So here we are: the end of the year and the need for a bookish summing-up. In choosing my favourites, I’m all too aware that you can’t go online without tripping over a listicle.

Whence this love for the bullet point and the curated selection? Writing in The New Yorker, Maria Konnikova, science writer and author of the excellent Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (reviewed here), neatly pinned down the reasons for our list lust, among them the spatial organisation of information and the finite format. These, she notes, ease consumption so it’s a “bit like sipping green juice instead of munching on a bunch of kale”.

Reducing a year’s worth of science reading and review editing to something resembling a liquid lunch has been no easy task. Revisiting these sometimes demanding, periodically astonishing but always stimulating books, I’ve been reminded of the serendipitous joys of sifting through hundreds of such brilliant condensations of thought by celebrity scientists and dark horses alike.

Here’s my top 20 for 2014. The order is irrelevant: each of these stars offered a unique spectrum of delights.

The Meaning of Human Existence, E.O. Wilson. Liveright. A titan of biology probes human nature — not least, through the tension between individual drive and collective cooperation. (Reviewed here.)

The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert. Henry Holt. The environmental writer analyses the context and process of today’s human-driven haemorrhage of biodiversity. (Reviewed here.)

H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald. Bloomsbury. A naturalist, poet and academic anatomises grief and explores a raptor’s mind in a masterful interweaving of nature-writing, memoir and literary biography. (Reviewed here.)

The Glass Cage, Nicholas Carr. W. W. Norton. A clear-eyed, open-minded critic of the digisphere explores whether we are becoming denatured by automation. (Reviewed here.)

Starlight Detectives, Alan Hirshfeld. Bellevue Literary Press. A science historian deftly tracks the transformation of astronomy from 1850 to 1930. (Reviewed here.)

Virtual Unreality, Charles Seife. Viking.  The accomplished science journalist on why we need to approach digital information, that “superbug of the mind”, with scepticism. (Reviewed here.)

The Lagoon, Armand Marie Leroi. Bloomsbury. The distinguished evolutionary biologist delivers a superb, in-depth exploration of Aristotle as the first scientist. (Reviewed here; podcast with Leroi here.)

Oxygen, Donald Canfield. Princeton University Press.  An ecologist’s ambitious, engrossing primer on the key atmospheric element, ranging from the ‘great oxidation event’ to photosynthesis. (Reviewed here.)

Invisible, Philip Ball. Bodley Head.  The prolific ex-Nature science writer probes our urge for the unseen, from paranormal beliefs to the invisibility shields of optical physics. (Reviewed here.)

Arrival of the Fittest, Andreas Wagner. Oneworld.  An evolutionary biologist marshals mathematics and computational biology to pin down the workings of natural selection in life’s genetic ‘library’. (Reviewed here.)

The Wives of Los Alamos, TaraShea Nesbit. Bloomsbury.  A debut novelist offers a boldly lyrical telling of the warped American dream endured by the women caught up in the Manhattan Project. (Reviewed here.)

The Fourth Revolution, Luciano Floridi. Oxford University Press.  A remarkable study of digital dependency by an information ethicist, laying out implications for identity, the environment and more. (Reviewed here.)

Earth’s Deep History, Martin Rudwick. University of Chicago Press.  A science historian’s magisterial journey through the history of how Earth’s immense age was discovered. (Reviewed here.)

Lives in Ruins, Marilyn Johnson. Harper.  The dogged, often underfunded work of archaeologists dug into with gusto by an investigative journalist. (Reviewed here.)

The Social Roots of Risk, Kathleen Tierney. Stanford University Press. A sociologist’s lucid analysis of how social and economic norms create catastrophes out of natural and financial upsets. (Reviewed here.)

One Plus One Equals One, John Archibald. Oxford University Press.  A biochemist’s fascinating journey through the discoveries that laid bare the mergings, parasitism and more of symbiosis and the rise of complex life. (Reviewed here.)

Off the Map, Alastair Bonnett. Aurum Press. A social geographer’s framing of dislocated spaces such as the Aral ‘Sea’ as precious slivers of terra incognita in an overmapped world. (Reviewed here.)

The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk. Viking Adult. A psychiatrist and specialist in PTSD — a condition he sees as “encoded in the viscera”— explores nuanced treatments to reset the body for recovery. (Reviewed here.)

On Immunity, Eula Biss. Graywolf.  Marshalling memoir, history, science and myth, the essayist offers a quietly impassioned call for childhood immunisation as communal act. (Reviewed here.)

The Lost Elements, Marco Fontani, Mariagrazia Costa and Mary Virginia Orna. Oxford University Press. A raft of fascinating stories on lab life and the wannabes of the periodic table, well told by a trio of chemists. (Reviewed here.)

