Science gift guide: The 19 best gifts for science lovers (and nerds)

When it comes to Christmas presents, there are some people for whom it just feels impossible to buy (I’m looking at my father, for whom I’ve been stumped gift-wise ever since he went off Dick Francis novels). Luckily, staff at New Scientist deal with impossible things on a regular basis, be it inexplicable particles or the mysteries of consciousness. So who better to ask for gift recommendations? From our favourite loupe lens to the best geode kit, via some science-themed board games and a huge Airfix rocket, here are our top Christmas gift ideas – no socks allowed, but it turns out we’re pretty fond of eggs. Alison Flood

High-tech field notes: digital microscope

Back in 2023, Chinese tech brand Beaverlab raised more than HK$2.8m (US$360,000) to bring the world’s first portable digital microscope to the market, and it proved an instant hit. The updated Darwin M2(S) Digital Microscope has a microscope that can be easily detached from its stand and taken into the great outdoors to get a closer look at everything from beetles to plants, with a battery life of up to 5 hours. Its simple design and interface means even children can use it – I can’t wait until my toddler daughter is old enough for us to explore the natural world together with it. Plus, you can record photos and videos of everything you capture, so I’m already excited by all the spin-off arts and crafts projects it will inspire.

DARWIN M2(S) Digital Microscope, £90.57

Madeleine Cuff

A smashing time: geodes

In the year 2025, who hasn’t wanted to bash some stuff with a hammer in a socially acceptable way? Enter geodes, a bag of rocks meant to be hit with a hammer and split open to reveal their sparkly crystal secrets. If you’re looking for colourful, pristine display pieces, you can buy pre-cracked geodes from any gem store, but I prefer the crack-your-own kind for the sheer satisfaction of smashing them open, even if the crystals inside tend to be less striking. Steer clear of the traditional “educational” sets if you can – independent specialist sellers tend to pick through their rocks more carefully to make sure there are crystals inside each one – and get your hammers and safety goggles ready. I tested a few, and this was my favourite by a small margin.

EDUMAN Break Open Geodes, £20.99

Leah Crane

Point scoring: nature board games

If someone you know is a nature lover with a penchant for nerdy board games, I have two top tips for gifts. In Wingspan, players compete to manage the best wildlife reserve for birds. The original game set contains cards featuring 170 species from North America with beautiful illustrations, and there are also expansion sets with birds from Europe, Asia and Oceania. Ark Nova is a more complex game where the aim is to run a zoo. You score points by maximising your appeal to visitors, but also by completing conservation projects. Both make for a highly satisfying way to while away the hours over the holidays.

Wingspan, £49 and Ark Nova, £68.99

Sam Wong

A closer look: loupe lens

I never leave the house without a loupe in my pocket. It is a hand lens – a magnifying glass for grownups, essential for the professional and amateur naturalist (and just for nature lovers in general) to bring the microscopic world to life. The best ones are triplet loupes, which combine three lenses in one: a magnifying lens and a lens each to correct colour and linear distortions. Just look at any lichen to get started. I use a 10x magnification. You can also get them with built-in LED illumination to really pick out the detail. Another item that brings nature closer is an insect net. Looking at a butterfly’s wings or a hoverfly’s eyes with your loupe is a thrill akin to that of seeing the rings of Saturn firsthand.

Triplet Loupe hand lens, £47

Rowan Hooper

Physics before breakfast: egg cracker

You can tell I’m British because I LOVE a soft-boiled egg for breakfast. What I don’t love is the tiny pieces of cracked shell from a poorly severed top. Enter the eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher, a traditional German gadget that uses science to guarantee a perfectly cut boiled egg every time. You simply drop a stainless steel ball down a shaft to land atop your boiled egg, and physics does the rest. The device has been precisely weighted and measured to deliver the exact force – 0.6867 Newtons, to be precise – to crack an ideal ring around the top of the eggshell. My perfect start to the day.

