The Ancient Origins of Consciousness: How the Brain Created Experience

Todd E. Feinberg and Jon M. Mallatt. (MIT Press, 2017)

Psychiatrist Todd Feinberg and biologist Jon Mallatt draw on evolution, neurobiology and philosophy to trace the roots of consciousness back some 540 million years to the 'Cambrian explosion' in animal diversity. Comparing vertebrates and invertebrates, they chart the evolution of sense, memory and consciousness since the birth of complex brains, and explore questions such as whether fish feel pain, and which sense developed first: sight or smell?

How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design

Katherine Isbister (MIT Press, 2017)

Games researcher Katherine Isbister offers fascinating insights into the ways in which designers trigger players' emotions. The ability to customize characters' appearance and personality in The Sims, for example, encourages players to form virtual attachments to the avatar.

Taming Manhattan

Catherine McNeur (Harvard Univ. Press, 2017)

Before the American Civil War, Manhattan was awash in manure and sewage, and teeming with wild dogs. Catherine McNeur's absorbing history traces how New York City was tamed through urban planning, yet plagued afterwards by social tensions and environmental pressures.

Fracking the Neighborhood: Reluctant Activists and Natural Gas Drilling

Jessica Smartt Gullion (MIT Press, 2017)

North Texas takes centre stage in sociologist Jessica Smartt Gullion's study of urban US fracking. She explores the state's drilling culture and industrial health risks, and interviews locals forced to cope with fracking on their doorstep.

The Dancing Bees

Tania Munz (Univ. Chicago Press, 2017)

In this compelling account of the work of Karl von Frisch, Tania Munz shows how, despite pressures from the Nazis, he advanced studies of animal communication. Notably, he discovered how bees 'waggle dance' to indicate food sources (see Mark L. Winston's review: Nature 533, 32–33; 2016).

Gender Medicine

Marek Glezerman (Duckworth Overlook, 2017)

Gender disparities in medicine are rife: less than 30% of participants in cardiovascular-disease trials are female, for instance. Medic Marek Glezerman advocates gender-specific therapy that factors in issues such as the menstrual cycle altering the efficacy of some pain-relief medication.

The Milky Way: An Insider's Guide

William H. Waller (Princeton Univ. Press, 2017)

Spanning star formation and Italian polymath Galileo Galilei's handmade spyglasses, astronomer William Waller's sweeping chronicle examines the formation of the Milky Way and the history of mapping and researching the 13-billion-year-old Galaxy.

Goodbye Berlin: The Biography of Gerald Wiener

Margaret M. Dunlop (Birlinn, 2017)

This fascinating biography of animal geneticist Gerald Wiener by writer Margaret Dunlop, his wife, describes Wiener's journey from his arrival in Britain on the Kindertransport during the Second World War to his pioneering research working with the team that cloned Dolly the sheep.

Retreat from a Rising Sea

Orrin H. Pilkey, Linda Pilkey-Jarvis and Keith C. Pilkey. (Columbia Univ. Press, 2017)

Science and policy intertwine in this cogent study of global sea-level change and the challenges of addressing it — from Alaskan villages forced inland from the coast to the ongoing surge of climate-change denialism.

From Sight to Light

A. Mark Smith (Univ. Chicago Press, 2017)

Historian Mark Smith unpicks optics from the classical period on. He pinpoints Johannes Kepler's seventeenth-century research on retinal imaging as the shift towards modern optics, along with René Descartes's study of refraction and the development of instrumentation.

In Praise of Simple Physics: The Science and Mathematics behind Everyday Questions

Paul J. Nahin (Princeton Univ. Press, 2017)

The energy of moving water, the physics of communication satellites and the maths behind catching a ball are all skilfully dissected by engineer and writer Paul Nahin in this enjoyable study of everyday physics.

Twenty-Six Portland Place

Gordon C. Cook (CRC, 2017)

Founded in 1907, London's Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene drew in pioneering researchers through two world wars. Former society president Gordon Cook has mined its archives to compile this gripping chronicle of its first, momentous, 50 years.

How to Survive a Plague

David France (Picador, 2017)

This poignant account of the US AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s follows the activists who expedited treatment on the ground. Prolific campaigner Spencer Cox, for example, designed clinical trials of potential medication and raised awareness of the psychological effects of AIDS.