One of the books I requested and received for Christmas was:

 The Science of Stephen King: From Carrie to Cell, The Terrifying Truth Behind the Horror Masters Fiction.

Stephen King is certainly one of my all time favourite authors when I'm reading purely for fun, so I thought this book might be amusing.  I was kind of expecting a "LOL people might really be able to move things with their minds, here's the evidence LOL" kind of a book, but it wasn't like that at all.

Basically, each chapter takes a central theme of a Stephen King story (like aliens in The Tommyknockers, telekinesis in Carrie, and plague in The Stand) and gives a history of earlier stories that used the same themes, which is great if you are looking for suggestions of other things to read.  Then it gives a brief history of scientific thinking on the various topics, like Carl Sagan's estimates using the Drake equation, and outbreaks of bird flu during the war that killed millions of people.  It also dabbles in various philosophers' ideas about the mind etc in the case of the Carrie story.

The way the bits about the history of scientific thinking reminded me a lot of the way the history of physics/cosmology was presented in Stephen Hawkings' Brief History of Time.

 So, basically, I'm all for the popularisation of sciences, as long as the popularisation doesn't depend on the 'dumbing down' of the sciences, which eventually turn into theistic catchphrases like "DNA is God's language".  The way to not do this is simply to not overstate things, just to get people interested enough to investigate things themselves. 

 That all being the case, I'd recommend this for a nice light read on the history of various scientific fields, and anybody who enjoyed Stephen King's books and is looking for other books with similar themes.

I think they also have done other books with titles like "The science of superheroes", which I haven't read, but would probably be pretty similar.