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.

According to author Jerry Silver, you can improve your knowledge of physics without expending a lot of energy. He has written 125 physics projects for the evil genius, a title he uses for himself, to guide people through experiments without the use of a formal lab, a large budget or years of technical experience. Topics cover motion, gravity, energy, sound, light and more. Adults – ask your children first.

But wait there’s more. Quantum physics for dummies looks at what it can do for the world. Steven Holnzer has written this to be compatible with classroom textbooks and courses, letting students study at their own pace.

And more. Three other book also covering the subject of physics – General relativity: an introduction for physicists, Lightening: physics and effect and Practice in physics.

If this topic is not for you, look at other books on this month’s Science Recent Picks including climate change, genetics and fossils.

Focusing on the inventors as well as the inventions The lives, loves and deaths of splendidly unreasonable inventors by Jeremy Coller and Christine Chamberlin examine the process from the original idea to subsequent wealth and fame – for some! These inventors, largely from the 19th and 20th centuries are responsible for changing how we live our day-to-day lives. Learn how the sewing machine, the safety razor, the telephone and many more inventions became reality.

Readers of Physics World voted for their most popular equation. A brief guide to the great equations : the hunt for cosmic beauty in numbers by Robert Crease lists the top ten. What made number 1? Surprisingly (to those non-mathematicians perhaps) the most commonly known equation “E=mc2″ was out-voted by Euler’s equation “eip+1=0″. A poetic mathematician states that it “captures with beautiful simplicity what can only be described clumsily in words”. Who could disagree?

Simon Levay’s book When science goes wrong : 12 tales from the dark side of discovery focuses on scientific misadventures. While not appointing blames it highlights the potential life threatening risks that can and do occur when science fails. The impact on the victims can be devastating.

Read more about these books and others about the history of science, the quest to catalogue life and Darwin’s lost world in this month’s Recent Science Picks.

Some things cannot be explained scientifically but yet they exist and may have an effect on our daily lives. In Michael Brooks book 13 things that don’t make sense : the most baffling scientific mysteries of our time, he reviews aspects of science that just shouldn’t happen. Homeopathic remedies have biological effects that cannot be explained by chemistry, gas has been detected on Mars that could only have come from carbon-based life forms and there’s no good scientific explanation for why we should die. Michael Brooks is not fazed by this – as he states science starts to get interesting when things don’t make sense.

It can be frustrating when a new scientific or health study contradicts the previous one. What is now healthy, what is the best way to reduce our carbon footprint and who has the answers we need? In Lies, damned lies and science : how to sort through the noise about global warming, the latest health claims and other scientific controver, journalist, science educator and author Dr Sherry Seethaler uses her expertise to guide the reader through the confusion.

Peter Macinnis, a science writer with a love of speed, has written a book full of facts, statistics and funny stories. The speed of nearly everything : from tobogganing penguins to spinning neurtron stars gives you everything you have ever wanted to know about this subject.

Read more about these titles plus other new books on Darwin’s Island, the search for living planets and freaks of nature via this month’s Science Recent Picks.

New science books for July include ‘Frogs : a chorus of colors’, ‘Butterflies of the world’, ‘The illustrated encyclopedia of dinosaurs’ and ‘Galileo’s instruments of credit : telescopes, images, secrecy’. Well-known mathematician Ian Stewart explains what it’s like to be a mathematician. In ‘Chances are… : adventures in probability’, we realise “once you know that daisies usually have an odd number of petals, you can get anyone to love you.”

Extinction, the secret history of gemstones and the genius of nature’s palate are the topics of some of our Popular science recent picks. In Sex, drugs, and DNA, Michael Stebbins discusses the taboos which work to prevent scientists from plaining discussing their work in public. Esteened Australian scientist Peter Doherty discusses his life in The beginner’s guide to winning the Nobel Prize: a life in science.