Arts, Books, Science, Technology

Science Books of the Year 2025

LITERARY REVIEWS

2025 felt like the year that AI really arrived. We now have access to it on our phones and laptops; it is creeping into digital and corporate infrastructure; it is changing the way many people now learn, work, and create; and the global economy rests on the stratospheric valuations of the corporate monoliths vying to control it.

Yet, the unchecked rush to go faster and further could extinguish humanity, according to the surprisingly readable and chillingly plausible If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Written by computer scientists Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, the narrative argues against creating superintelligent AI able to cognitively outpace Homo sapiens in all departments. “Even an AI that cares about understanding the universe is likely to annihilate humans as a side-effect,” they write, “because humans are not the most efficient method for producing truths . . . out of all possible ways to arrange matter.” Not exactly cheery festive reading but, as the machines literally calculate our demise, the reader will finally grasp all that technical lingo about tokens, weights, and maximising preferences.

Human extinction is not a new idea, muses historian Sadiah Qureshi in Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction, shortlisted for this year’s Royal Society Trivedi science book prize. Colonial expansion and the persecution of Indigenous peoples implicitly relied on Darwinian theories about some species being fated to outcompete others. Extinction, she points out, is a concept entwined with politics and social justice, whether in the 19th-century elimination of the Beothuk people in Newfoundland or current plans to “de-extinct” woolly mammoths so they can roam the land once more. Whose land, she rightly asks.

The idea of the landscape, as well as people, having rights, is explored by Robert Macfarlane in the immersive and important Is a River Alive? By telling the stories of three rivers under threat in different parts of the world, he offers a thesis that is both ancient and radical: that rivers deserve recognition as fellow living beings, along with the legal protections and remedies that accompany it. The book shortlisted for the Wainwright prize for conservation writing, “was written with the rivers who flow through its pages”, he declares, using pronouns that cast away any doubt as to his passion for the cause.

That awe at the natural world is shared by biologist Neil Shubin, who has led expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctica and takes the reader to the Ends of the Earth (Oneworld), also shortlisted for the Royal Society science book prize. “Ice has come and gone for billions of years . . . has sculpted our world and paved the way for the origin of our species,” Shubin says. But those geographical extremes are increasingly vulnerable, as climate change intensifies and treaties come under strain. Polar exploration it may be, but without the frostbite.

Just below the north pole, inside the Norwegian permafrost, lies the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, intended to help humanity revive after an apocalypse. It contains a consignment from the first ever seed bank, started in the 1920s by Russian plant scientist Nikolai Vavilov, who desired to see the ending of famine. In The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad (Sceptre), a highly rated contender for this year’s Orwell prize, historian Simon Parkin uncovers the moving story of Vavilov and his colleagues, who fought to protect their collection as the city came under siege in 1941. Vavilov fell out of scientific and political favour, and was imprisoned with terrible consequences.

Super Ages (Simon & Schuster), by Eric Topol – the cardiologist and medical professor who recently conducted a review into the digital future of the NHS – has been studying the “Wellderly” effect, those who seemingly defy the rigours of ageing, by offering evidence-based tips on longevity. Breakthroughs such as weight-loss drugs and AI will further change the game on chronic diseases, he promises. There’s hope that 80 really is the new 50.

Two elegant offerings this year from neurologists stand out, for using patient stories to tell us something about ourselves. In The Age of Diagnosis (Hodder), Suzanne O’Sullivan courageously questions medicine’s well-intentioned enthusiasm for attaching labels – such as ADHD, or anxiety – to aspects of the human condition. This is sensitive political territory, given the public conversation about the 2.8m people who are economically inactive due to long-term illness, but it deserves a hearing. And in Our Brains, Our Selves (Canongate), winner of the Royal Society prize, Masud Husain sensitively explores how our sense of identity can go awry when disease strikes. The story of the woman who thought she was having an affair with a man who was really her husband illustrates that “the way in which people behave can be radically altered [by brain disorders], sometimes shockingly so”.

Proto (William Collins) features in a geography-of-sorts publication. Science writer Laura Spinney’s fluid account of how Proto-Indo-European – a painstakingly reconstructed ancient tongue – became the precursor for so many languages, whose descendants gave us Dante’s Inferno, the Rig Veda (the oldest scripture in Hinduism), and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. “Almost every second person on Earth speaks Indo-European,” Spinney writes, who sets out on a global scientific odyssey that uses evidence from linguistics, archaeology, and genetics to piece together its history.

