Science Books

The novelist and nature lover T C Boyle tells us about delicious dodos, angry tigers, snakes on planes and why Viagra saves rhinos.

Science is the only way to make sense of the world around us and the scientific method the only way to establish truth, says Peter Atkins, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of Oxford. Author of several chemistry textbooks as well as many popular science books, he recommends books that track the evolution of our understanding about the world around us, starting with an anthology of sacred texts and ending with Shakespeare.

Professor Tim Birkhead is one of the pioneers of spermatology. He explains how promiscuous females can be selective about sperm, even after multiple inseminations

Award-winning statistician and political scientist Andrew Gelman says that uncertainty is an important part of life, and recognition of that uncertainty is itself an important step. He picks the best books on statistics.

One of the Natural History Museum’s experts in meteoritics, Dr Caroline Smith says the meteorites that land on earth predate our planet by about 150 million years and it’s not surprising that they land here

It makes us feel sexy, it makes us feel healthy and it can even make us feel more inspired. No wonder we’re in thrall to the power of the sun, says Richard Cohen

Bats are remarkably like us in many ways — social animals with complex lives, who put a lot of energy into rearing their young. They also make up around one-fifth of the world's mammal species. Phil Richardson, co-founder of the UK's Bat Conservation Trust, recommends five books to learn more about bats around the world.

Palaeontologist and dinosaur specialist Paul Barrett says many of the 1,200 known species of dinosaur were far more complex than we once thought. Some were brightly feathered, many were at least partly warm-blooded

Palaeontologist Richard Fortey says it took tiny organisms two billion years of work to oxygenate the planet sufficiently for our kind of life, including trilobites, dinosaurs and ourselves, to evolve

Internationally known ecologist says plants are grievously overlooked, because no life on earth would exist without them - essential reading on plants