How To Win Friends and Influence Fungi: Collected Quirks of Science, Tech, Engineering, and Math from Nerd Nite

In 2003, Balakrishan, then a Boston University graduate student and now the program director for the National Science Foundation, hosted the first Nerd Nite gathering at a Boston bar. The event combined several 20-minute presentations on any scientific topic with the opportunity for the audience to drink while they took in new facts. It was immediately popular and quickly moved on to New York City, where Wasowski took on the task of spreading these events worldwide. Today, Nerd Nite takes place monthly in more than 100 cities across the globe, and many presentations are featured on the brand’s YouTube channel. Presenters are often grad students or professors just getting started in their fields. The Nerd Nite cofounders determined that the next logical step in their offerings would be a collection of articles by some of their most popular presenters. Topics range from wildlife and bodily fluids to space and mathematics. This book features 70 such articles, each designed to inform and delight readers with irreverent tones and factual accounts of particular subjects.