A magical scientific exploration of volcanoes, and how they’ve shaped both nature and human destiny

Volcanoes are the homes of gods, language tells us – across most of Europe, people who may never have laid eyes on one call them after the smoking forge of Vulcan, Roman god of fire and smithery. (In the tectonic hotspot of Iceland, where people live cheek-by-jowl with 130-odd volcanoes, they are simply “fire mountains”.) Even in our unenchanted modern age, they are capable of inspiring a kind of divine madness in devotees such as the French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, who died in an eruption on Japan’s Mount Unzen in 1991. In recent documentaries by Werner Herzog and Sara Dosa , the Kraffts appear astronaut-like in eerie silver fire-proximity suits, silhouetted against glowing torrents of the Earth’s molten innards. “If I could eat rocks, I’d stay in the volcanoes and never come down,” Maurice proclaims.

Tamsin Mather, professor of Earth sciences at Oxford University, is an altogether more sober kind of scientist. Adventures in Volcanoland, the result of two decades of painstaking international research, is structured around pragmatic questions such as “What messages do volcanic gases carry from the deep?” But its roots lie in childhood memories of perhaps the most famous volcano of all: Vesuvius, and the plaster casts of the townspeople it killed in Pompeii in AD79. “It was the fear and distress twisted into the bodies of the people it claimed that stayed with me,” Mather writes. This isn’t simply a geological study, it’s a book about the entwined destiny of humans and volcanoes: how they helped create the conditions for our life on Earth, how they have threatened and destroyed communities, and how they point to the consequences of our current planet-destroying behaviours.

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The Harvard professor reveals how everyday rituals can help us cope with pressure, unlock our emotions and define our identities – but can also become unhelpful and divisive

Michael Norton studied psychology and was a fellow at the MIT Media Lab before becoming professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Known for his research on behavioural economics and wellbeing, Norton published his first book, Happy Money: The New Science of Smarter Spending , with Elizabeth Dunn , in 2013. For his latest, The Ritual Effect: The Transformative Power of Our Everyday Actions , out on 18 April, Norton spent more than a decade surveying thousands of people about the role of ritual in their lives.

Rituals seem a tricky subject for scientific study. How do you categorise them and measure their effect?
It felt very daunting at first, because you can’t randomly assign people to families and have them do different rituals, then follow up in 12 years. At first I was going to study obvious things like weddings and funerals, but when we surveyed people, we found that they had all these other things they made up – in their families, with a significant other, with people at work. That opened it up a lot. We could look at these kinds of rituals and see when people do them. We could measure their emotions, we could really start to get traction on what these things are doing in our lives.

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A failing memory can be frustrating, but it may be a sign your brain is working exactly as it should

Every day, people across the planet ask themselves this question, myself included. When we are desperately searching for our glasses, wallet or keys, we might wish to have a photo­graphic memory, but the truth is we are designed to forget.

In fact, the majority of what we experience in a given day is likely to be forgotten in less than 24 hours. And that is a good thing. Think of all the passing encounters with people you will never see again, the times you spend waiting in a queue at the supermarket, and those awkward times when you find yourself looking at the floor while stuck in a crowded elevator. If our brains hoarded away every moment of every experience, we would never be able to find the information we need amid an ever-increasing pile of detritus.

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Returning to her native soil, the historian unearths stories from the second world war, the days of the French revolution and the prehistoric era

As far as English counties go, Sussex is not usually viewed as a cultural heavy-hitter. It boasts no equivalent of the Brontës or Thomas Hardy. Wordsworth never took time off from striding the northern Lakelands to stroll across the South Downs. True, Shelley was born on his family’s estate in Horsham, but he got out as soon as he was able, and never looked back. Painters similarly voted with their feet. William Gilpin, pioneer of the picturesque, toured the southern coastal counties in 1774 and, inevitably, given his hatred for the way that chalk soil always gave everything “a blank glaring surface”, decided that Sussex offered little to delight.

But there was one man who, while not Sussex-born, got the proper measure of the place. In 1802, William Blake was staying near Bognor, when a walk on the beach prompted his ecstatic line about being able to see the “ World in a Grain of Sand ”. With this model of close-looking in mind, Alexandra Harris returns to her native soil to conduct her own fingertip search and discover the multitudes that lie within. The approach is properly hyperlocal. This isn’t just Sussex, or even West Sussex, but the few miles around West Chiltington, the village outside Horsham where she grew up in the 1980s. Her patch of what TS Eliot called “significant soil” stretches from the foothills of the Weald down to the sea and takes in Chichester, Arundel, Petworth and Pulborough.

