Peter J. Bentley has written The undercover scientist: investigating the mishaps of everyday life to help understand why some days things just go wrong. He explains the science that lies behind the most mundane mishaps such as sleeping through the alarm and battling with superglue and how to be in control of these situations.

Ed Zine, an otherwise healthy 24 year old has a form of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) where his mind tells him that if going forward in time leads to death, then reversing time will lead away from it. In Life in rewind: the story of an OCD prisoner and the Harvard doctor who broke all the rules to set him free by Terry Murphy highlights the relationship between doctor and patient and how the breakthrough finally occurred.

Experiments on animals and plants have been used for generations. In Pavlov’s dogs and Schrodinger’s cat: scenes from the living laboratory: tales from the living laboratory by Ron Harre the focus is on the history of how and why living creatures have been used for scientific purposes rather than the moral aspects. It includes extraordinary stories, curious incidents and scientific fraud through five centuries.

Learn more through these books and others including titles on how to build a dinosaur, the Hadron Collider and viruses in the month’s Recent Popular Science Picks.