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This has been a truly excellent year in science books, and I’ve written about five of them: Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which seems to be on the top of everyone’s “Best of 2010″ list; Shell Games by Craig Welch, who delved into the hidden world of wildlife trafficking in the Pacific Northwest; Bonobo Handshake by Vanessa Woods, who introduced readers to our lesser known primate cousins; Sam Kean’s The Disappearing Spoon, full of fabulous tales of the Periodic Table; and The Calculus Diaries by Jennifer Ouellette, who made calculus so interesting, I wanted sit down and figure out the equations for myself.

But I have a pile of books sitting on my desk that I haven’t had time for yet. Here are nine I wish I’d gotten to:

Written in Stone, by Brian Switek, is just one of many science books I wish I'd gotten to this year.

* Packing for Mars, by Mary Roach: Roach visited research facilities around the world to learn how we prepare for space exploration, from the miseries of isolation to how NASA designs space toilets.

* Written in Stone, by Brian Switek: In his first book, my fellow Smithsonian blogger Switek (he writes daily on Dinosaur Tracking) looks at evolution from the paleontological point of view.

* Pink Brain Blue Brain, by Lise Eliot: Eliot, a neuroscientist at the Chicago Medical School examines how the differences between boys and girls emerge, arguing that small differences present at birth become amplified over time as we reinforce stereotypes.

* Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception, by Charles Seife: Mathematical misinformation pervades our world, making falsehoods seem to be true. Seife shows the dangers in this and how “proofiness” is undermining our democracy.

* The Species Seekers, by Richard Conniff: In his most recent book, Conniff, a frequent contributor to Smithsonian, looks at the history of natural history, back to the 18th century. “It was the great age of discovery,” he told Smithsonian.com recently.

* Selling the Fountain of Youth, by Arlene Weintraub: The anti-aging industry is making a killing off of people who are trying to stay young. But many of these treatments aren’t just doing damage to our pocketbooks; Weintraub discovered that some are downright dangerous.

* The World in 2050, by Laurence C. Smith: Geoscientist Smith uses global modeling research to predict what our world will be like in 2050. This should be a nice companion to Smithsonian‘s 40th anniversary issue, “40 Things You Need to Know About the Next 40 Years.”

* On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hardwired Habits, by Wray Herbert: The mental tricks and biases that help us get through life quickly and easily may also be leading us into unwise decisions, Herbert writes.

* Solar, by Ian McEwan: Good fiction books with a science bent are rare. Here’s a story about greed, deception and climate change.

Make your own hot sauce in one of our 2010 Geeky Gifts. Courtesy of Flickr user 2eklecktik

This year, 2010, is a big year for science gifts! We’ve searched far and wide for the coolest, brainiest—but also trendiest—toys of the season, to be enjoyed by kids and adults alike. Here’s our wish list for this holiday season:

Mythbusters Kits: Any science enthusiast who also likes television will likely be a huge fan of the Discovery Channel’s hit television series, Mythbusters, in which a team of science-minded handymen and -women, led by hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, test common myths. Now Mythbusters fans can take matters into their own hands with one of several Mythbusters kits. Choose from the “Power of Air Pressure,” “Science of Sports,” “Forces of Flight” or the “Weird World of Water.”

Human Power: The new nPowerPEG transforms kinetic energy into energy you can use to charge your phone or other electronic devices. Put it in your backpack or purse and the PEG will gather energy throughout the day. In a pinch, shaking the device will generate enough power for you to make an emergency phone call.

Space Shuttle Gifts: Next year marks the end of NASA’s space shuttle program (I interviewed curator Valerie Neal of the National Air and Space Museum earlier this month.) The Kennedy Space Center has a host of items that commemorate the shuttles’ milestones of space exploration. My personal favorites are the rhinestone-studded T-shirt and the space shuttle Discovery mission patch.

Star Wars Force Trainer: Star Wars is, without a doubt, one of the geekiest (and greatest!) film series of all time. The movies also engendered a generation of toys, perhaps the most popular being the glowing light saber. The new Star Wars Force Trainer allows Jedis in training to hone their use of the Force using nothing but their minds. The Trainer is a Jedi helmet and an encased ball. Manufacturers claim that the helmet actually senses brain waves and moves the ball accordingly (Editor: we’re a bit skeptical of this claim).

Terrarium: This year, terrariums have made a serious comeback as a cool house decoration. Make one yourself by arranging some dirt and moss in a glass container (read more here), or buy one of Etsy’s super stylish options. Etsy also has some mossy rings for taking the terrarium idea to the streets.

City Lights Globe: For trendy but brainy urbanites, the City Lights Globe simulates how the lights from the world’s cities are perceived from outer space.

Let Your Geek Flag Fly: For nerdy friends with a sense of humor, try a gift that really puts their geek status out in the open. Laser-cut “Geek” or “Nerd” necklaces are available on Etsy, while the irresistible “I Heart Nerds” T-shirt is very indie-chic.

Make Your Own Root Beer/Hot Sauce: Those with a proclivity for both science and cooking might enjoy either a root beer or hot sauce kit. There are many more options for “make your own” food kits, but these stuck out as most original. The hot sauce kit in particular will yield enough sauce to spice up any dish, even your root beer! (Okay, that might not be so tasty, but an experiment nonetheless.)

Science Heroes: While coworkers’ desks might be populated with baseball bobbleheads (Editor: That’s me!), yours could have the “Lil Giants of Science,” a collection of four petite figurines of famous scientists: Newton, Darwin, Einstein and Tesla.