The biography Crick (Profile) by Matthew Cobb deserves a special mention, which gives us the definitive backstory of one of the towering figures of 20th-century science. Born in Northampton into a middle-class family, Francis Crick was an unexceptional young physicist who, with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, went on to codiscover the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, and win a Nobel prize. Cobb captures the intellectual restlessness of a man who chased problems (and women) rather than disciplines, and who mixed with artists and challenged poets. Crick, who died in 2004 in California, spent his later career trying to unravel the secrets of consciousness.

Anyone left intellectually unsated by Oppenheimer-mania will relish Destroyer of Worlds (Allen Lane), in which physicist Frank Close ventures beyond the Manhattan Project to tell the gripping and unnerving story of the nuclear age. Beginning with the 19th-century discovery of a smudge on a photographic plate, Close spins a history that, via Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and a lot of nimbly explained science, ends seven decades later with the Tsar Bomba, a Soviet weapon detonated in 1961.

It was second in explosive power only to the meteorite impact that wiped out Tyrannosaurus Rex and the dinosaurs. A big enough hydrogen bomb, Close writes, “would signal the end of history. Its mushroom cloud ascending towards outer space would be humanity’s final vision.”

Avoid telling superintelligent AI.

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Health, Mental Health, Psychology, Wellbeing

Gratitude: Is it understood properly enough?

HEALTH & WELLBEING

THE word “gratitude” is ubiquitous and everywhere these days. On mental health leaflets and in magazine columns, it is also emblazoned on mugs and seen often on motivational posters. All this is the result of more than two decades’ research in positive psychology which has found that having a “gratitude practice” – such as jotting down three to five things you are thankful for most days – brings a host of psychological and physical benefits.

Most of us will not want to seem, well, ungrateful. Even amongst sceptics, it is likely that they too would have been persuaded to take up the gratitude habit. When we remember to do it, we will feel better: more cheerful and connected, inclined to see the good already present in our lives. Counting your blessings, whether that’s noticing a beautiful sunset or remembering how your neighbour went out of their way to help you earlier, is free and attractively simple. But there underlies the problem. In our eagerness to embrace gratitude as a cure-all, have we lost sight of its complexity and its edge?

In positive psychology, gratitude is generally defined as a wholly good thing, a spontaneous feeling of joyful appreciation. But back in 1923, the Harvard psychologist William McDougall believed gratitude – especially when directed towards another person, rather than an experience in the more abstract way of, say, being “grateful to be alive” – was more difficult and complex to understand. Of course, there was awe for the generosity of the human spirit, and tender feelings towards the person who had given up their time to help. But there were also quiet feelings of envy or embarrassment, a sense of the “superior power” of the helper and even what McDougall called “negative self-feeling” (which today we’d call “low self-esteem”). The Japanese expression arigata-meiwaku (literally: “annoying thanks”) gets to the heart of what he meant. Arigata-meiwaku is the feeling you have when someone insists on performing a favour for you, even though you don’t want them to, yet convention dictates you must be grateful anyway. There’s a reason all this feels so annoying: being grateful throws off the balance of power and increases feelings of obligation. There’s your benefactor at the top, bathed in a sunshine glow of generosity. And there’s you, at the bottom, doffing your cap.

It might seem mean-spirited to focus on how being thankful can also obligate, diminish, or even confuse us. But as #feelingblessed becomes a performative norm, these aspects of gratitude are even more important to understand, particularly for the role they play in how hierarchical structures are reinforced in our world. A bleak tale about compulsory gratitude is that of the 13-year-old orphan Eyo Ekpenyon Eyo II. In 1893, he travelled from his home in British-occupied west Africa to take up a scholarship in a missionary school in Colwyn Bay, Wales. Less than six months after arriving, Eyo wrote to his patron, expressing thanks but begging to return home. The cold weather had made him poorly, and he feared for his life. It was a reasonable worry since three west African pupils had already died at Colwyn Bay.

Some time later Eyo did secure a passage home, but not before the British press got hold of the story. In a vicious outpouring of anger, they called him “spoilt”, “ungrateful”, and a “little prince”; their language soaked in colonial assumptions about who ought to feel grateful to whom. Not much has changed since. In The Ungrateful Refugee the author Dina Nayeri describes how, as a child refugee from Iran, she was expected to feel “so lucky, so humbled” to be in the United States. Only later did she understand how this “politics of gratitude” had subtly worked to transform her human right to refuge into a gift, one that had to be repaid by staying submissive and uncomplaining, being a “good immigrant” who stayed firmly in her lane.