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A train full of family secrets, a witty and poignant memoir about kinship and loss, and sniffing out the disappearance of our favourite prickly mammal

Alex Schulman
Little, Brown, £14.99 , pp288

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The awe-inspiring life in our oceans – and its desperate fight for survival

Nine kilometres beneath the sea off the coast of Japan, there are fields of yellow flowers that stretch for hundreds of miles. They are not real flowers – not even plants at all but animals called crinoids, related to sea urchins and starfish, which anchor themselves to the deep seabed and feed off plankton filtered by their delicate frond-like arms.

The cliche that we know more about the surface of the moon than about our own oceans is given vivid new currency in this blend of natural history, popular science, travelogue and ecocriticism by the Australian novelist and poet James Bradley. The book takes us from pole to pole and surface to bottom of the blue realm that covers most of Earth.

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Our ability to resist temptation is increasingly shaped by forces beyond our control

In the 1960s the Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel devised a way to measure self‑control in four-year-olds. He would leave the preschoolers alone in a room with a plate of marshmallows and a challenge: they could eat one marshmallow right away, or wait until the adult returned and eat two. In the decades that followed, he noticed something interesting. The four-year-olds who had waited for the two marshmallows did better at school, were less likely to take drugs or end up in jail, were happier and earned more. He came to believe that self-control, the ability to delay gratification, was the key to success.

More recently, however, psychologists have challenged his findings . Mischel’s original studies followed fewer than 90 children, all of whom were enrolled in the same nursery. Once you start studying bigger and more diverse groups, a different pattern emerges: it is wealthier children who are better able to resist the marshmallow. That’s partly because they are more likely to trust that they really will get two marshmallows if they wait. It’s also because our ability to resist temptation is shaped by our environment in complex and under-recognised ways. Basically: we’re not fully in control of our self-control.

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A botanist goes in search of the vast, stinking Rafflesia in its natural habitat

If you think of flowers as beautiful, fragrant, decorous and domesticated – something you order from an online florist or pick up at your local garden centre – Chris Thorogood’s Pathless Forest should come with a health warning. It’s a love letter to the largest flowers in the world: the monstrous blooms of the 40-odd species – no one knows quite how many exist, or may have already been driven to extinction – of Rafflesia. This stinking, sprawling “corpse flower” grows in the tropical rainforests of Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines, and from its nickname on, nothing about it is pretty. It’s a parasite that mimics the odour and appearance of rotting flesh to attract its favoured carrion fly pollinators, with a bouquet featuring notes of “blocked drains”, “sewage”, “pigs’ shit” and “bad chicken”.

It’s also the lifelong love of Thorogood, a botanist and academic who admits to a relationship with Rafflesia that echoes the monomania of any Werner Herzog antihero. “Dragged helplessly to heaven through hell and back, he became half-sick with his obsession to find it,” he writes of himself; like its subject, his prose is undemure, supersized, unbound by convention. The story starts with Thorogood as a plant-bewitched child, modelling Rafflesia blooms from papier-mache in an overgrown cemetery behind his family home. (He’s also a botanical artist with a popular Instagram account , and Pathless Forest is illustrated with his own detailed, atmospheric drawings and paintings of expedition colleagues, rainforest plants – and Rafflesia in all its liver-coloured, white-splotched glory.)

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Implants like Elon Musk’s Neuralink offer great promise, but come with massive ethical questions

Are we on the verge of a new era in which brain disorders become a thing of the past, and we all merge seamlessly with artificial intelligence? This sci-fi future may seem one step closer after Elon Musk’s recent announcement that his biotech company, Neuralink, has implanted its technology into a human brain for the first time. But is mind-melding of this kind really on the way? And is it something we want?

Founded in 2016, Neuralink is a newcomer in the world of brain-machine interfaces, or BMIs. The core technology has been around for decades, and its principles are fairly straightforward. A BMI consists of probes – usually very thin wires – that are inserted into the brain at specific locations. These probes eavesdrop on the activity of nearby brain cells and transmit the infor­m­ation they gather to a computer. The computer then processes this information in order to do something useful – perhaps control a robot, or a voice synthesiser. BMIs can also work the other way round, driving neural activity through electrical stimulation carried out by the probes, potentially changing what we think, feel and do.

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