Take 2 Clack 99001 Punch-Bell Egg Cracker with Rubber Head, £24.43

Madeleine Cuff

Disaster in space: Challenger

It may seem like there’s little left to learn about the January 1986 Challenger disaster that killed seven astronauts. Adam Higginbotham, however, succeeds in making the tragedy feel as urgent and heartbreaking as ever. His book traces Challenger’s origins deep into NASA history, and he describes the crew’s lives in such compassionate detail that by the time the book reaches the dreaded zero hour, you’ll feel like you’ve lost close friends. These pen portraits are also interspersed with remarkable (and, frankly, enraging) technical minutiae about how everything went so wrong. It would be a welcome, engaging gift for any science history enthusiast.

Challenger by Adam Higginbotham, £10.99

Kelsey Hayes

Moon shot: Saturn V Airfix kit

Saturn V was the largest and most powerful flying machine ever built until it was usurped by SpaceX’s Starship. But while Starship performs nifty soft landings, nothing can truly match having carried 24 astronauts to the moon.

This Airfix kit is 1:144 scale, but Saturn V’s gargantuan 111 metre height means the finished model will still stand just shy of 77 centimetres when built. That’s several times bigger than anything I tried as a child, so I’ve set aside a few days over Christmas to tackle it.

Everything from glue to paint is included, and if I can avoid sticking together the 79 parts in the wrong order then each of the rocket’s three stages will be removable, so I can reenact the groundbreaking moon shots of the 60s and 70s at the kitchen table.

Saturn V Airfix kit, £49.99

Matthew Sparkes

Budget stretcher: a home observatory

If money were no object, I would be buying everyone I know a telescope that costs the best part of £4000 – the Celestron Origin Mark II Intelligent Home Observatory. It is an astrograph, meaning a telescope designed purely for photography, with no eyepiece to look through. I have seen some of the images of galaxies, nebulae and stars its 6-inch aperture and super-fast optics can produce in a matter of minutes. They are truly mind-blowing. If that is a little out of your budget, though, something smaller, with a 2-inch aperture, like the ZWO Seestar S50, is another brilliant option for producing beautiful astrophotography. At around £500, it is still expensive, but an order of magnitude less than the Origin. It has the bonus of also being more portable.

Celestron Origin Mark II Intelligent Home Observatory, £3,999.99 and ZWO Seestar S50, £539

Abigail Beall

Green power: recycled powerbank

British brand Gomi, based in the hip seaside town of Brighton, has cornered the market in eye-catching tech accessories that prioritise the health of the planet. I love their ethos: their power banks are made from marbled recycled plastics, but they are more than just a pretty face… inside is a repurposed e-bike battery rescued from a damaged e-bike. Each powerbank offers enough portable charge for 40 hours of extra phone use and best of all, they are designed to be repairable, allowing spent batteries to be switched out for a fresh one at the end of its life. For me, this turns what’s normally a pretty boring purchase into something that perfectly marries styles with sustainable function.

Gomi powerbank, £79

Madeleine Cuff

Fly write: hoverpen

Everyone has at least one person in their life who is impossibly hard to buy for. Enter the hoverpen, a nice-quality pen that uses a magnetic stand to hover, tilted slightly, above the surface of your desk. Despite its sleek and grown-up look, it is incredibly fun to play around with and generally just very cool. It is a nice pen that writes well, but more importantly, if you’ve got good hand-eye coordination you can dramatically pluck it out of mid-air and place it back into its hovering spot again. Plus they have a version with a meteorite embedded in it!

Hoverpen Interstellar, £99

Leah Crane

Industrial empire: Brass board game

I often miss my hometown, Wolverhampton, and its post-industrial charms. Thankfully, I was recently introduced to Brass: Birmingham, a fantastic board game set in the West Midlands during the Industrial Revolution. Over two phases, players mine coal and iron across the region and invest in vital commodities like cotton, pottery, breweries and manufactured goods. Their burgeoning empires must be connected up using canals and railways, so successful strategists end up with a sprawling web of industry across the beautifully designed board. Not for nothing, this is the number-one game on the BoardGameGeek forum – it is a fascinating insight into one of the most significant periods of scientific history and, for me, the perfect antidote to homesickness.

