We've all got a favourite bit of technology that has been 'coming soon' for decades. Nicole Kobie takes us through the historical journey to the present for a range of such technologies from flying cars to robots (more detail in a moment). In each case these technologies seemed achievable many decades earlier, but the reality has been that making the dream real proved much harder than most envisaged (especially the inventors and investors). Kobie takes us through driverless cars, AI, robots, augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), cyborgs and brain interfaces, flying cars, Hyperloops and smart cities. Many of these topics are much discussed, but it's really helpful seeing them all pulled together to get an overview of the way that we repeatedly get drawn into failed investments of time and money into a science fictional future without thinking enough about the practicalities of making it happen. My least favourite section was smart cities - I think most people (once Hype

When I first saw the title of this book I assumed it was yet another attempt to take us from the earliest life to humans, but, as the subtitle suggests, the target is much broader - getting to us all the way from the Big Bang. This makes it sound like it's going to be a chronological approach, but it's rather more fragmented - while it does sort of follow a timeline, we get, for example, a chapter that introduces the relevant key parts of physics and another primarily on molecules, with the timeline more of a background than the main content. Taking this long span and wide sciences approach means there is a huge amount to cram in, even though it's a somewhat over-long book. Covering so much is a daunting endeavour for which I have to admire Tim Coulson's bravery. One potential problem is that it means having to be very summary in parts. Almost inevitably it's more summary about areas outside Coulson's own field of biology and this can be detrimental - in can be

Neil Lawrence is the DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge where he leads the university-wide initiative on AI, and a Senior AI Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. Previously he was Director of Machine Learning at Amazon, deploying solutions for Alexa, Prime Air and the Amazon supply chain. Co-host of the Talking Machines podcast, he's written a series for The Guardian and appeared regularly on other media. Known for his policy and societal work with the UK's AI Council, the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, and the OECD's Global Partnership on AI, his research focuses on improving data governance, accelerating scientific discovery, and how humans can take back control of large AI systems. His latest title is  The Atomic Human . What would you like your book to achieve? I wanted it to speak to individuals from different backgrounds in a way that didn’t preach or tell, but told stories in a way the reader could relate to. I hope the book

There's no doubt that Matt Parker can make practically anything interesting - this is one of the few books I've ever read where I genuinely enjoyed the introduction. But there was a real challenge here. In a review of a recent book about maps and mathematics I said 'I always found [geometry and trigonometry] the most tedious aspect of maths.' Take a look at the subtitle here: 'the life-changing magic of trigonometry'. It's no surprise that the 'trig' word turns up - it literally means triangle measuring (trigon is an obsolete term for a triangle). But it inevitably raises a shudder for many. Parker does acknowledge this in his pure trigonometry section, suggesting it's primarily because it's a pain remembering what tan and cos and sin refer to, but pointing out convincingly how useful and powerful trigonometry is. I confess, however, it was still my least-favourite chapter in the book. Thankfully there's a lot more, introduced with Parke

I very much enjoyed Lucy Jane Santos' previous title Half Lives , which covered 'the unlikely history of radium'. Her enthusiasm for the topic shone through (in true radium fashion). As well as the straight history of the discovery and deployment of radium, we got lots on its use in commercial products - initially in quack medicine, but later in every type of product imaginable, with Boots even selling radiated soda syphon cartridges. In this follow-up Santos takes on what might seem a quite similar topic: the history of our discovery and use of uranium. There is obviously a degree of overlap between the topics, particularly in the quack medicine usage - particularly delightful were some of the more wacky US attempts to monetise atomic appeal by, for instance, setting up treatment barns where you could be immersed in allegedly (though often not actually) radioactive soil in a process that felt more like going to Lourdes than a true medical treatment. But in practice both be

Jules Howard is a zoological correspondent, science writer and broadcaster, whose recent book, Wonderdog , won the 2022 Barker Book Prize for non-fiction. He writes on a host of topics relating to zoology, ecology and wildlife conservation and appears regularly in BBC Science Focus magazine and on radio and TV, including BBC Breakfast and Radio 4's Nature Table and The Ultimate Choice. He lives in Northamptonshire with his wife and two children. His latest title is Infinite Life . Why write about eggs? Like many, I have always loved those big epic tales, based on science, that chart the evolution of animals – the Cambrian Explosion, fish moving onto the land, early amphibians and reptiles, the demise of dinosaurs and the rise of mammals… Gould, Dawkins, Attenborough did it so well, and I loved this kind of information when I was starting out in zoology. I guess I was always looking for an opportunity to tell my own version of this… and that’s where the eggs idea comes into it. Eggs