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Science
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Stargazing for beginners
Discover the wonders of the Universe with this complete introduction to observing and understanding the night sky. This practical guide explains and demystifies stargazing, teaching you to recognize different kinds of objects and showing you how they move through the sky over the course of the night and the year. It shows you how to understand and enjoy the cosmos, building your practical astronomy skills from the basics to more advanced techniques. Beginning with an explanation of the Universe itself - how big is it, what shape is it, how old is it, and will it end? - it then takes you on a tour around the night sky, building up your knowledge in simple stages.
£20.00
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Sapiens. Volume 1
One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one-homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us? In this first volume of the full-colour illustrated adaptation of his groundbreaking book, renowned historian Yuval Harari tells the story of humankind's creation and evolution, exploring the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be 'human'.
£22.00
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The Ten Equations that Rule the World: And How You Can Use Them Too
Is there a secret formula for getting rich? For making something a viral hit? For deciding how long to stick with your current job, Netflix series, or even relationship? This book is all about the equations that make our world go round. Ten of them, in fact. They are integral to everything from investment banking to betting companies and social media giants. And they can help you to increase your chance of success, guard against financial loss, live more healthily and see through scaremongering. They are known only by mathematicians - until now. With wit and clarity, mathematician David Sumpter shows that it isn't the technical details which make these formulas so successful. It is the way they allow mathematicians to view problems from a different angle - a way of seeing the world that anyone can learn.
£20.00
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Remarkable Life of the Skin: An intimate journey across our surface
How does our diet affect our skin? What makes the skin age? And why can't we tickle ourselves? Providing a cover for our delicate and intricate bodies, the skin is our largest and fastest growing organ. We see it, touch it and live in it every day. It's a habitat for a mesmerisingly complex world of micro-organisms and physical functions that are vital to our health and our survival. It's also one of the first things people see about us and is crucial to our sense of identity. And yet how much do we really know about it? Through the lenses of science, sociology and history, Dr Monty Lyman leads us on a journey across our most underrated and unexplored organ and reveals how the skin is far stranger and more complex than you've ever imagined.
£10.99
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Guns Germs & Steel
This book abandons the conventional distinctions between history and science. By focusing on what ancient peoples had in the way of land, animals and plants, Diamond sheds genuinely new light on the world's most explosive diversions.
£12.99
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Reality Is Not What It Seems
Do space and time truly exist? What is reality made of? Can we understand its deep texture? Scientist Carlo Rovelli has spent his whole life exploring these questions and pushing the boundaries of what we know. In this book, he shows how our understanding of reality has changed throughout centuries, from Democritus to loop quantum gravity. Taking us on a wondrous journey, he invites us to imagine a whole new world where black holes are waiting to explode, spacetime is made up of grains, and infinity does not exist - a vast universe still largely undiscovered.
£10.99
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The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
This title provides an examination of human perception, reality, and the evolutionary schism between the two. Do we see the world as it truly is? In 'The Case Against Reality', pioneering cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman says no? we see what we need in order to survive. Our visual perceptions are not a window onto reality, Hoffman shows us, but instead are interfaces constructed by natural selection.
£10.99
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How To: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally bad that no one would ever try it. 'How To' is a guide to the third kind of approach. It's full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole. Bestselling author and cartoonist Randall Munroe explains how to predict the weather by analyzing the pixels of your Facebook photos. He teaches you how to tell if you're a baby boomer or a millennial by measuring the radioactivity of your teeth. He offers tips for taking a selfie with a telescope, crossing a river by boiling it, and getting to your appointments on time by destroying the moon.
£10.99
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Outgrowing God: A Beginner's Guide
Should we believe in God? Do we need God in order to explain the existence of the universe? Do we need God in order to be good? In twelve chapters that address some of the most profound questions human beings confront, Dawkins marshals science, philosophy and comparative religion to interrogate the hypocrisies of all the religious systems and explain to readers of all ages how life emerged without a Creator, how evolution works and how our world came into being. For anyone hoping to grapple with the meaning of life and what to believe, 'Outgrowing God' is a challenging, thrilling and revelatory read.
£10.99
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A Small Illustrated Guide to the Universe: From the New York Times bestselling a
Have you ever found yourself wondering what we might have in common with stars, or why the Moon never leaves us? Thinking about the precise dancing of planets, the passing of time, or the nature of natural things? Our world is full of unshakeable mystery, and although we live in a civilisation more complicated than ever, there is simplicity and reassurance to be found in knowing how and why. This is a delicately existential, illustrated, and welcoming exploration of the universe - one that examines and marvels at the astonishing principles, laws, and phenomena that we exist alongside, that we sit within.
£12.99
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The Weather Machine: How We See Into the Future
'The Weather Machine' is about a miraculous-but-overlooked invention that helps us through our daily lives - and sometimes saves them - by allowing us to see into the future. When Superstorm Sandy hit North America, weather scientists had predicted its arrival a full eight days beforehand, saving countless lives and astonishing us with their capability. Their skill is unprecedented in human history and draws on nearly every major invention of the last two centuries: Newtonian physics, telecommunications, spaceflight, and super-computing. In this gripping investigation, Andrew Blum takes us on a global journey to explain this awe-inspiring feat - from satellites circling the Earth, to weather stations far out in the ocean, through some of the most ingenious minds and advanced algorithms at work today.
£9.99
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Cosmological Koans: A Journey to the Heart of Physics
Could there be a civilization on a mote of dust? How much of your fate have you made? Who cleans the universe? Through more than fifty Koans - pleasingly paradoxical vignettes following the ancient Zen tradition - leading physicist Anthony Aguirre takes the reader across the world from Japan to Italy, and through ideas spanning the age, breadth, and depth of the Universe. Using these beguiling Koans and a flair for explaining complex science, Aguirre covers cosmic questions that scientific giants from Aristotle to Galileo to Heisenberg have grappled with, from the meaning of quantum theory and the nature of time to the origin of multiple universes.