Brass: Birmingham, £89

Bethan Ackerley

Story time: How Life on Earth Began

There are very many books for kids about dinosaurs, but the story of life on Earth as a whole – possibly the most remarkable thing to have ever happened in the universe – is a much less covered subject. For young minds curious about the bigger picture, I recommend this beautifully illustrated 2021 book which is breathtaking in scope, from the big bang to the earliest humans. There are flaps and peel-away layers, but this is a book for children old enough to turn delicate pages with care and who enjoy independent exploration. That said, even if you’re an adult who is well-versed in the Cambrian explosion, snowball Earth and the like, I guarantee you’ll have fun spending an hour revisiting the subject with Bestard’s gorgeous graphics and an inquisitive young relative at your side.

How Life on Earth Began by Aina Bestard, £19

Penny Sarchet

Who’s lying? A treacherous card game (with werewolves)

If you (like me) are a major fan of The Traitors, then this game will give you a chance to test your understanding of psychology and show friends and family just how good you’d be in the Traitors’ Castle. Can you read body language or linguistic quirks to tell who is lying and who is telling the truth? In The Werewolves of Miller’s Hollow, everyone gets a card. On its simplest level, you’re either a Villager (innocent to the core) or a Werewolf (a terrible shape-shifting murderer), but you can add more complex cards into the mix (the Seer, who gets to peek at other people’s cards; the Witch, who can kill or heal another player). Then your compere takes you through the nights of werewolf murders and subsequent banishments until a winner emerges. My family has played this so many times and we are always getting it out when friends come over (you need at least eight players). It is so simple, and so much fun – as long as you can stop your younger children from peeking…

The Werewolves of Miller’s Hollow, £10.99

Alison Flood

A lyrical memoir: Easy Beauty

Most of us will step into the land of disability at some point in our lives, but few will do so with the lyricism and insight of Chloé Cooper Jones. She writes with extraordinary beauty about how her body – shorter than others due to sacral agenesis – provokes perverse reactions from people who insist they’re just curious or debate the worth of a disabled life. It’s been years since I studied philosophy, but I was naturally drawn to Cooper Jones’s perspective as a philosophy professor on theories of beauty. She doesn’t fit the ancient Greek theory, which calls for symmetry, and yet there are other ideas and ways of celebrating aesthetics.

Easy Beauty: A Memoir by Chloé Cooper Jones, £12.99

Olivia Goldhill

Runny yolk: Colour-changing egg timer

However you like your boiled eggs, this colour-changing egg timer will ensure perfect results every time. It contains a heat-sensitive disc that changes from red to white at 80°C (176°F), and it heats up at the same rate as an egg. This means you can plonk it in with your eggs and watch the white creep inwards until it meets the soft, medium and hard markers, then stop cooking at just the right moment.

Perfect Colour-Changing Egg Timer, £3

Sam Wong

Feeling hot: chilli kit

On a birthday, deep into the London lockdowns of the covid-19 pandemic, my friend admits, “I didn’t know what to get you,” as she hands me one Grow Your Own Chilli Kit unaware of the horticultural journey that gift was about to take me on.

Instead of tackling the philosophical crises of mankind presented by covid-19, I, like Voltaire’s Candide, decided to cultivate my own garden.

The kit came with everything I needed to get the seeds germinating and a guide on how to care for them in the future. After a few months, I upgraded their pots, and with a bit of summer sun, my garden began bearing fruit. The chillies may be eaten and the plants may be dead, but at least I now know how to garden.

Pronto Seed Grow Your Own Chilli Plant Kit, £9.99

Daniel Walker

And finally…

Cooling off: ice pack

OK, so an ice pack isn’t the most exciting gift of all time. But these specific ice packs – the Chattanooga ColPac with the black polyurethane coating – are perfect, the Platonic ideal of an ice pack. They’re squishy and malleable, cold but not too cold, and they stay that way for a long time. Say you’re a field scientist and sore from trekking around all day, or you’re like me and simply prone to tripping and falling; these are a godsend. The only reason I’m not gifting them to all my loved ones this year is because I already have.

Chattanooga ColPac, £40.02

Leah Crane