Books & Arts in 2014

Richard Holmes finds Mary Somerville's breakthrough science best-seller thrillingly fresh, 180 years on.

Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week's best science picks.

Jessa Gamble on a radio play about the Nobel laureate and the UK Prime Minister.

David Deamer welcomes a synthesis of what we know about the origins of life, as told by a master in the field.

Robert Seder applauds the chronicle of a secret US wartime project to vanquish the disease.

Linda Geddes is moved by an insider's take on how doctors and geriatric-care systems are failing old people and the dying.

Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week's best science picks.

Mark Pagel relishes an analysis of how natural selection riffles through life's immense genetic library.

Jennifer Light enjoys a chronicle of the collaborations that conjured the digital realm.

Michael Brooke reappraises Julian Huxley's pioneering classic of animal behaviour on its centenary.

Lucy Fortson enjoys a slim primer on cosmology that uses a cleverly constrained lexicon.

Peter Ratcliff uses dendrochronology — tree-ring dating — to pin down the age and suggest the provenance of stringed instruments. As he prepares to speak at the Woodmusick instrument identification conference in Cremona, Italy, on 30 September, he talks about the science of spotting fakes, and the 14 Stradivarius instruments made from the same spruce tree.

Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week's best science picks.

Best-selling science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson's works cover everything from cryptography to Sumerian mythology. Ahead of next year's novel Seveneves, he talks about his influences, the stagnation in material technologies, and Hieroglyph, the forthcoming science-fiction anthology that he kick-started to stimulate the next generation of engineers.

Danièle Chatelain and George Slusser explore how French science fiction grapples with Cartesian duality.

Virginia Valian ponders a study on biology, evolution and gender differences in humans.

Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks.

Mario Livio welcomes a lucid description of attempts to evaluate how special humans are.

Paul L. McEuen relishes Margaret Atwood's acerbic tales of sex, hallucinations and death by stromatolite.

Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks.