https://www.wired.com/gallery/8-science-books-read-gift-winter-2020/

This has been a strange year. Well, the year has been a lot of things—infuriating, exhausting, heartbreaking—but it’s also been pretty freaking weird. We’ve been in the same place with the same people for a very long time. Adult children back with their parents, parents with their small children all day. Everyone staring at the same walls and screens morning until night. And while the strangeness of the situation has left us missing things like gathering with friends, going to bars, seeing live music, and even commuting to an office, it’s also made us think about (and, on good days, maybe even appreciate) the things we overlooked when life felt faster and fuller, like the comforts of home and a restorative walk. Perhaps that kind of perspective shift also explains the types of books we gravitated toward this year: ones that hold a magnifying glass to the parts of our world we had never really contemplated, or challenge us to reconsider things we thought we understood. Like, for example, the actual definition of a penis, which it turns out can be super weird. Only fitting for a year like this one. —Ricki Harris

Intromittum. That’s science writer Emily Willingham’s neologism for “the organ that animals use to transmit sperm or eggs to each other.” Why the new word? Well, that’s the point of the book—that nature’s wild diversity in how it builds those organs goes way beyond mere penises. Willingham traces those paths across the animal kingdom, from daisy chains of 20 hermaphroditic slugs oriented male side-to-female side, to the 11-inch penis bone of the elephant seal (though the actual penis is, Willingham writes, “pink and unarmored, in a shape that should be relatively familiar”). Not so the bulging intromittum of the Phallomedusa snail, which looks like a tree that the Lorax would speak for.