A wealth of new popular science titles arrive in 2013. Here鈥檚 what we鈥檙e looking forward to
Out in February (UK)/May (US)
In Periodic Tales, Hugh Aldersey-Williams revealed the many ways in which the elements affect our world 鈥� from the palettes of artists to chemical interactions. We hope his investigation of the human body will be just as good.
Advertisement
Out in February (UK)/April (US)
Astrophysicist and former president of the European Astronomical Society, Paul Murdin, addresses the eternal question 鈥� is there anybody out there?
Out in April听听听听听听听听听听听听
Do you want to read this book? Emotions and psychological conditions can strongly influence our ability to make decisions. Can smart drugs change that? Would we want them to?
Out in March听听听听听听听听听听听听
Monte Reel tells the story of 19th-century anthropologist Paul Du Chaillu, the first outsider to collect hard evidence for the existence of gorillas.
Out in April听听听听听听听听听听听听
Insightful, sharp science writing that will have you snorting with laughter is Mary Roach鈥檚 speciality. In Gulp, she explores our innards in what we hope will be another side-splitting study.
Out in April听听听听听听听听听听听听
Think that men and women have lots of bizarre differences? That鈥檚 nothing compared with the striking distinctions among sexes of other species, as Daphne Fairbairn aims to make clear.
Out in April听听听听听听听听听听听听
Would eating like our distant ancestors make us more healthy? And is pounding the pavement in your bare feet a better way to run? Biologist Marlene Zuk separates the facts from the pseudoscience behind our fondness for the way humans lived in bygone eras.
Out in March听听听听听听听听听听听听
NASA鈥檚 Roger Wiens has worked on instruments for many robotic space exploration vehicles 鈥� including the ChemCam on the Curiosity rover. He tells the inside story.
Out in May听听听听听听听听听听听听
Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter earned a Pulitzer prize for his book G枚del, Escher, Bach. Now he pairs up with psychologist Emmanuel Sander to introduce a new theory of mind, positing that analogies are the tools we use to make sense of our world.
Out in March听听听听听听听听听听听听
If a computer can quickly spot a problem, can it also solve it? That in a nutshell is the P vs NP problem that confounds computer scientists and often eludes the rest of us. We hope Lance Fortnow will shed more light.
Anatomies: The human body, its parts and the stories they tell
Viking/W. W. Norton.
Are We Being Watched? The search for life in the cosmos
Thames & Hudson.
Bad Moves: How decision making goes wrong, and the ethics of smart drugs
Oxford University Press.
Between Man and Beast: An unlikely explorer, the evolution debates, and the African adventure that took the Victorian world by storm
Doubleday.
Gulp: Adventures on the alimentary canal
OneWorld/W. W. Norton.
Odd Couples: Extraordinary differences between the sexes in the animal kingdom
Princeton University Press.
Paleofantasy: What evolution really tells us about sex, diet, and how we live
W. W Norton.
Red Rover: Inside the story of robotic space exploration, from Genesis to the Curiosity rover
Basic Books.
Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the fuel and fire of thinking
Basic Books.
The Golden Ticket: P, NP and the search for the impossible
Princeton University Press.