2018 brought no shortage of great science-themed books. Spurred by rapid advances in biotech, the writer Carl Zimmer spun a personal tale around the emerging science of heredity. Investigative reporter John Carreyrou exposed the rotten business at the heart of Theranos, the blood-testing startup built on air. Our past also proved bountiful, with books on that time we made teenage girls glow until their bones rotted (The Radium Girls), and when competing visionaries dueled over how to steward our one and only world (The Wizard and the Profit). If that all seems a bit much, we've got an escape hatch: psychedelics. Lots of them, as recounted by Michael Pollan.

But those are just a few of the superb tomes to emerge in 2018. So grab a weighted blanket and a precision-brewed cup of tea, and read on to see WIRED's staff selections.

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Kate Moore, The Radium Girls

In the early part of the 20th century, radium was all the rage. The glowing, radioactive substance could be used to fight tumors and was thus treated as a sort of miracle product. People drank it, they bought jockstraps infused with it, you could get it in toothpaste and makeup. It also made an excellent paint with which to trace the dials of watches and other instruments (including gun sights and such for the war raging in Europe) so they would glow in the dark. And the girls who worked with the stuff in American factories shone. Literally. When the lights were out, the dust-and-paint-covered girls “looked glorious, like otherworldly angels,” writes Kate Moore, author of The Radium Girls. They also used a technique called lip-pointing to keep the tips of their brushes sharp as they traced the paint over the dials.

Pierre and Marie Curie knew radium was dangerous of course, so did the doctor who founded the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation where some of the girls worked. (He once told a girl to stop lip-pointing because, he said, “You will get sick.”) But the girls were nevertheless reassured by their supervisors that the radium was fine, perfectly fine. Lab workers there had lead aprons and forceps, but the girls painting the dials had no such protections. The tiny amounts they worked with were nothing to worry about.

Want more? Read all of WIRED’s year-end coverage

But then they started to fall ill. They got sores, their bones ached, their teeth started rotting in their sockets, their jawbones practically melted away. Doctors wondered if it was syphilis, or maybe phosphorus poisoning. It certainly wasn’t radium, though. “Radium was such an established medical boon that it was almost beyond reproach,” writes Moore. One researcher, Martin Szamatolski, did try to raise the alarm, but there was so much industry research contradicting him that few listened. Szamatolski was just one guy “set against the flamboyant roar of a well-funded campaign of pro-radium literature.”

Everyone knows radioactive substances are dangerous now, of course, though few probably know why we know it. It’s partially because of the radium girls and the eventual legal scandal that surrounded them. The cheerful hopes and wrecked lives of these earnest teenagers is set against a backdrop of cold capitalism, scientific elision, and willful ignorance—a story as enchanting as it is enraging. Available on Amazon. ---Sarah Fallon

Available on Amazon Penguin Random House

Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind

Having thoroughly mined the everyday ethics of eating in previous books, what is an earnest, endlessly inquisitive journalist with a sizeable advance to do? In Michael Pollan’s case, it’s to travel around America tripping balls for science. Sure, he also does his homework and goes deep into the research on the healing power of hallucinogenic drugs. But in this elegantly orchestrated new work, it’s his personal experiences that offer readers a fresh look inside the controversial and stigmatized world of psychedelics.