Color in Nature

Justin Marshall et al. Princeton Univ. Press (2024)

The photographs in this global survey induce goggle-eyed curiosity. For example, an octopus can camouflage itself so that it is almost invisible, even though it is completely colour-blind. And a marsh marigold flower (Caltha palustris) seems uniformly yellow — but to a bee’s ultraviolet sight it is white with a dark centre, which contains pollen and nectar. Written by specialists in biology, neuroscience and visual science and a fashion designer, this book will fascinate anyone intrigued to know why “the ancient Greeks had no word for blue”.

A Century of Tomorrows

Glenn Adamson Bloomsbury (2024)

Modern weather forecasting became feasible in the 1840s, when volunteers formed a nationwide US network to report current weather conditions using the newly invented telegraph. Today, notes cultural historian Glenn Adamson in his stimulating analysis, imagining the future preoccupies social theorists, political activists, insurance executives, architects, urban planners, military war gamers, fiction writers and others. But he avoids making predictions. “I’m just a historian,” he writes, “more or less the opposite of a futurologist.”

The Well-Connected Animal

Lee Alan Dugatkin Univ. Chicago Press (2024)

“It’s time to scratch off another item from the ‘what makes humans unique’ list,” concludes biologist Lee Dugatkin. Animals, too, have complex social networks — as his entertaining book about species around the world demonstrates. A vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus), for instance, shares more blood with a starving one if the latter had been generous with food when the former was hungry. Satellites and other technologies monitor such networks at a resolution inconceivable when Dugatkin began doing research in the 1980s.