Most Wanted Particle: The Inside Story of the Hunt for the Higgs, the Heart of the Future of Physics

  • Jon Butterworth
Experiment (2015) 9781615192458 | ISBN: 978-1-6151-9245-8

The Higgs boson may seem amply biographized, but Jon Butterworth's account of its 2012 discovery offers deep context. As a physicist on the ATLAS experiment at CERN — the Higgs hunting ground near Geneva, Switzerland — Butterworth is an insider's insider. His narrative seethes with insights on the project's science, technology and 'tribes', as well as his personal (and often amusing) journey as a frontier physicist. Glossaries on the standard model of physics, Feynman diagrams and more are included.

Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina

  • Stuart B. Schwartz
Princeton University Press (2015) 9780691157566 | ISBN: 978-0-6911-5756-6

Ten years ago, Hurricane Katrina killed more than 1,800 people and submerged 80% of New Orleans, Louisiana. Historian Stuart Schwartz frames that catastrophe within five centuries of hurricanes in the greater Caribbean — natural disasters that mirrored and exacerbated the violent social upheavals that erupted as European nations pursued New World riches. Today, a mix of political vagaries and patchy official disaster response presents dangerous ambiguities in a region where more cyclones are a certainty.

Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart, and Mind

  • David J. Linden
Viking Adult (2015) 9780670014873 | ISBN: 978-0-6700-1487-3

A touching story? A tactless comment? So elemental is the sense of touch that it permeates metaphors we live by. In this succinct treatise, neuroscientist David Linden explores the “weird, complex, and often counter-intuitive” tactile system and its intimate impact on the human experience. Through scores of scientific studies and anecdotes, Linden investigates phenomena ranging from the two separate touch systems in the skin (one slow, one fast), to a detailed 'cast list' for the main neurophysiological players in orgasm, such as the somatosensory cortex, amygdala and cerebellar nuclei.

Melting Away: A Ten-Year Journey through Our Endangered Polar Regions

  • Camille Seaman
Princeton Architectural Press (2014) 9781616892609 | ISBN: 978-1-6168-9260-9

In the space of a generation, Antarctica and the Arctic have metamorphosed from remote frontiers to cruise destinations, their icy reaches and charismatic wildlife exhaustively mapped and filmed. But writer and photographer Camille Seaman (see J. Hoffman Nature 492, 40; 2012) has a rare gift for making them seem arrestingly alien again. Her coffee-table book is the product of ten years at the poles; its images alone are a compelling argument for protecting the wonder and strangeness at the ends of the Earth.

Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis

  • Julie Sze
University of California Press (2015) 9780520262485 | ISBN: 978-0-5202-6248-5

Carbon-neutral, zero-waste and home to 500,000 people: the Chinese eco-city of Dongtan seemed a radical urban dream. But the city, to be sited near Shanghai on Chongming — the world's biggest alluvial island — remains a blueprint. As Julie Sze argues in this thoughtful, if uneven, analysis of Chinese “eco-desire”, the culprit could be irreconcilable beliefs in harmony with nature, and the ability of autocratic political structures to enact radical change.