!bookworms !ifrickinglovescience so you can post and discuss Pop-Sci books. Tell us what you recommend but also which ones you hated and made up roll your eyes 
Pic related is from !sophistry "The Neolithic Revolution and it's consequences…" author and Silicon Valley darling (((Yuval Noah Harari))) 
because it's Sci-Fi-ish when compared to that overrated "history" 
book Sapiens.
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I think pop sci is interesting because the topic is deeper then ppl think. I would argue most research at conferences and talks ends up being presented in a very pop way even if it isnt as crass as ted. Scientific fields are so diverse there is a good chance even in giving a talk to a room of PHD tenured professors you will talking about a topic they have little understanding of, so even in an academic context speakers and presenters rely on big ideas, flashy graphics, and minimal sources. With student researchers and temporary interns its common for professors and lab heads to simplify and hype up their own project and its importance partially to get students engaged and partially to arm students with a nice set of talking points they can use in their own presentations.
In terms of pop sci books I like the blank slate by Pinker
There was a pop sci book about how genetic diversity is created from how small the human genome is but i cant remember the title
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I generally like pop-science as well, but I think it comes down to the book quality (cranks Malcolm Gladwell fail at this).
One example of great pop-sci I've read was this, which is partially related to your field (author is a biochemist).
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6429264-life-ascending
My only mistake was reading it in pauses (I started reading before my vacations, then I traveled for like 10 days without my Kindle then went back, then stopped for a week and then finished it) because the book introduced a lot of chemistry and micro-bio lingo I was not familiar with, and while it explained them I would forget by the time I re-took it lol, gotta keep it fresh.
With fields being so hyper-specialized these days, are there times where this tenured Professors can be almost as lost on a subject they don't work at as the layman?
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Not necessarily as lost as the layman I mean these talks are still more complex then TED or Bill Nye, but I mean I've been guilty of saying things that are maybe true or our lab hopes to prove as true as being actually true in posters and presentations to wow scientific audiences and network. Like there is a growing body of evidence that your gut micro biome effects your mental health, so when I am presenting a project which has identified a few possible probiotic canidates I am going to lay into my audience (esp the corpo and military audience) "An imbalanced gut microbiome not only causes obvious health issues but can also effect long term mental health decreasing productivity in subtle ways resistant to traditional treatment" since science is all about selling. You need to sell why your project is beneficial enough to be funded
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Stuff like this makes me wonder about the behind-the-scenes of climatology. I have no doubts about Climate Change being bad but I wonder if some climatologists purposely push for worst-case-scenario models like AMOC collapse within 30 years for attention grabbing/grant gibs.
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Im not a climatologist so I don't want to definitively comment but I think what you said is probably a factor in funding, and others have been pointing out this conflict of interest for years.
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