Passing with a whistle of pinions and the occasional squawk, 2014 was a rara avis in several respects. The avian family tree was redrawn, for one thing. And the flock of bird-related books has been prodigious.

Ornithology, one of the foundational disciplines of Victorian science, is also one of the great enterprises in crowd-sourced research. So noted Oxford ornithologist Ben Sheldon in his review of the stellar Ten Thousand Birds. A standout moment for today’s great community of aficionados — amateurs and academics — was the arrival of the online Handbook of the Birds of the World Alive. In celebrating it, ecologist Stuart Pimm notes it “allows the compilation of instant, custom-made field guides”.

And as ornithologist John Marzluff reminds in Welcome to Subirdia, no travel is actually necessary: the average backyard is a bite-sized world of birds.

Mark Cocker followed up last year’s monumental Birds and People, which explored the complex nexus of humanity and birds from the falconers of Mongolia to gourmands concocting bird’s-nest soup, with a minutely focused look at his own parish in East Anglia, UK. In Claxton (reviewed here), a birder’s-eye view is everywhere evident — try him watching wigeons “peel off the water as a continuous blanket that instantly atomises and falls back to earth amid a downpour of contact notes”.

Observational brilliance emerges too in Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk (reviewed here), a gleaming skein of focused nature writing, memoir and literary history that won this year’s UK Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction. Macdonald’s portrait of the goshawk she trained as part of her recovery from bereavement exquisitely captures a bird both companion and killing machine.

Ornithologist Noah Stryker’s The Thing with Feathers is a broader take on avian ethology, looking at how the science on cockatoo dancing, the “spontaneous order” in starling murmurations, or snowy owl irruptions casts light on aspects of human behaviour.

Owls and hawks are hunters nonpareil, but human beings are past masters at picking off abundant game, as two assessments of the passenger pigeon’s demise show —  Joel Greenberg’s A Feathered River Across the Sky and Mark Avery’s A Message from Martha. It took less than a century to drive those billions to extinction. Now, a tamed cousin — the chicken — exists in a shifting average population of around 19 billion. And the bird has nudged its way into thousands of human cultural niches, chronicled in Andrew Lawler’s Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? (reviewed here). 

Flight, song, scintillating beauty, stunning variety, intriguing evolutionary past — it’s easy to see why we’re so entranced by birds. Their scientific and metaphoric power was lost neither on Darwin, Shelley nor the hordes who birdwatch today. 

The holiday feeding frenzy has begun. If the visions dancing in your head are of modified soy proteins and aromatizers instead of sugar plums, your seasonal bout of gastronomy is likely to be molecular. Luckily, there has been a smorgasbord of books this year to tantalise.

This autumn Hervé This — the physical chemist who with physicist Nicholas Kurti pioneered molecular gastronomy in the 1980s — announced that a new revolution is at hand. ‘Note-by-note cooking’ (in the eponymous book, reviewed here) aims to create symphonies of flavour by harnessing molecular compounds such as sotolon, which smells of nuts, caramel or curry depending on concentration.

Food science, it seems, now sports more twists than a molecular martini, as Dave Arnold’s handbook of cocktail science, Liquid Intelligence (W.W. Norton), bears out. (Arnold, a food-science writer and educator, also runs techie New York cocktail bar Booker and Dax.) Cue searches for centrifuges and liquid nitrogen (procurable from your “local welding supply shop”, notes Arnold),  gear without which the innovative mixologist would be confined to mere blenders and peelers.

You are then ready to enter the culinary lab and concoct Peanut Butter and Jelly with a Baseball Bat (vodka, peanut butter, grape jelly and a freezer). Or infuse pineapple spears with rum using a vacuum machine that compresses pores in the fruit with a force of 1.026 kilogram per square centimetre. Or follow Arnold’s “procedure for a simple drink in excruciating detail” — basically, an Old-Fashioned built with the Zen-like concentration of a neutrino tracker. Think knocking the corners off ice cubes to fit the glass, and observing the finished drink for some minutes “without touching”.

Blood flies and Chimp Sticks

Meanwhile experimental psychologists Charles Spence and Betina Piqueras-Fiszman round up research on the criteria for gustatory nirvana in The Perfect Meal (Wiley), reviewed here. Spence and Piqueras-Fiszman explore variables such as lighting, plate size and the behaviour of wait staff. And speculate broadly about the future of food, including entomophagy or insect-eating. (See also The Insect Cookbook, and an interview with its author Arnold van Huis). Spence and Piqueras-Fiszman reference the Nordic Food Lab as a hotbed of insect-based chow, not least the Chimp Stick — a liquorice root studded with honeyed ants (Formica rufa and Lasius fuliginosus).

