Virtual Unreality: Just Because the Internet Told You, How Do You Know It's True?

  • Charles Seife
Viking (2014)

Digital information is a “superbug of the mind” with no vaccine, notes journalist Charles Seife. Uniquely transmissible, persistent and connected, it is both an unprecedented marvel and ideally suited to misuse. Seife's analyses cut deep as he tours the 'reality' strained through the Internet's clotted filter — from the instant news churned out by online journalism to Wikipedia's shifting edits, 'sock puppetry' (fake online identities), plagiarism and viral rumours. A cogent, balanced, quietly impassioned call for Internet scepticism.

Zoom: How Everything Moves, From Atoms and Galaxies to Blizzards and Bees

  • Bob Berman
Little, Brown (2014)

Science columnist Bob Berman approximates the impossible — perpetual motion — in this wit-propelled exploration of movement in nature. He bookends his tour with the “mother of all motion”, the cosmos, first visiting astrophysicist Daniel Kelson (who discovered the fastest-moving known galaxy), and finally contemplating the limitless speed of stars in an infinite Universe. In between is a dazzling romp through trekking neutrinos, 60-kilometre-an-hour dragonflies, the 'kangaroo hops' of wind-blown sand grains, and more.

The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers

  • Joanna Bourke
Oxford University Press (2014)

Pain — chronic, searing, triggered by childbirth or unrequited love — is a “definition-defying beast”, avers historian Joanna Bourke. In her perceptive study covering the past three centuries, she details experiences of pain (such as “champagne bubbles and blisters” reported by a woman with a phantom limb) and responses to others' suffering. The belief that the poor and indigenous were less susceptible to pain, for instance, was still held by many into the twentieth century. We can learn to “suffer better”, argues Bourke, by recognizing that pain is multifaceted and culturally embedded.

The Trilobite Book: A Visual Journey

  • Riccardo Levi-Setti
University of Chicago Press (2014)

They may have died out 250 million years ago, but trilobites — a group of marine arthropods containing some 20,000 species — have a persistent grip on the human imagination. This coffee-table gem by physicist and trilobite aficionado Riccardo Levi-Setti marries the intertwined story of his global hunt for specimens and trilobites' place in prehistory with 235 superb colour photographs of select fossils. Perhaps most astounding is the array found by Arkadiy Evdokimov in Russia: their preservation is exquisite, down to the rococo flourishes of curving spines and protuberant, complex eyes.

Blue Mind: How Water Makes You Happier, More Connected and Better at What You Do

  • Wallace J. Nichols
Little, Brown (2014)

The nexus of wellbeing and proximity to water — ocean shores, lakes, even fountains — holds promise as an area of multidisciplinary study, argues marine biologist Wallace Nichols. And in his popular mix of biology, neuroscience and ecosystem analysis, some findings do compel. The sight of moving water, for instance, can subtly boost daydreaming, that neural “drift” in the default-mode network that benefits brain function.