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Science
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COVID by Numbers
How many people have died because of COVID-19? Which countries have been hit hardest by the virus? What are the benefits and harms of different vaccines? How does COVID-19 compare to the Spanish flu? How have the lockdown measures affected the economy, mental health and crime? This year we have been bombarded by statistics - seven day rolling averages, rates of infection, excess deaths. Never have numbers been more central to our national conversation, and never has it been more important that we think about them clearly. In the media and in their Observer column, Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter and RSS Statistical Ambassador Anthony Masters have interpreted these statistics, offering a vital public service by giving us the tools we need to make sense of the virus for ourselves and holding the government to account.
£10.99
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39 Ways to Save the Planet
533 days in the life of a great European writer. Though a tireless explorer of distant cultures, for more than forty years Cees Nooteboom has also been returning to the island of Menorca, 'the island of the wind', and it is in his house there, with a study full of books and a garden taken over with native plants and fauna, that the 533 days of writing take place. The product is not a diary, nor a set of movements of the soul organised by dates, but 'a book of days' to retain 'something of the flow of thoughts, and of what one reads and sees' with concerns about his cactus garden and suffering hibiscus, his love for Menorca, his thoughts on the world and on the place we humans have in the universe.
£12.99
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Philip's 2022 Stargazing Month-By-Month Guide to the Night Sky Britain & Ireland
This is a guide for stargazers in Britain and Ireland. The new 2022 edition has been completely revised to make it even more essential for exploring the night skies - making the night sky accessible to beginners and experts alike.
£6.99
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Beyond order
In '12 Rules for Life', acclaimed public thinker and clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson offered an antidote to the chaos in our lives: eternal truths applied to modern anxieties. His insights have helped millions of readers and resonated powerfully around the world. Now in this much-anticipated sequel, Peterson goes further, showing that part of life's meaning comes from reaching out into the domain beyond what we know, and adapting to an ever-transforming world.
£25.00
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The Space Business
20th century space exploration may have belonged to state-funded giants such as NASA, but there is a parallel history which has set the template for the future. Even before Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, private companies were exploiting space via communication satellites - a sector that is seeing exponential growth in the internet age. In human spaceflight, too, commercialisation is making itself felt. Billionaire entrepreneurs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson have long trumpeted plans to make space travel a possibility for ordinary people and those ideas are inching ever closer to reality. At the same time, other companies plan to mine the Moon for helium-3, or asteroids for precious metals. Science writer Andrew May takes an entertaining, in-depth look at the triumphs and heroic failures of our quixotic quest to commercialise the final frontier.
£8.99
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Eight Improbable Possibilities
Echoing Sherlock Holmes' famous dictum, John Gribbin tells us: 'Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, is certainly possible, in the light of present scientific knowledge.' With that in mind, in his sequel to the hugely popular 'Six Impossible Things and Seven Pillars of Science', Gribbin turns his attention to some of the mind-bendingly improbable truths of science.
£10.99
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Order Of Time
Time is a mystery that does not cease to puzzle us. Philosophers, artists and poets have long explored its meaning while scientists have found that its structure is different from the simple intuition we have of it. From Boltzmann to quantum theory, from Einstein to loop quantum gravity, our understanding of time has been undergoing radical transformations. Time flows at a different speed in different places, the past and the future differ far less than we might think, and the very notion of the present evaporates in the vast universe. With his extraordinary charm and sense of wonder, bringing together science, philosophy and art, Carlo Rovelli unravels this mystery, inviting us to imagine a world where time is in us and we are not in time.
£10.99
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The Life Scientific: Virus Hunters
BBC Radio 4's celebrated 'The Life Scientific' has featured some of the world's most renowned experts in the field of deadly viruses. The interviews make sobering reading, a reminder of all the deadly viruses that have threatened global health, and why for the scientists working on the front line in the war against viruses, the arrival of Covid-19 came as no surprise. Among the contributors to this all-too-timely book are: Jeremy Farrar, Peter Piot and Jonathan Ball.
£16.99
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The Sirens of Mars
Right now, spacecraft are circling Mars, sweeping over Terra Sabaea, Syrtis Major, the dunes of Elysium and Mare Sirenum - on the brink, perhaps, of a discovery that would inspire humankind. With poetic precision, Sarah Stewart Johnson traces the evocative history of our explorations of Mars, interlacing her personal journey as a scientist with tales of other seekers who have scoured the planet for signs of life. Ultimately, she shows how its story is also a story about Earth: it is a mirror, a tell-tale reflection of our own anxieties and yearnings to find - if we're lucky - that we're not alone.
£10.99
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Once Upon A Time I Lived On Mars
This title provides a new and unique perspective on isolation. The book looks at space, exloration and life on Mars.
£9.99
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30 Animals That Made Us Smarter
Did you know that mosquitoes' mouthparts are helping to develop pain-free surgical needles? Who'd have thought that the humble mussel could inspire so many useful things, from plywood production to a 'glue' that cements the crowns on teeth and saves unborn babies in the womb? For many years, humans have been using the natural world as inspiration for everything from fashion to architecture, and medicine to transport, and it may come as a surprise to learn how many inventions have been motivated by animal design and behaviour. Dive into the depths with us as author Patrick Aryee reveals even more astonishing stories about animals' exceptional powers and the unique contributions they've made to the quality of our everyday lives. Ties in to the BBC podcast.
£16.99
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Spike
The Coronavirus Pandemic will be a source of endless human accounts. However, there is a truthful and objective narrative to be written about how the virus played out and how the world set about dealing with it. 'Spike' is that story - from the inside.