They have all, however, been pipped to that post not only by the 2 billion people whose traditional cuisine, notes the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, already encompasses everything from grubs to blood flies, but by Vincent Holt. The Victorian naturalist’s 1885 pamphlet Why Not Eat Insects? suggests a menu featuring Moths on Toast.

For linguist Dan Jurafsky, words are essential to the gastronomic experience, and in The Language of Food (reviewed here) he slices and dices menus to reveal the subtle links between the cost of a dish, and the length of its description. He also etymologically traces foods to their roots: ketchup, he reveals, originated as a Fujinese fish sauce with more or less the same name.

If after all that you’re still hungry for the fusion of science and food, see our 2009 interview with chemist Harold McGee, who reminded readers that his 1984 paper revealed why beating eggs in a copper bowl makes them fluffier. (The eggwhite protein ovotransferrin absorbs copper, changing its properties.) Last holiday season McGee celebrated the role of fermentation in everything from chocolate to chorizo — look out for this piece in Nature’s ‘festive flashback’. From features on wine and climate change to interviews with food science pioneers such as Nathan Myhrvold, Tous les goûts sont dans la Nature (‘All tastes are in Nature’).

 

The first post of a brand-new blog is a bit like a first step into half-mapped territory. You pack a surveyor’s scope with the T-shirts and socks. And take a back bearing — in my case, a look at Nature’s debut issue, published 145 years ago.

Reading the nine book reviews and checking out the shelf’s worth of ‘books noted’ (including archaeologist John Lubbock’s landmark Prehistoric Times), I was thrilled to sense a bracing honesty and a mix of the wry and the frank. Thrilled, because that smacked of what we strive for in today’s Nature’s Books and Arts section. And here, in B&A’s first-ever blog — A View from the Bridge — we aim to carry on the tradition.

Among the books covered in that 1869 issue were tomes on everything from lepidoptery and the “convolutions of the brain” to the ‘planet’ Pomona. The review of the Text Book of Botany is a classic. While the book’s author has failed to publish “original observations”, notes the reviewer, it’s no bad thing. After all, original observers — the formidable field biologists of the day — can be “apt to ride special hobbies too far, and to be very unfair and crotchety”. Thus, the nerds of yore.

Mining such bibliophilic delights reminds us, too, that popular science books — as distillations of research and vehicles for informed speculation — are still as important in creating the bigger science narrative as they were then. Or earlier. Mathematician and popular science doyenne Mary Somerville’s best-seller On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (see Richard Holmes’s review) pre-empted Nature’s launch by 35 years.

Sciences in flight

That narrative has been extraordinarily dynamic — then and now. In issue no. 1, zoologist and British Museum curator W. S. Dallas clocked that fact in his review of Newman’s British Moths. A “predilection for moths”, he notes, may be celebrated in the scientifically literate 1860s, yet just decades before it was seen as piteously bizarre. But there were other changes: as science itself shot up in popularity, it began to speciate — the very trend Somerville aimed to bridge in her magnum opus.

We’re in flux now too, but the trend today is to reknit scientific splits through the push for multidisciplinarity. At the same time, the “two cultures” — science and the arts — are reintegrating.

As biologist E.O. Wilson noted in this year’s The Meaning of Human Existence (see Tim Lenton’s review), the humanities are “the natural history of culture, and our most private and precious heritage”. Scientists are increasingly seeking connections with peers in that realm. The London-based Wellcome Trust, for instance, has just established the cross-disciplinary Hub Award of up to £1 million over two years. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology insists on STEAM (STEM plus arts) teaching for undergraduates. It’s a new norm.

This is, as Books and Arts’ name implies, very much home territory. B&A reviews and essays cover visual and sound art, music, the theatre, film and Q&As with crossover icons such as Michael Frayn, Ferran Adrià and Björk. A View from the Bridge will inevitably trace such cultural shifts, from the distinct vantage point between ‘sci’ and art.

As we’re time-travelling in this post, it’s worth noting that in 1869, this bridge had never really been breached. It was the heyday of Darwin, Faraday and Mendeleev, yet William Wordsworth’s line “To the solid ground of nature trusts the Mind that builds for aye” gave Nature its name. And “Darwin’s bulldog” Thomas Henry Huxley chose Goethe’s Aphorisms on Nature to head that first issue — in which the German anatomist and novelist noted, “[Nature] is ever shaping new forms… Everything is new, and yet nought but the old.”

The view from this bridge is pretty exhilarating: please join me for a look at it.