The Royal Society has announced the six titles shortlisted for the 2024 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize, which celebrates the best popular science writing from across the globe.

The winner will be revealed October 25. The author of the winning book receives £25,000 and £2,500 is awarded to each of the five shortlisted books.

The full shortlist – selected from 254 submissions published between July 1, 2023 and September 30, 2024 – is as follows:

• Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon (Hutchinson Heinemann) 

In Eve, Cat Bohannon answers questions scientists should have been addressing for decades. With boundless curiosity and sharp wit, she covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex. Eve is not only a sweeping revision of human history, it’s an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. Bohannon’s findings, including everything from the way C-sections in the industrialized world are rearranging women’s pelvic shape to the surprising similarities between pus and breast milk, will completely change what you think you know about evolution and why Homo sapiens have become such a successful and dominant species, from tool use to city building to the development of language.

• Everything Is Predictable: How Bayes’ Remarkable Theorem Explains the World by Tom Chivers (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) 

Thomas Bayes was an eighteenth-century Presbyterian minister and amateur mathematician whose obscure life belied the profound impact of his work. Like most research into probability at the time, his theorem was mainly seen as relevant to games of chance, like dice and cards. But its implications soon became clear.

Bayes’ theorem helps explain why highly accurate screening tests can lead to false positives, causing unnecessary anxiety for patients. A failure to account for it in court has put innocent people in jail. But its influence goes far beyond practical applications. A cornerstone of rational thought, Bayesian principles are used in modelling and forecasting. ‘Superforecasters’, a group of expert predictors who outperform CIA analysts, use a Bayesian approach. And many argue that Bayes’ theorem is not just a useful tool, but a description of almost everything – that it is the underlying architecture of rationality, and of the human brain.

Fusing biography, razor-sharp science communication and intellectual history, Everything Is Predictable is a captivating tour of Bayes’ theorem and its impact on modern life. From medical testing to artificial intelligence, Tom Chivers shows how a single compelling idea can have far-reaching consequences.

• Your Face Belongs to Us: The Secretive Startup Dismantling Your Privacy by Kashmir Hill (Simon & Schuster) 

For fans of Bad Blood, a thrilling account of the tech start-up selling a radical new form of facial recognition.

When Kashmir Hill stumbled upon Clearview AI, a mysterious startup selling an app that claimed it could identify anyone using just a snapshot of their face, the implications were terrifying. The app could use the photo to find your name, your social media profiles, your friends and family – even your home address. But this was just the start of a story more shocking than she could have imagined.

Launched by computer engineer Hoan Ton-That and politician Richard Schwartz, and assisted by a cast of controversial characters on the alt-right, Clearview AI would quickly rise to the top, sharing its app with billionaires and law enforcement. In this riveting feat of reporting Hill weaves the story of Clearview AI with an exploration of how facial recognition technology is reshaping our lives, from its use by governments and companies like Google and Facebook (who decided it was too radical to release) to the consequences of racial and gender biases baked into the AI. Soon it could expand the reach of policing — as it has in China and Russia — and lead us into a dystopian future.

Your Face Belongs to Us is a gripping true story. It illuminates our tortured relationship with technology, the way it entertains us even as it exploits us, and it presents a powerful warning that in the absence of regulation, this technology will spell the end of our anonymity.

• The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction by Gísli Pálsson (Princeton University Press) 

The great auk is one of the most tragic and documented examples of extinction. A flightless bird that bred primarily on the remote islands of the North Atlantic, the last of its kind were killed in Iceland in 1844. Gísli Pálsson draws on firsthand accounts from the Icelanders who hunted the last great auks to bring to life a bygone age of Victorian scientific exploration while offering vital insights into the extinction of species.

Blending a richly evocative narrative with rare, unpublished material as well as insights from ornithology, anthropology, and Pálsson’s own North Atlantic travels, The Last of its Kind reveals the saga of the great auk opens a window onto the human causes of mass extinction.

• Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality by Venki Ramakrishnan (Hodder Press) 

Would you want to live forever? Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Venki Ramakrishnan transforms our understanding of why we age and die – and whether there’s anything we can do about it. We are living through a revolution in biology. Giant strides are being made in our understanding of why we age and die, and why some species live longer than others. Immortality, once a faint hope, has never been more within our grasp. Examining recent scientific breakthroughs, Ramakrishnan shows how cutting-edge efforts to extend lifespan by altering our natural biology raise profound questions. Although we might not like it, does death serve a necessary biological purpose? And how can we increase our chances of living long, healthy and fulfilled lives? As science advances, we have much to gain. But might we also have much to lose?

• A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (Particular Books) 

Earth is not well. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away – no climate change, no war, no Twitter – beckons, and settling the stars finally seems within our grasp. Or is it? Bestselling authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith set out to write the essential guide to a glorious future of space settlements, but after years of original research, and interviews with leading space scientists, engineers and legal experts, they aren’t so sure it’s a good idea. Space tech and space business are progressing fast, but we lack the deep knowledge needed to have space-kids, build space-farms and create space nations in a way that doesn’t spark conflict back home. In a world hurtling toward human expansion into space, A City on Mars investigates whether the dream of new worlds won’t create a nightmare, both for settlers and the people they leave behind.

With deep expertise, a winning sense of humour and art from the beloved creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, the Weinersmiths investigate perhaps the biggest questions humanity will ever ask itself – whether and how to become multiplanetary.