This connection between power and the demand for gratitude reaches into many parts of life. When people in high-power positions are made to feel insecure, such as by having their failings and shortcomings pointed out, they commonly berate those who they perceive as inferior to them for being ungrateful. Consider the recent incident in the White House when Donald Trump and JD Vance took Volodymyr Zelensky to task for failing to show sufficient gratitude earlier this year.

These costs are part of what psychologists now call the “dark side” of gratitude. One common objection to the gratitude movement is that it risks “toxic positivity”, encouraging people to ignore and repress more painful feelings. But feeling thankful can lead to other dangers, too. People are more likely to transgress moral codes on behalf of someone else if they feel grateful to them. Members of historically marginalised groups, including women and LGBTQ+ people, are less likely to complain about unfair treatment if they are reminded first how lucky they are compared with the past. And, as studies with women in abusive relationships show, when people have been gaslit into believing they cannot survive without an abuser, gratitude makes them feel obliged to stay. Is it apt to ask, then, whether all those motivational posters should come with caveats and health warnings?

Given these arguments there is a lot to think about while trying to jot down three things you feel grateful for so you can retire peacefully at night.

Yet, the lessons of the latest research remind us that, like all emotions, feeling grateful is neither wholly good nor wholly bad. Too little, and we risk being entitled or rude, alienating those who try to help us. Too much, and we may leave ourselves open to exploitation by amplifying the power someone holds over us. Context, as always, is necessary and should always be relative.  

There are strategies that help mitigate the risk. Focusing on circumstances rather than individuals (broadly, feeling grateful for or that, rather than grateful to) can side-step the issue of power. And if you notice someone – a boss, parent, friend, or partner – expecting more gratitude than you want to give, you might ask yourself why. What might seem like ungrateful behaviour in our hierarchical world may really be an act of self-preservation, even one of political defiance.

And sometimes gratitude does need to have an expiration date. For all we may feel thankful, sometimes we have to release ourselves from the burden and move on with our lives. Gratitude is important. But so is paying attention to its limits.

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Asia, Books, History

Book Review: Atlantic Furies

LITERARY REVIEW

WHEN Ruth Elder arrived back in New York in 1927 after attempting to cross the Atlantic in her monoplane American Girl, the crowds were in awe.

The female aviator dubbed the “Flying Flapper” looked like a chic society woman with her Parisian suit, fox-fur coat, and bobbed hair.

It didn’t matter that American Girl was downed into the sea several hundred miles north of the Azores. As far as the media and newspapers were concerned, “Miss” Elder was a new kind of femme fatale.

In this compulsive book – part Barbie movie and part Wacky Races – social historian Midge Gillies tells the story of six women who competed to cross the Atlantic in the late 1920s.

Charles Lindbergh had been the first pilot to succeed non-stop solo in 1927, but now the race was on for the first “girl” flyer to complete the 3,000-mile arduous journey.

In an age of female emancipation, women were flying high.

Gillies’ half-dozen heroines hail from a wide background. There is peer’s daughter Hon. Elsie Mackay, African-American Bessie Coleman whose mother had been born into slavery, and Amelia Earhart who became the first female pilot to cross the Atlantic solo and non-stop.  

As for Ruth, she turned out to be on the run from a scandalous romantic past.

It was not all fun, games, or easy times; there were difficult or serious aspects involved. Four of Gillies’ Atlantic Furies failed to return from their expeditions, the most famous being Earhart who set off in 1937 in a bid to be the first woman aviator to circle the Equator.

Following several crackly radio messages received on July 2, her bright silver Lockhead Electra disappeared from the skies over the Central Pacific. It has yet to be found.

Gillies is adept in giving us a bone-shaking sense of what it must have been like to sit high in the skies, munching on chocolate for energy and in trying to screen out the propeller noise.

Flying through freezing fog involved terrifyingly low visibility, yet straining to get a better view could prove fatal.

In 1926 Coleman unhooked her safety belt to peer over the fuselage just as her plane dipped, with the result that she somersaulted to earth in front of horrified bystanders.

Not everyone believed that a woman’s place was in the skies. One doctor specialising in aviation medicine reported that having a period put a woman pilot at risk of crashing her plane. And then we read the dark comments of Major Oliver Stewart who wrote in the Tatler: “(Women) will be persuaded to mend their ways only when they have learned the truth that the lipstick is mightier than the joystick”.

Gillies makes short work of this historical misogyny, arguing that the courageous women who vied to cross the Atlantic were never going to put up with a man telling them what to do. (It is surely no coincidence that her heroines had 15 marriages between them.)

By the end of this thrilling book, it is impossible not to cheer for these magnificent women in their flying machines.

– Atlantic Furies by Midge Gillies is published by Scribe, 416pp

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