Moore's Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley's Quiet Revolutionary Arnold Thackray, David C. Brock and Rachel Jones. Basic (2015)

9780465055647

In 1957, experimental chemist Gordon Moore and his colleagues formed a start-up manufacturing silicon transistors in Mountain View, California. Silicon Valley was born, and the prediction known as Moore's Law began to play out: the number of transistors in integrated circuits started to double every two years. Arnold Thackray, David Brock and Rachel Jones transform Moore from a man “doing something inscrutable in the margins” to a comprehensible, fiercely driven technophile who shaped history from the inside out.

Move UP: Why Some Cultures Advance While Others Don't Clotaire Rapaille and Andrés Roemer. Allen Lane (2015)

9780241186992

With gross domestic product looking ever thinner as an index of success, marketing specialist Clotaire Rapaille and diplomat Andrés Roemer proffer a new analytic tool for gauging progress, informed by behavioural economics, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. Their R2 Mobility Index rests on a country's cultural capacity to enable upward mobility, and its ability to sensibly support the basic biological imperatives of security, success, survival and sex. Scandinavian nations top several indices here, but Rapaille and Roemer's provocative synthesis throws up surprises too.

Coastlines: The Story of Our Shore

  • Patrick Barkham
Granta (2015) 9781847088970 | ISBN: 978-1-8470-8897-0

“The British Isles,” writes Patrick Barkham, “are more edge than middle.” Here he pays homage to the chalk cliffs and tidal flats of the 17,800-kilometre coastline to mark 50 years of National Trust protection of more than half of it. Filtered through his hyper-observant sensibility, it all becomes fabulously strange: Undercliff near Lyme Regis, for instance, is an active landslide festooned with botanical oddities and criss-crossed by shrews. Barkham's tour of the wind-scoured spots on this ragged borderland reminds why it has mesmerized scientists, artists and all those hungering for horizons.

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up

  • Philip N. Howard
Yale University Press (2015) 9780300199475 | ISBN: 978-0-3001-9947-5

The Internet of Things could encompass 30 billion connected smart devices — from cars to spectacles — within just five years. In analysing this pervasive phenomenon, sociologist Philip Howard emphasizes its potential as the titular “pax technica”, binding industry and government in “mutual defense pacts, design collaborations, standards setting and data mining”. Howard duly notes possible risks, such as intensified mass surveillance, but argues that new devices could become “liberation technologies”.

The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness

  • Sy Montgomery
Atria (2015) 9781451697711 | ISBN: 978-1-4516-9771-1

“Twisting, gelatinous, her arms boil up from the water, reaching for mine.” So begins naturalist Sy Montgomery's close encounter with a giant Pacific octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini) in this delightful study of cephalopods in the wild, aquaria and labs. Montgomery celebrates the solitary invertebrates in all their behavioural and physiological glory — as playful escapologists, problem-solvers and masters of camouflage that can taste and might even see with their skin.