JUDGING PANEL. Alongside Professor John Hutchinson, the 2024 judging panel comprises Booker Prize-winning author and screenwriter Eleanor Catton; New Scientist Comment and Culture Editor Alison Flood; teacher, broadcaster and writer Bobby Seagull; and lecturer in Functional Materials at Imperial College London, and Royal Society University Research Fellow, Dr Jess Wade.

[Based on a press release.]

The Royal Society has announced the six titles shortlisted for the 2023 Royal Society Science Book Prize, sponsored by the Trivedi Family Foundation, which celebrates the best popular science writing from across the globe.

The winner will be revealed in November. The author of the winning book receives £25,000 and £2,500 is awarded to each of the five shortlisted books.

The full shortlist – selected from 255 submissions published between July 1, 2022 and September 30, 2023 – is:

• Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way) by Roma Agrawal (Hodder & Stoughton)

In Nuts and Bolts, award-winning Shard engineer and broadcaster Roma Agrawal deconstructs our most complex feats of engineering into seven fundamental inventions: the nail, spring, wheel, lens, magnet, string and pump. Each of these objects is itself a wonder of design, the result of many iterations and refinements. Together, they have enabled humanity to see the invisible, build the spectacular, communicate across vast distances, and even escape our planet.

Tracing the surprising journeys of each invention through the millennia, Roma reveals how handmade Roman nails led to modern skyscrapers, how the potter’s wheel enabled space exploration, and how humble lenses helped her conceive a child against the odds.

She invites us to marvel at these small but perfectly formed inventions, sharing the stories of the remarkable, and often unknown, scientists and engineers who made them possible. The nuts and bolts that make up our world may be tiny, and are often hidden, but they’ve changed our lives in dramatic ways.

• Jellyfish Age Backwards: Nature’s Secrets to Longevity by Nicklas Brendborg, translated by Elizabeth de Noma (Hodder & Stoughton)

Molecular Biologist Nicklas Brendborg takes us on a journey from the farthest reaches of the globe to the most cutting-edge research to explore everything the natural world and science have to offer on the mystery of aging. 

From the centuries-old Greenland shark and backwards-aging jellyfish to the man whofasted for a year and the woman who successfully edited her own DNA, this book follows the thread of every experiment, story, and myth in the search for immortality.

With mind-bending discoveries and physiological gifts that feel closer to magic than reality, Jellyfish Age Backwards will reshape everything you thought you knew about aging – and offer nature’s secrets to unlocking your own longevity.

• Taking Flight: The Evolutionary Story of Life on the Wing by Lev Parikian (Elliott & Thompson)

A bird flits overhead. It’s an everyday occurrence, repeated hundreds, thousands, millions of times daily by creatures across the world. It’s something so normal, so entirely taken for granted, that sometimes we forget how extraordinary it is. But take that in for a moment. This animal flies. It. Flies.

The miracle of flight has evolved in hugely diverse ways, with countless variations to flapping and gliding, hovering and diving, murmurating and migrating.

Conjuring lost worlds, ancient species and ever-shifting ecologies, this exhilarating new book is a mesmerising encounter with fourteen flying species: from the first fluttering insect of 300 million years ago to the crested pterosaurs of the Mesozoic Era, from hummingbirds that co-evolved with rainforest flowers to the wonders of dragonfly, albatross, pipistrelle and monarch butterfly with which we share the planet today.

Taking Flight is a mind-expanding feat of the imagination, a close encounter with flight in its myriad forms, urging us to look up and drink in the spectacle of these gravity-defying marvels that continue to shape life on Earth.

• Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus by David Quammen (VINTAGE – The Bodley Head)

Breathless is the story of the worldwide scientific quest to decipher the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, trace its source, and make possible the vaccines to fight the Covid-19 pandemic.

Here is the story of SARS-CoV-2 and its fierce journey through the human population, as seen by the scientists who study its origin, its ever-changing nature, and its capacity to kill us. David Quammen expertly shows how strange new viruses emerge from animals into humans as we disrupt wild ecosystems, and how those viruses adapt to their human hosts, sometimes causing global catastrophe. He explains why this coronavirus will probably be a ‘forever virus,’ destined to circulate among humans and bedevil us endlessly. As scientists labour to catch, comprehend and control it, with their high-tech tools and methods, the virus finds ways of escape.

Breathless takes us inside the frantic international effort to understand and control SARS-CoV-2 as if peering over the shoulders of the brilliant scientists who led the chase.

• An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong (VINTAGE – The Bodley Head)

The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving only a tiny sliver of this world.

In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, welcoming us into previously unfathomable dimensions – the world as it is truly perceived by other animals. Showing us that in order to understand our world we don’t need to travel to other places; we need to see through other eyes.

• The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science by Kate Zernike (Simon & Schuster

The remarkable untold story of how a group of sixteen determined women used the power of the collective and the tools of science to inspire ongoing radical change. This is a triumphant account of progress, whilst reminding us that further action is needed.

These women scientists entered the work force in the 1960s during a push for affirmative action. Embarking on their careers they thought that discrimination against women was a thing of the past and that science was a pure meritocracy. Women were marginalized and minimized, especially as they grew older, their contributions stolen and erased.

Written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who broke the story in 1999 for The Boston Globe, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology made the astonishing admission that it discriminated against women on its faculty, The Exceptions is an intimate narrative which centres on Nancy Hopkins – a surprisingly reluctant feminist who became a hero to two generations of women in science.

In uncovering an erased history, we are finally introduced to the hidden scientists who paved the way for collective change.

[Based on a press release.]