£10.99
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Letters From An Astrophysicist
Neil deGrasse Tyson is arguably the most influential, acclaimed scientist on the planet. As director of the Hayden Planetarium, and host of Cosmos and StarTalk, he has dedicated his life to exploring and explaining the mysteries of the universe. Every year, he receives thousands of letters - from students to prisoners, scientists to priests. Some seek advice, others yearn for inspiration; some are full of despair, others burst with wonder. But they are all searching for understanding, meaning and truth. His replies are by turns wise, funny, and mind-blowing. In this, his most personal book by far, he covers everything from God to the history of science, from aliens to death. He bares his soul - his passions, his doubts, his hopes. The big theme is everywhere in these pages: what is our place in the universe?
£12.99
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Body: A Guide for Occupants
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.
£10.99
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Enlightenment Now
One of the world's greatest contemporary thinkers and author of 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' (described by Bill Gates as 'the most inspiring book I have ever read') shows how to think afresh about the human condition and to meet the challenges that confront us. Is modernity really failing? Or have we failed to appreciate progress and the ideals that make it possible? If you follow the headlines, the world in the 21st century appears to be sinking into chaos, hatred and irrationality. Yet Steven Pinker shows that this is an illusion - a symptom of historical amnesia and statistical fallacies.
£14.99
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Sapiens
100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come? Bold, wide-ranging and provocative, 'Sapiens' challenges everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our power ... and our future.
£12.99
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Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors
Matt Parker, the brilliant stand-up mathematician, shows us what happens when maths goes wrong in the real world. We would all be better off if everyone saw mathematics as a practical ally. Sadly, most of us fear maths and seek to avoid it. This is because mathematics doesn't have good 'people skills' - it never hesitates to bluntly point out when we are wrong. But it is only trying to help! Mathematics is a friend which can fill the gaps in what our brains can do naturally. Luckily, even though we don't like sharing our own mistakes, we love to read about what happens when maths errors make the everyday go horribly wrong. Matt Parker explores and explains near misses and mishaps with planes, bridges, the Internet and big data as a way of showing us not only how important maths is, but how we can use it to our advantage.
£10.99
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£9.99
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No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference: Illustrated Edition
The history-making, ground-breaking speeches of Greta Thunberg, the young activist who has become the voice of a generation'Everything needs to change. And it has to start today' In August 2018 a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, decided not to go to school one day. Her actions ended up sparking a global movement for action against the climate crisis, inspiring millions of pupils to go on strike for our planet, forcing governments to listen, and earning her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. This book brings you Greta in her own words, for the first time. Collecting her speeches that have made history across Europe, from the UN to mass street protests, No One Is Too Small to Make A Difference is a rallying cry for why we must all wake up and fight to protect the living planet, no matter how powerless we feel. Our future depends upon it.
£4.99
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Moon: A History For the Future
Every generation has looked up from the Earth and wondered at the beauty of the Moon. 50 years ago, a few Americans became the first to do the reverse - with the whole world watching through their eyes. In this short but wide-ranging book, Oliver Morton explores the history and future of humankind's relationship with the Moon. A counterpoint in the sky, it has shaped our understanding of the Earth from Galileo to Apollo. Its gentle light has spoken of love and loneliness; its battered surface of death and the cosmic. For some, it is a future on which humankind has turned its back. For others, an adventure yet to begin. Advanced technologies, new ambitions and old dreams mean that men, women and robots now seem certain to return to the Moon. What will they learn there about the universe, the Earth - and themselves? And, this time, will they stay?
£9.99
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Our House is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis
This is the story of a family led to confront a crisis they had never foreseen. Aged eleven, their eldest daughter has stopped eating and speaking. Alongside diagnoses of autism and selective mutism, her parents slowly become aware of another source for her distress: her imperilled future on a rapidly heating planet. Steered by her determination to understand the truth, the family begins to see the deep connections between their own and the planet's suffering. Against forces that try to silence them, disparaging them for being different, they discover ways to strengthen, heal, and act in the world. And then one day, fifteen-year-old Greta decides to go on strike.
£16.99
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Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies
Asserting that religious creeds and philosophical questions can be reduced to purely genetic and evolutionary components, and that the human body and mind have a physical base obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry, 'Genesis' demonstrates that the only way for us to understand human behaviour fully is to study the evolutionary histories of nonhuman species.
£10.99
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Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future
The signs of climate change are unmistakable even today, but the real transformations have hardly begun. We've been taught that warming would be slow - but, barring very dramatic action, each of these impacts is likely to arrive within the length of a new mortgage signed this year. What will it be like to live on a pummelled planet? What will it do to our politics, our economy, our culture and sense of history? And what explains the fact we have done so little to stop it? These are not abstract questions but immediate and pressing human dramas, dilemmas and nightmares. In 'The Uninhabitable Earth', David Wallace-Wells undertakes a new kind of storytelling and a new kind of social science to explore the era of human history on which we have just embarked.
£10.99
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Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History
Why is the world the way it is? What forces have forged our planet and how have they in turn governed our evolution, influenced the rise and fall of civilisations through history, and ultimately shaped the story of humanity? Lying imperceptibly beneath everything we encounter in the modern world is a vast architecture of causal links, chains of consequences that explain why things are the way they are. 'Origins' is the story of this connectivity; it's not about what we've done to our environment, but about what our environment has done to us. We range from the deep roots behind everyday realities, like why do most of us eat cereal for breakfast, to the profound factors that enabled life to make transitions in evolution.
£10.99
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