The top picks from Nature’s coverage of science and culture.
In a bumper crop of picks at the nexus of science and culture, we present our top 10 book reviews, and top 10 blog posts from our arts and culture blog, A view from the bridge — and the Books & Arts editor’s top 20 picks.
Reviews
Fatimah L. C. Jackson weighs up a study on the cultural politics of genetic testing among African Americans. 20 January 2016
Marian Turner reviews the memoir of émigré virologist and millionaire philanthropist Jan Vilcek. 10 February 2016
David Hurst Thomas explores the controversies over collections of human remains and plundered artefacts. 16 March 2016
Michael D. Gordin reviews a history of the Soviets' failed national computer network. 27 April 2016
Gregor Macdonald applauds a biography of prescient geologist and energy theorist Marion King Hubbert. 6 April 2016
Tilli Tansey engages with the medical autobiography of a pioneer in the field of HIV/AIDS. 25 May 2016
Jane Lubchenco applauds James Estes's chronicle of his 45 years studying the complexities of an apex predator. 18 May 2016
Biomechanist Adam Summers of the University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratories has spent much of his life working out how fish move. But he has another role that some would consider more prestigious – as Pixar's 'fabulous fish guy'. 15 June 2016
Richard Holmes ponders the discoveries that inspired the young Mary Shelley to write her classic, 200 years ago. 27 July 2016
Ethan Carr traces the arc of influence in landscape creation and preservation from 'Capability' Brown to Frederick Law Olmsted and the US National Park Service. 6 July 2016
A view from the bridge
Alexandra Witze extols Hidden Figures, a book celebrating the African American women mathematicians behind the US space programme. 6 September 2016
Mathematical biologist Marten Scheffer looks at how the laws of dynamical systems play out in love. 20 May 2016
Elizabeth Gibney follows the trajectory of Apollo astronaut Gene Cernan in documentary The Last Man on the Moon. 4 April 2016
Barbara Kiser marks the 50th anniversary of 9 Evenings, a seminal collaboration between Bell Labs engineers and avant-garde artists. 27 October 2016
Sustainability expert Martin Charter reveals a circular-economy revolution in ‘share and repair’ communities. 23 March 2016
Jeff Tollefson is energized by a show on the Bauhaus ‘industrial artist’ Lázló Moholy-Nagy. 13 June 2016
Sara Reardon checks out the CRISPR-esque storyline in this year’s reboot of The X-Files. 29 February 2016
Barbara Kiser explores Victorian novelist Charlotte Brontë’s close encounters with the science of her day. 20 April 2016
Rich Monastersky assesses Hollywood’s take on the Deepwater Horizon blowout in Peter Berg’s eponymous film. 12 October 2016
Barbara Kiser relishes an exhibition on artist Georgia O’Keeffe, whose visual paeans to geomorphology changed the face of nature painting. 10 August 2016
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Books & Arts of 2016. Nature (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2016.21185
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2016.21185