Giants of the deep and the wonder of space: Books in Brief

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. In the seventeenth century, right whales (Eubalaena spp.) were so common in Cape Cod Bay on the eastern coast of the United States that whalers joked that they could cross the bay by walking across the whales’ backs. Today, fewer than 400 right whales survive worldwide — a bleak testament to their name, which was bestowed by whalers who deemed them the ‘right’ whales to kill because they were slow-moving and rich in blubber. Such details enliven marine biologist Asha de Vos’s excellent, well-illustrated book about whales. Nanotechnology Rahul Rao Icon (2026) Carbon nanotubes are 100,000 times slimmer than a human hair. But their structure gives them astonishing tensile strength, the flexibility to bend more than 90 degrees without snapping and an electrical conductivity 1,000 times better than copper wire, notes science journalist Rahul Rao in his brief, lively introduction to nanotechnology. “All signs indicate that we’re in nanotechnology’s very earliest days,” he writes. Eventually, Rao thinks, these materials will make it possible to construct an elevator from Earth to space. The Man Who Made Plants Write Jagadish Chandra Bose, transl. Sumana Roy Yale Univ. Press (2026) Best known as an experimental physicist, Jagadish Chandra Bose was also fascinated by plant intelligence. He invented the crescograph, a tool for measuring minute plant growth. The invention features in this collection of his essays, published in Bengali in 1921 and now translated by writer Sumana Roy. One of the essays asks “is it possible to make the plants write down their own autographs?” Such ideas were controversial in Bose’s lifetime, but now that plant intelligence is an established field of study, they seem prescient. Climate Justice Now Eds Rebecca Marwege et al. Columbia Univ. Press (2026) Enjoying our latest content? Log in or create an account to continue Access the most recent journalism from Nature's award-winning team Explore the latest features & opinion covering groundbreaking research