I'm always a little wary of popular science books that start with a personal story, but I'll make an exception for Madeleine Beekman's excellent book, which sets out a possible explanation of our ability to speak, because the approach fits in with a well-balanced combination of storytelling and scientific information.  There have been a good number of books that either set out to explain some of our species' physical oddities or abilities that seem to set us apart from other animals. Twenty years ago I was impressed by Clive Bromhall's The Eternal Child , which suggested retaining infantile features (neoteny) enabled us to exist more effectively in large groups, while  many authors have attempted to highlight aspects of being human that set us apart (as was the case with storytelling in Brainjacking ). Here Beekman first takes us through what palaeontology can tell us about the development our biological form, then explores the function of speech and language. In ma...

Frank Close is Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford. He was one time head of theory at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and head of communications and public education at CERN. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and winner of their Michael Faraday Prize for excellence in science communication in 2013. He is the only professional scientist to have won the Association of British Science Writers Prize on 3 occasions. Author of 22 books on science including The Cosmic Onion, Trinity , and Elusive - the story of the elusive Peter Higgs and his boson, his latest book is Destroyer of Worlds - the deep history of the nuclear age. Why this book? One afternoon in 2022 I was walking into town with my 10-year-old grandson, Jack, when he started asking - and remarkably telling me what he knew - about Tsar Bomba, the most powerful bomb ever detonated. I had been thinking about the history of nuclear physics for many years, but it was this conversation that was the f...

I’ll get onto the details of this specific book a bit further down, but first it’s worth taking a more general look at the series of which it’s the latest instalment. Coming from Reaktion Books, the series is called Kosmos and several of the previous titles have already been reviewed on this site – on Mercury ,  Venus , Mars , Saturn , Uranus and Neptune  and Asteroids . Looking back at those reviews, there’s a clear common theme. They’re all nice-looking, lavishly illustrated books that are packed to overflowing with information – sometimes, as with Mercury or Saturn, on subjects that rarely get a whole book to themselves. On the downside – as far as this site is concerned, anyway – they aren’t popular science books by any meaningful definition of the term.  Here's an analogy. Imagine buying a large-format, nicely illustrated book called, say, The Himalayas . You’d expect it to cover the geography and culture of the region and the history of its exploration, but you’d be...

Anne Toomey is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Science at Pace University in New York City. Her research explores how science can be applied to solve real-world environmental and policy challenges and she is the author of the award-winning 2024 book Science with Impact: How to Engage People, Change Practice, and Influence Policy. Anne holds a Ph.D. in Human Geography from Lancaster University, a dual M.A. in Natural Resources and Sustainable Development from American University and the University for Peace, and a B.A. in Communications and Political Science from the University of Rhode Island. She is also co-founder and executive director of Participatory Science Solutions LLC, which supports collaborative, science-based decision-making in communities, organizations, and governments. Her new book is Science with Impact . Why science? Science is such a powerful tool, but it’s also one that’s often misunderstood. What excites me about science isn’t really the discover...

As the title suggests, this new book from Kate Kelly is a kind of mirror-image counterpart to her earlier novel, The Arid Lands , from 2023. You can find my review of that one on Goodreads. Both feature futures where, owing to changes in the global climate, human society has become much more fragmented, with some communities retaining a higher degree of civilisation than others. In the first book, set in a hot, dry future, the range was roughly from the 1950s back to mediaeval times. In this one, set in a much bleaker, deep-frozen future, the mediaeval culture is actually the more modern one, beset on all sides by barbarian savagery. The plots of the two books have a mirror-image quality, too. The first one is about a late-teen female protagonist whose initial concern is simply to look after her slightly younger male sibling, but then ends up having to save the world virtually single-handed. Permafrost has a similar scenario, but with the genders reversed. As far as the actual stories...

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...

Dete Meserve structures her novel around four characters, each getting their own chapter in rotation until storylines start to cross. This is a difficult approach to engage with, as after the first four chapters it's hard to have any connection to a character, but in the context of the storyline it makes sense, and after a while everything does start to fit into place. Each of our four is making a journey back in time using new technology developed by Californian startup Aeon Expeditions (founded by ex-husband of one of the four, Elizabeth). This is not time travel as science fiction usually portrays it. It is reminiscent of Daphne du Maurier's striking time travel novel The House on the Strand . In that book, the protagonist is able to mentally travel back to the fourteenth century, while his body remains in the present (putting him in danger, as his physical body moves across the landscape following the mental one in the past). in Meserve's book, the characters do travel...

Astrobiology is an unusual science in that there’s no clear, undisputed evidence that its subject of study – extraterrestrial life – even exists. It’s still an active field of research, though, with observational astronomers scouring the skies for telltale signs of life, and theoreticians tying themselves in knots trying to explain why we haven’t seen any of those signs yet. This book deals almost exclusively with the second of those topics. Before going any further, it’s worth defining exactly what we mean by ‘life’ in this context. If you’d asked Aristotle or Shakespeare or Charles Darwin to define life, they’d give pretty much the same answer, relating to biological processes. If we can’t detect such processes at a distance of many light years, that’s not really a great surprise: the latest generation of telescopes has only just got to the point where it might be possible even in principle. But many popular discussions of extraterrestrial life, this book included, aren’t talking abo...

Mark Gomes is a writer and tech executive who uses fiction to ask the questions our systems won’t. His latest novel, Age of Extinction, explores AI as a man-made extinction event—rooted not in rogue machines, but in profit-driven logic. At its core is The Equation—a simple but urgent framework for understanding what it takes for humanity to survive.  He’s also the author of The Heavy Butterfly , a work of mystical realism that uses quantum theory and surreal imagery to explore consciousness, identity, and what might lie beyond death. Mark studied the philosophy of science with a focus on Bayesian reasoning but believes deeply that logic means nothing without moral clarity.  He lives in Munich, thinks in story, and writes to provoke.  His latest is a novel, Age of Extinction looking at the potential impact of AI on society. Why this book?  I wrote Age of Extinction because the AI conversation felt like pantomime. Doomers shouting 'Skynet,' TechBros promising utopia—a...

In his introduction, James Kimmel tells an attention-grabbing story that surely could only have originated in America. After years of bullying, when he was 17 the local kids thought it would be funny to come over in their pickup one night and shoot his dog. A couple of weeks later, they blew up his mailbox. In Kimmel's words 'I grabbed a loaded revolver from my father's nightstand, jumped in my mother's car and tore off [after them] into the night.' He corners the evil kids, grabs the gun and is about to get out of the car to kill them when the realisation of what he's about to do and its implications hit him. He might have suppressed his immediate urge for revenge, but he claims it then grew in a general driving force of his life, the reason he became a lawyer. 'Within a decade, my revenge addiction had nearly destroyed me and my family.' It wasn't just his work but 'I threatened retribution against just about anyone for the slightest offense - ...