Google data editor Simon Rogers tells us What We Ask Google in his new book out this month
Mijansk786/Shutterstock
This month’s most exciting popular science books are surprisingly eclectic, and big on invention, ambition –and hubris. We’re tackling topics including the wonder (and envy) of flight, how to eat so the planet doesn’t collapse, the human capacity to build colossal structures and a drugs industry worth trillions, that er, doesn’t work as planned. Get stuck in – there’s plenty to amuse, delight and terrify.
How do I get rid of hiccups? Why is grief so lonely? Should I have a third child? How can I help a bee? In What We Ask Google: A surprisingly hopeful picture of humankind, Google data editor Simon Rogers shares some of the intimate, touching, momentous and downright human questions that we’ve been asking Google for over two decades now. There is plenty of opportunity for embarrassed winces reading Rogers’s exploration of the billions of anonymous data searches: we share more than we know, it seems. Rogers is also a lecturer in data journalism at Medill-Northwestern University, San Francisco, and wrote the well-regarded Facts are Sacred in 2013. Oh, and economist Tim Harford (presenter of BBC Radio’s More or Less and an FT columnist) says, “This view from the other side of the search box is both charming and insightful.”
Walk by Courtney Conley and Milica McDowell
Hands up if you haven’t been pushing through the daily tyranny of notching up however many thousands of steps are in vogue that month. Well, you may change your mind after reading Walk: Your life depends on it by gait specialist Courtney Conley and physiotherapist Milica McDowell, which focuses on the multiple health benefits of walking and argues, say the publishers, that “it is one of our most powerful and under-prescribed medicines”. The applications of that medicine span everything from preventing/treating obesity and falls to mitigating lower back pain – so that would be most of us caught up in those preventable conditions at some time in our lives. And, as ancient societies (not to mention Romantic poets like Wordworth and Coleridge) knew all too well, thinking, creating and walking do indeed go well together. Sounds like a win.
We’re looking forward to the wildest of political rides crashing into epic physics from New Scientist columnist Chanda Prescod Weinstein in The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, poetry and the cosmic dream boogie. Her first book, The Disordered Cosmos, brought her many accolades, and this one is already off to a great start with praise from the likes of Ruha Benjamin, professor of African-American studies at Princeton University, who described it as a “lyrical exploration of the universe that dances at the intersection of physics, pop culture, and Black intellectual thought”. Then there’s theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, who reckons it is a “great read for any human being who lives in the universe”. I can’t wait to get a finished copy and dig deep, not least to discover exactly what the section delivers with its tantalising title, “How to Live Safely in a Science Factual Universe”, where Virginia Hamilton’s short story collection The People Could Fly fits in and why Chanda stayed up late thinking about metaphors in science.
The Power of Plankton by Vincent Doumeizel (translated by Charlotte Coombe)
Just how much better placed do you need to be to write about plankton? Vincent Doumeizel, author of The Power of Plankton: How plankton made life on Earth possible and why it’s key to our future, is senior adviser on oceans to the U.N. Global Compact, the world’s largest corporate sustainability and corporate social responsibility initiative. Publisher The Book Social says his new book uncovers hidden connections between “these microscopic organisms and the survival of our planet”, shares “unforgettable” stories about a scientist who survived 65 days crossing the Atlantic eating only plankton and reveals the truth behind ancient myths of “blood rain”, which apparently traces back to plankton blooms. New Scientist readers will also remember his previous book, The Seaweed Revolution, which reviewer Chris Simms thought was excellent, as it made the case for the potential of seaweed to transform our world. So where does that leave plankton’s power, then? The clue is in the subtitle – as usual!
The remains of Richard III where they were discovered in 2012
University of Leicester
You may not know the name Turi King, but you will almost certainly have heard of her work: identifying the bones of Richard III in a car park in the UK city of Leicester and leading the project to sequence Adolf Hitler’s genome. So, we can definitely expect amazing stories in her new book, The Secrets of Our DNA: How genetics has changed the world. But underpinning those stories (think everything from O.J. Simpson to mistaken dinosaur DNA to Angelina Jolie’s BRCA1 gene) will be a deep account of how genetics has ended up entangled in the lives of us all. King “shows how we are all interconnected and why we must all benefit from this exciting and rapidly evolving science” and reminds us that DNA need not be destiny – nor is it the silver bullet some imagine.
