The New Cool: A Visionary Teacher, His FIRST Robotics Team, and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts

  • Neal Bascomb
Crown 352 pp. $25 (2011)

Robot-building competitions are 'the new cool' in high schools across the United States. Writer Neal Bascomb follows a team of California teenagers and their inspirational physics teacher as they try to win the coveted FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) contest, a nationwide annual project instigated 22 years ago by inventor Dean Kamen. In relating the team's travails, Bascomb shows how children are enthused by hands-on approaches to science and technology.

Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them

  • Donovan Hohn
Viking 416 pp. $27.95 (2011)

After hearing about thousands of plastic toys washed up on Alaskan shores after the loss of a container from a Chinese ship, journalist Donovan Hohn set out to learn about ocean currents. Retracing the journey of the plastic ducks, frogs and turtles across the Pacific, he reveals how floating markers have been used to map the circulation of the seas. And he questions the globalized economic system that sends cheap novelty products on such odysseys in the first place.

Driven to Extinction: The Impact of Climate Change on Biodiversity

  • Richard Pearson
Sterling 264 pp. $22.95 (2011)

Global warming will result in winners and losers among species, explains Richard Pearson, a biogeographer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Offering a balanced assessment of case studies of animals and ecosystems that are already affected by environmental degradation — such as Madagascan geckos, coral reefs and polar bears — he relates how climate change will sever links between organisms. This will lead to inevitable extinctions, he admits. But new niches will emerge in which other species might flourish.

The Beautiful Invisible: Creativity, Imagination, and Theoretical Physics

  • Giovanni Vignale
Oxford University Press 320 pp. $34.95 (2011)

Physics is much more than just dry mathematics, argues physicist Giovanni Vignale. Its abstract concepts, such as energy and atoms, are products of the imagination that call for a creative approach, and are best viewed as cultural hand-me-downs that have developed from philosophical ideas throughout the ages. In his thoughtful and wide-ranging book, Vignale explores the esoteric side of the discipline, which he sees as “the military academy of liberal arts” owing to its mix of rigour and creativity.

The Kaguya Lunar Atlas: The Moon in High Resolution

Motomaro Shirao and Charles A. Wood. Springer 174 pp. $39.95 (2011)

Lunar landscapes take on a new realism in this atlas of photographs taken by the high-definition television camera aboard the Kaguya (SELENE) spacecraft, operated by the Japanese space agency JAXA. The oblique views, snapped by the low-flying probe from just 100 kilometres above the Moon's surface, show the terrain as it would be seen by astronauts descending to its surface, rather than the vertical views presented by other satellites.