The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind

  • Michio Kaku
Doubleday (2014)

Taking a break from contemplating the cosmos, Michio Kaku plunges into the universe inside the skull, training his theoretical physicist's eye on the field. His intriguing 'space-time' theory of consciousness frames the extraordinary findings emerging from ever-more-finely targeted brain scanning and other technologies. A fascinating sprint through everything from telepathy research to the 147,456 processors of the Blue Gene computer, which has been used to simulate 4.5% of the brain's synapses and neurons.

Girls Coming to Tech! A History of American Engineering Education for Women

  • Amy Sue Bix
MIT Press (2014)

The Second World War flung open windows of opportunity on aircraft engineering for thousands of women in the United States. In the 1950s, many eager to pursue an engineering degree hit a wall; less than 1% of the era's engineering students were female. Focusing on three iconic technology institutes (California, Georgia and Massachusetts), science historian Amy Sue Bix relates how these “oddities at best and outcasts at worst” made headway in closing the gender gap: women now earn one-fifth of degrees in the field.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. W. W. Norton (2014)

In this comparative study of economic and digital progress, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue that we stand at an “inflection point” — poised to reap big rewards if we harness the forward leap of innovation. With measured optimism, they survey a digital landscape of exponential progress in computing power and application; technological benefits and their uneven spread; and policy. Crammed with analyses of everything from human–machine competition to the state of US education.

Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love: What Neuroscience Can — and Can't — Tell Us About How We Feel

  • Giovanni Frazzetto
Penguin Books (2014)

Neuroscientist Giovanni Frazzetto enters the restless realm of human emotion through the portals of physiology, genetics, history, art and philosophy. Anger, guilt, anxiety, grief, empathy, joy and love are anatomized in turn, enlivened with research on everything from the role of monoamine oxidase A in anger to the engagement of opioid receptors as we thrill to music. And who knew that surrealist Salvador Dali created an art installation in the shape of a giant caterpillar to explore the process of sedation?

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History

  • Diane Coyle
Princeton University Press (2014)

A raft of economists, including Robert Costanza (see Nature 505, 283–285; 2014), argue that gross domestic product (GDP) is a flawed measure of national prosperity, hiding social inequality and pushing growth at the planet's expense. Economist Diane Coyle is less severe in this brief, lucid history. She traces GDP from its roots in the eighteenth century to its twentieth-century heyday, offering a smart analysis of its status and uses now, as a one-note statistic in an increasingly complex world.