Not Your Average Ant Farm: This glowing blue ant farm was the result of NASA’s 2003 tests to see how animals tunnel in microgravity. The farm’s blue nutrient gel is designed to provide all the food and water ants need for up to a year (most farms last only two to six months). The farm also comes with an “illuminator” that lights up the gel so you can watch the insects hard at work even at night.

Better to be frugal and save than be a spendthrift or tightwad (image courtesy of flickr user Alan Cleaver)

The difference between a spendthrift and a tightwad comes down to emotional pain, and it’s not good to be either type of shopper, says University of Michigan marketing professor Scott Rick, who participated last week in a National Science Foundation webcast.

It all comes down to what Rick calls the “pain of paying,” and this distress registers in fMRI studies of brain activity. Tightwads feel a lot of that pain and end up spending less than they might want, buying lesser quality items or passing up on indulging themselves. Spendthrifts, however, don’t feel enough distress and end up spending more than they had intended, and sometimes more than they should.

“Both are kind of bad news,” says Rick. They’re unhappy with their spending habits and unhappier than what he calls “unconflicted consumers,” the majority of us who fall in the middle of the spendthrift/tightwad scale. (Tightwads, though, tend to be the most healthy financially.) Rick says that it’s better to be a frugal person and cultivate saving.

Come Black Friday, spendthrifts and tightwads will behave a bit differently—spendthrifts are more likely to line up for those crazy 3 A.M. sales—but spending money on gifts tends to take away some of a tightwad’s reluctance to spend. “The necessities of buying gifts and maintaining relationships almost makes these feelings, this pain of paying, moot,” Rick says. If Grandma wants it, it goes in the cart, he says.

And though there is little evidence that a spendthrift or tightwad can change their ways—Rick, a spendthrift, says that even all his research hasn’t much affected his spending habits—there are a few things that these individuals can do by harnessing the way our brains think about money and spending. Since people tend to be reluctant to break up large bills, tightwads should carry small ones and spendthrifts hundred-dollar bills. And because we spend more when it’s on credit, tightwads should use their cards more often while spendthrifts should leave them at home.

Who would you send to Mars permanently? (Hubble image, credit: Steve Lee (University of Colorado), Jim Bell (Cornell University), Mike Wolff (Space Science Institute), and NASA)

Here’s something to ponder over Thanksgiving dinner: who among your fellow diners would you send on a one-way trip to Mars? Or would you choose to go yourself and leave all you know behind for an uncertain future as a bold explorer?

Two scientists, astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University and cosmologist Paul Davies of Arizona State University, recently proposed in the Journal of Cosmology that we seriously consider having our first manned forays to the Red Planet be trips without return tickets. “A human mission to Mars is technologically feasible, but hugely expensive requiring enormous financial and political commitments,” they write. “A creative solution to this dilemma would be a one-way human mission to Mars.”

Any volunteers for such a project would get a head start in this scenario; unmanned missions could establish a site for a new colony, supplying it with an energy source, food, a rover, tools for maintenance and supplies for agriculture. Mars itself could provide water and shelter. And once humans arrived (Schulze-Makuch and Davies envision starting with two spacecraft, each with two astronauts), they could get regular supply missions from home.

There are several pros for such a plan: money would be saved. There would be no need for a lengthy rehabilitation after a return to Earth. The risk of death during take-off and landing and from exposure to radiation from space would be halved. Of course, a volunteer’s lifespan would be shortened by such a trip, due to the radiation exposure and lack of good medical facilities on Mars, and the radiation would also impede there ability to reproduce. For those reasons, the scientists suggest sending only older explorers, those age 60 or so.

But don’t think that this will happen anytime soon, and especially not soon enough to save you from an awkward Thanksgiving dinner conversation. NASA, for instance, isn’t too keen on sending anyone to Mars without a way to get them home. And even Schulze-Makuch and Davies acknowledge there are large hurdles to their plan. “To attain it would require not only major international cooperation,” they write, “but a return to the exploration spirit and risk-taking ethos of the great period of Earth exploration, from Columbus to Amundsen, but which has nowadays been replaced with a culture of safety and political correctness.”

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The first page of Galileo's Starry Messenger (via wikimedia commons)

Are you having difficulty figuring out what to buy that special someone? Do you have $600,000 to $800,000 on hand? Well, then you can bid on a first edition of Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius (Starry Messenger), which is just one lot in next week’s auction “Beautiful Evidence: The Library of Edward Tufte” at Christie’s in New York.

Tufte is a statistician known for his books and lectures on information design. If you’ve ever heard a rant about the evils of PowerPoint, that person is likely channeling Tufte. His amazing collection of books includes several other books by Galileo, Euclid’s Elements and a couple copies of Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia. (I would be happy with pretty much anything on the list.)

Why would anyone who had gone to the trouble of amassing such a collection suddenly decide to get rid of it? Well, as Tufte explains on his web site and in the auction catalog, he always meant for these books to be used. And they were, while he was working on his previous books. “My library was always a working library, with the rare books beside my computer as I was writing,” Tufte wrote. “But in the last few years, the books were viewed only when a visitor requested a look at the Galileo, Playfair, or Picasso books, or when I took a nostalgic look in the library.”

I would hope, then, that whoever ends up with these amazing volumes doesn’t let them mold on a shelf somewhere but instead takes the time to page through occasionally and read what they were so lucky to purchase.