to inspire cocktail party chats on making booze, tasting it, and its effects on our bodies and brains.

Drinking gets a lot more interesting when you know what’s actually inside your glass of microbrewed ale, single-malt whisky, or Napa Cabernet Sauvignon. All of them begin with fermentation, where a fungus called yeast binges on sugar molecules and poops out ethanol. Humans have been drinking the results for ten thousand years. Distillation is a two-thousand-year-old technology–invented by a woman–that we’re still perfecting today. And the molecular codes of alcoholic flavors remain a mystery pursued by scientists with high-tech laboratories and serious funding.

In Proof, Adam Rogers reveals alcohol as a miracle of science, going deep into the pleasures of making and drinking booze–and the effects of the latter. The people who make and sell alcohol may talk about history and tradition, but alcohol production is really powered by physics, molecular biology, organic chemistry, and a bit of metallurgy–and our taste for those products is a melding of psychology and neurobiology.

Proof takes readers from the whisky-making mecca of the Scottish highlands to the oenology labs at UC Davis, from Kentucky bourbon country to the most sophisticated gene-sequencing labs in the world–and to more than one bar–bringing to life the motley characters and evolving science behind the latest developments in boozy technology.