Many of us – and that may well include some doctors – still have to get seriously acquainted with the nocebo effect, which can make us feel unwell or even experience pain. Science writer and former cell biologist Helen Pilcher is here to help, with her latest, This Book May Cause Side Effects: Why our minds are making us sick. Like placebo, the word nocebo has Latin roots, but while placebo is linked to someone’s positive expectations, nocebo is linked to negative expectations. In medicine, the placebo effect can mean that a patient expecting a particular treatment to have a good outcome gets that outcome – even when they receive an inert medicine or sugar pill. A nocebo is, sort of, the reverse. But it’s also a lot more complex than that, as we’ve reported in New Scientist, so it will be fascinating to see what Pilcher makes of it – especially because of the possible implications of social media feeds for mass psychogenic illnesses, or even the controversial phenomenon known as Havana syndrome.
You might well wonder whether Nick Barber decided he had to have the “Dr” in front of his name on this book to keep everyone on the right page here, given its title. How to Take Drugs: A new approach to medication for better results and fewer side effects looks likely to be the kind of book we should all have chained to our wrists, given the sheer amount of prescription medicines we are likely to consume in a lifetime. That, and the fact that adverse drug reactions are a huge burden on health care systems – with the percentage of hospital admissions due to adverse drug reactions (ADR) to prescription medicines in the UK alone estimated to be as high as 6 to 7 per cent by some studies, according to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. Barber is emeritus professor of pharmacy at University College London and recipient of the lifetime achievement award from the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, so he should know a thing or two about the state of his sector, what the real ADR figures may be – and how to address all the factors involved.
How to eat well without harming the planet is one of the world’s knottiest problems, so it is tempting to welcome any book promising to guide us through the multidimensional issues. But Eat the Planet Well: How to fix our toxic food system – one meal at a time is by Dave Goulson, professor of biology at the University of Sussex, who wrote well-received books like The Garden Jungle and A Sting in the Tale, not to mention more than 300 scientific articles on the ecology and conservation of bumblebees and other insects. His publishers say Goulson shows that changing our damaging ways is possible through supporting less-intensive farming, wasting less and rethinking what we eat – that our everyday choices really do matter. I’ll definitely be reading this one.
What child hasn’t wanted to fly like a bird? And many an adult still yearns to soar like an eagle. So, Simon Barnes’s How to Fly: Taking wing with birds, bats, insects and humans sounds like it’s going to be fun. Its publishers say it’s “a unique and all-encompassing exploration of the wonders of flight and the way different species have evolved different solutions to the problem of defying gravity – including humans”, and it’s certainly stuffed full of facts. We meet bees that beat their wings 230 times per second, the extinct pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus, with its 10-metre wingspan, and Arctic terns that travel 75,000 kilometres every year.
The Three Gorges Dam is opened to release floodwater in 2024
Cynthia Lee / Alamy
At 185 metres high and 2300 metres long, the Three Gorges Dam, spanning the Yangtze river in Hubei province, China, is the biggest dam in the world. Among other claims, the dam, says NASA, shifted Earth’s axis by about 2 centimetres and slightly shortened the planet’s day by approximately 0.06 microseconds. But that would come as no surprise to Fred Mills, the author of Mega Builds: Ten colossal construction projects that will change our world. Mills looks set to take us on a tour designed to convince us that modern engineering is a truly revolutionary force. As founder of The B1M YouTube channel, specialising in construction and with over 4 million subscribers, this should be a breeze for him, as he goes on a quest round the world to explore everything from a “170km-long smart city in Saudi Arabia, to Japan’s levitating railway”.
A “blistering and whistleblowing account of how Britain has joined the frontline of the world’s climate emergency, an exposé of how dangerously unprepared we are, and a vital roadmap towards a better future”, say the hopeful publishers about The Response: A Story of Fire and Flood in Britain’s New World of Extremes by David Shukman. He’s a leading climate journalist and was a BBC climate correspondent for 20 years. This book sounds amazingly terrifying and has fans ranging from Tim Peake (“While I saw the fragile beauty of our planet from space, David Shukman reveals how incredibly vulnerable we are on the ground”) to the redoubtable climate negotiator and UN veteran Christiana Figueres (“A vital wake-up call for a world already on the frontlines. This is climate change stripped of rhetoric and abstraction, delivered at the painful ground level”).
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