Our holiday science book show

How ancient artifacts emerge from melting ice

As Earth’s glaciers and ice sheets melt due to global warming, they are revealing rare archaeological treasures released from a frozen time capsule. These objects are often made of organic material – human and animal remains and wooden tools that only survive in ice. In her book, The Age of Melt: What glaciers, ice mummies, and ancient artifacts teach us about climate, culture, and a future without ice, Lisa Baril tells the story of the archaeologists searching for these valuable artifacts, and what they’re finding. Baril is an ecologist and science communicator based out of Yellowstone National Park.

Easily influenced: Why and how the human mind is built to be suggestible

As a teenager, Amir Raz began to perform as an amateur magician and mentalist, and learned the power of stage hypnosis. It ultimately led him to a career as a neuroscientist studying the science of psychological suggestibility, and how powerful the power of suggestion can be. He explores this science in his new book The Suggestible Brain: The Science and Magic of How We Make Up Our Minds. Dr Raz taught and practiced for many years at McGill University and is the Founding Director of the Brain Institute at Chapman University in Orange, California.

What alien life will really look like

We’re just beginning to have the ability to look for signs of life elsewhere in our solar system or around other stars. But even so, Arizona State University physicist Sara Walker thinks we might be doing it wrong — imagining that life elsewhere will look like life on Earth. She’s advocating a broader perspective to imagine how we’d recognize life as a reflection of different versions of chemical complexity. Her new book about this is Life As No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence. 

Dan Falk, science writer and co-host of the Booklab podcast reviews: 

The Language Puzzle: How We Talked Our Way Out of the Stone Age by Steven Mithen

Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death by Susana Monsó

The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson