There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...

It's a perfectly reasonable assumption that a book about a topic you (and most of the world) have no interest in will be uninspiring - and for me, motorsport is on a par with watching paint dry without the aesthetic content. However, David Sumpter's Soccermatics had proved to me that it was possible to take a similarly boring subject and make an enjoyable popular maths title based on it - so perhaps I shouldn't have been so surprised that I enjoyed Racing Green . In part, this is down to Kit Chapman's skill as a storyteller. I often moan about a lack of narrative in popular science books - this book oozes with it. If anything, there's almost too much. Where Sumpter gave us quite a bit of detail on the maths of the 'beautiful game', Chapman gives fleeting glimpses of the science and technology involved in this most technical of sports, sometimes with no more science content than a shampoo commercial. Even so, I can forgive that for the range of technologies ...

There has been a suggestion doing the rounds that if you don't get into a book after the first few pages, you should give it up - because life's too short. If I'd followed this suggestion, I wouldn't have discovered what a brilliant book Sticky is. I'll get back to that, but it's worth saying first why Laurie Winkless's book on what makes things sticky, produces friction and grip - or for that matter lubricates - is so good. Without doubt, Winkless is great at bringing storytelling to her writing. She frames her information well with interviews, visits to places and her personal experiences. But of itself, that isn't enough. The reason, for example, I was captivated by her section on the remarkable (though oddly, given the book's title, entirely non-sticky) adhesive qualities of the gecko's foot was really about the way that Winkless takes us through the different viewpoints on how the foot's adhesion works. We get plenty of science and also...

The MIT Press is unusual amongst academic publishers in putting out a fair number of 'packaged' books. These are often highly illustrated titles that are relatively light on content but provide an attractive introduction to a subject. Although Jack Challoner's Water looks like such a book - and it has some very pretty full colour illustrations (though I don't get the point of the final one at the back of the book) - but in reality its content is very different from what's suggested by the highly illustrated format. In some ways that's good, in others it definitely isn't. Let's do the good bit first. Despite the look, Challoner often goes into a lot more depth than you would expect in such a book. I'm not talking about delving into the mathematics behind what's going on, but when covering, say, phase changes or transient structures in water we get far more detail than might be expected. In several places there were 'Wow, I never knew that!...

When I saw the subtitle of this book 'the science of adhesion' and the fact that it was published by the Royal Society of Chemistry I imagined turf wars breaking out with the Institute of Physics - as surely the science of adhesion is pure physics. However, it would be fair to say that in practice the majority of the book covers the science of adhesives , where chemistry can certainly lay a firm claim. There is no doubt that this book will answer everything you ever wanted to know about how things stick to other things - from geckos to PVA adhesive - it is both comprehensive and often fascinating. Steven Abbott has a friendly style and supports the material in the book with regular links to YouTube videos where you can see various experiments and tests being undertaken for real, which is really helpful. The reader also gets an insight into some of the more contentious aspects of the science of stickiness, where Abbott is entirely prepared to declare that some of his colleagues ...

Materials science is one of the hardest topics to make interesting, probably only beaten in the potential dullness stakes by geology, but Ainissa Ramirez achieves the near-impossible of making the subject genuinely engaging, essentially by hardly covering materials science at all, but rather telling stories of people and their inventions with a  materials science context.  This  is the k ind of book academic publishers (and even more so academic authors) rarely achieve - lyrical and quirky, jumping around rather than linear: it's got a lot going for it. Ramirez picks out eight topics: metal springs and crystals (for timekeeping), steel (for rails), telegraph wires, photographic materials, carbon filaments (for lighting), magnetic data storage, scientific glassware and switches plus silicon for computing. Of themselves, nothing particularly new and exciting - but what's great is the way that she headlines with excellent stories, some of which I've never come acros...

Graphene's one of those words that gets bandied around a lot without getting more than some vague feeling of what it's all about. In the end, it's just a material, and everyone knows that books about materials don't make for very exciting reading. But the advantage Brian Clegg has here is that graphene is not just a wonder material (which it certainly is) but it also has a brilliant story attached to it. The two Russian discoverers of graphene (sort of - more on that in a moment), working at Manchester University are, to say the least, characters. This is particularly the case with Andre Geim, who first came to fame (or infamy) when he successfully levitated live frogs using a very powerful magnet. Geim and his co-discoverer Konstantin Novoselov had the idea that you should be able to spend some time on what they called 'Friday Night Projects' (spare time activities to look at something completely different) and they succeeded remarkably with graphene. Cl...

This is a tasty little volume, packed with kitchen-based science. I must admit, when I saw that the author was the One Show's science expert and Marty Jopson's author photo has that 'Hey, I'm a mad scientist, kids!' look, my heart fell - I was sure the book would be the written equivalent of a 'Wow, look, aren't I clever, I can make this go bang!' science show - but, in fact, it's packed full of (appropriately) meaty scientific content. I was really pleased that Jopson didn't stick purely to the chemistry of cooking, but launched with the working of some familiar kitchen gadgets - there was genuinely fascinating reading to be had about apparently humdrum equipment in the form of the physics and materials science of a knife and chopping board. And Jopson took us into industrial kitchens too, to reveal, for example, the remarkable process required to make puffed wheat. Inevitably, the chemistry of cooking - how, for example, proteins denature...

A welcome trend over the past few years is the increased number of popular science books involving materials science, in part inspired (I suspect) by the success of Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik.  Laurie Winkless, a physicist and writer who has had a place at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and has worked at the National Physical Laboratory, has written her first book, looking at the science of how cities function. The book has as its foundation (pun intended) the creation of a skyscraper. This skyscraper acts as a guide throughout the book to illustrate the science of materials, the accomplishments and methods of engineering involved in building superstructures, a reference for the history of construction and its technological achievements and a starting point for explanations of the science at work in the world’s cities. The book goes into depth into various areas of the commonplace around us: how cities provide and distribute energy, water, public transport, food producti...

Quantum theory proves the fascination of the science of the very small, and nanotechnology offers the potential for structures and materials at the kind of scale where quantum physics comes into play behaving significantly more impressively than we expect from something as, dare I say, it dull as materials science. Thanks to the concept of tiny replicators and robots, nanotechnology has some remarkable heights to aim at - and some deadly lows in the form of all-eating 'grey goo' as worried about by Prince Charles. But the reality is that such technology is far beyond us, and may never be possible because of the difficulties of making engineering work at this scale, where all sorts of different influences, from unexpected forces to quantum tunnelling come into play. Practical nanotechnology started with pigments and even now is mostly about small structured particles and tubules, rather than mini-machines. Peter Forbes and Tom Grimsey provide a good basic introduction to ...