Frankenstein鈥榮 creator, Mary Shelley, would approve of our new forays into the mysteries and mechanics of life. Take (Canongate) by Sally Adee, New Scientist鈥榮 books columnist (see 鈥淭en top sci-fi picks鈥�). Adee explores the chemical and electrical ferment underpinning all growth and life, highlighting the pioneers and charlatans who discovered and exploited 鈥渂ioelectricity鈥�. She also conjures electric medicine: a future of good health, regenerated tissue and (perhaps) extended life.
Shifting the focus to before birth is Leah Hazard鈥檚 (Virago). It is 鈥渢he most miraculous and misunderstood organ鈥�, writes Hazard, a midwife and health campaigner. It is also the one about which we most argue and legislate. Can science bring clarity to the fraught business of birth? Does technology improve childbearing?
(Profile Books) runs with this as Claire Horn, a criminologist and reproductive rights expert, looks with hope and trepidation to a future of externalised, artificial uteruses. Where do abortion, surrogacy and parenthood fit in a brave new 鈥渆ctogenetic鈥� world?
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Mathematics helps us understand the world; computation helps us change it. In (Profile), Eugenia Cheng returns to her war against 鈥渕aths phobia鈥�, asking and answering questions such as why must some mathematical operations be performed in a certain order to get the right result? And is maths even real? For Cheng, the common complaints about mathematics expose its greatest wonders, and hidden in our most innumerate fumblings is its great wisdom.
Physicist Michio Kaku looks to the future in (Penguin Press). While the best computers struggle to model the simplest of real-world systems, quantum computers are altogether different. Kaku brings his signature enthusiasm and optimism to bear on a vision of a time when it will be possible to manipulate reality at will.
Fancy adding a whole new dimension to your existence? Just add wings and set off for some epic journeys. Start with by Lev Parikian (Elliott & Thompson), who juggles birdwatching with a career as an orchestral conductor. The author looks for the commonalities between 13 of Earth鈥檚 diverse flyers, from pterosaurs to dragonflies and butterflies to albatrosses, and contemplates the rhythms of flocking and migration.
If you find yourself walking in East Lothian, UK, look out for ecologist Katty Baird in forests, behind waterfalls and down holes, as she traps and observes the moths to which she has devoted her career. Her (4th Estate) is a love letter to the natural world.
Dingy footman, Jersey tiger (pictured above) and pale mottled willow are some of the favourite moths of Tim Blackburn, an expert in invasive species and former director of the Institute of Zoology in London. In , he shows how studies of unassuming moths have revealed a world of unseen ecological connections.
And then there is Naira de Gracia鈥檚 (Scribner). In it, de Gracia recalls her months following a generation of chinstrap penguins through their nesting season 鈥� and epic foraging journeys using their flippers (wings, honest) to help them swim, or 鈥渇ly鈥�, underwater. It is a vivid account, full of natural beauty and brutality, laced with polar history and climate science.
From the deep history of continents to new visions of climate change, tackling the reality of our ever-changing Earth has never been more vital. Imagine the planet more than 2 billion years ago: teeming with life, but where the newly oxygenated air could kill in an instant. Imagine the evolution of animals struggling to adapt to a changing climate. In (Reaktion), palaeontologist Ken McNamara finds incredible worlds preserved in stones we tend to ignore as he explores life鈥檚 rocky roads.
In 2012, Ross Mitchell and researchers at Yale University predicted that Earth鈥檚 next supercontinent, 鈥淎masia鈥�, would form near the North Pole, as Asia and North America crunch together. We will know if they are right in 200 million years. Meanwhile, Mitchell鈥檚 (University of Chicago Press) tours past supercontinents and introduces us to the forces shaping the next one.
Closer to our own times, The Paradox of Svalbard: Climate change and globalisation in the Arctic by anthropologist Zdenka Sokolickova shows the human face of climate change. She tells of her two years in the town of Longyearbyen in the high Arctic, watching planes land and take off and listening to cruise ships sound their horns in the harbour. Climate change is well under way there, with higher temperatures, more rainfall, a rapidly thawing permafrost 鈥� and a way of life altered beyond recognition.
Christina Gerhardt鈥檚 (University of California Press) celebrates islands as rich repositories of history, culture and biodiversity 鈥� and laments their loss as sea level rise redraws coastlines. The author, an environmental journalist, mixes cartography, science and history in a vivid, urgent testament to the climate crisis.
The further we travel, the more we learn about our quest to understand the cosmos. In (University of Chicago Press), Matthew Shindell, who curates the spacecraft collection at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, has plenty to say about why we look up at the stars. His history of Mars-driven hope and fancy includes Babylonian astrologers and Victorian scientists, some of whom brought extraordinary inventiveness to their search for intelligent life on Mars (pictured above).
After studying Earth from space, some astronauts end up thinking that everyone and everything on this planet is interconnected. How do the rest of us feel about that? (W. W. Norton), by Marjolijn van Heemstra, and translated by Jonathan Reeder, starts by listening to exoplanets and talking to the prisoners helping us to imagine human settlements on Mars.
Simon Ings is New Scientist鈥檚 film聽columnist