£14.99
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Something Doesn't Add Up
Some people fear and mistrust numbers. Others want to use them for everything. After a long career as a statistician, Paul Goodwin has learned the hard way that the ones who want to use them for everything are a very good reason for the rest of us to fear and mistrust them. 'Something Doesn't Add Up' is a field guide to the numbers that rule our world, even though they don't make sense.
£9.99
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Six Impossible Things
A short guide to the six theories that try to explain the wild world of the quantum.
£8.99
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Vaxxers
On 1 January 2020, Sarah Gilbert, Professor of Vaccinology at Oxford University, read an article about four people in China with a strange pneumonia. Within two weeks, she had designed a vaccine against a pathogen that no one had ever seen before. 12 months later, vaccination is being rolled out across the world to save millions of lives from Covid-19. In this book, we hear directly from Professor Gilbert and her colleague Dr Cath Green as they reveal the inside story of making the Oxford vaccine and the cutting-edge science behind it. This is their story of trying to fight a pandemic as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Sarah and Cath share the heart-stopping moments in the eye of the storm; they separate fact from fiction; they explain how they made a safe vaccine in record time with the eyes of the world watching; and they give us hope for the future.
£20.00
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Life Changing
For the last three billion years or so, life on Earth has been shaped by natural forces. Through climate change, humans have now affected even the most remote environments and their inhabitants, and studies suggest that through our actions we are forcing some animals to evolve at breakneck speed to survive. Whilst some are thriving, others are on the brink of extinction, and for others the only option is life in captivity. Today, it's not just the fittest that survive; sometimes it's the ones we decide to let live. In this book, Helen Pilcher considers the many ways that we've shaped the DNA of the animal kingdom and in so doing, altered the fate of life on earth. In her post-natural history guide, she invites us to meet key species that have been sculpted by humanity, as well as the researchers and conservationists who create, manage and tend to these post-natural creations.
£11.99
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Body
Bill Bryson achieved the seemingly impossible by making the science of our world both understandable and entertaining to millions of people around the globe. Now he turns his attention inwards to explore the human body, how it functions and its remarkable ability to heal itself. Full of extraordinary facts and astonishing stories this title is a brilliant, often very funny attempt to understand the miracle of our physical and neurological make up.
£25.00
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Books Do Furnish a Life
Including conversations with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley and more, this is an essential guide to the most exciting ideas of our time and their proponents from our most brilliant science communicator. 'Books Do Furnish a Life' is divided by theme, including celebrating nature, exploring humanity and interrogating faith. For the first time, it brings together Richard Dawkins' forewords, afterwords and introductions to the work of some of the leading thinkers of our age - Carl Sagan, Lawrence Krauss, Jacob Bronowski, Lewis Wolpert - with a selection of his reviews to provide an electrifying celebration of science writing, both fiction and non-fiction.
£25.00
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How to argue with a racist
Race is real because we perceive it. Racism is real because we enact it. But the appeal to science to strengthen racist ideologies is on the rise - and increasingly part of the public discourse on politics, migration, education, sport and intelligence. 'How To Argue With a Racist' is a vital manifesto for a twenty-first century understanding of human evolution and variation, and a timely weapon against the misuse of science to justify bigotry.
£9.99
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The Pandemic Century
Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet, despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. From the Spanish flu and the 1924 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Los Angeles, to the 1930 'parrot fever' pandemic and the more recent SARS, Ebola, Zika and - now - COVID-19 epidemics, the last 100 years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated pandemic alarms. Mark Honigsbaum chronicles 100 years of history in 10 outbreaks. Bringing us right up-to-date with a new chapter on COVID-19, this fast-paced, critically-acclaimed book combines science history, medical sociology and thrilling front-line reportage to deliver the story of our times.
£12.99
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The Premonition
'It's a foreboding,' she said. 'A knowing that something is looming around the corner. Like how when the seasons change you can smell Fall in the air right before the leaves change and the wind turns cold.'In January 2020, as people started dying from a new virus in Wuhan, China, few really understood the magnitude of what was happening. Except, that is, a small group of scientific misfits who in their different ways had been obsessed all their lives with how viruses spread and replicated - and with why the governments and the institutions that were supposed to look after us, kept making the same mistakes time and again.This group saw what nobody else did. A pandemic was coming. We weren't prepared.The Premonition is the extraordinary story of a group who anticipated, traced and hunted the coronavirus; who understood the need to think differently, to learn from history, to question everything; and to do all of this fast, in order to act
£25.00
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How To Save Our Planet
How can we save our planet and survive the 21st century? How can you argue with deniers? How can we create positive change in the midst of the climate crisis? Professor Mark Maslin has the key facts that we need to protect our future. Global awareness of climate change is growing rapidly. Science has proven that our planet and species are facing a massive environmental crisis. 'How to Save Our Planet' is a call to action, guaranteed to equip everyone with the knowledge needed to make change.
£8.99
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There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness
One of the most inspiring and counter-intuitive thinkers of our age, the author of 'Seven Brief Lessons on Physics', transforms the way we think about the world with his reflections on science, history, and humanity. In this collection of writings, the logbook of an intelligence always on the move, Carlo Rovelli follows his curiosity and invites us on a voyage through science, history, philosophy, and politics.
£20.00
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Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
A New York Times bestseller: "A passionate and convincing case for the sophistication of nonhuman minds." -Alison Gopnik, The Atlantic
£9.99
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