Popular Science

Our species long lived on the edge of starvation. Now we produce enough food for all 7 billion of us to eat nearly 3,000 calories every day. This is such...

More than fifty years ago, John Coltrane drew the twelve musical notes in a circle and connected them by straight lines, forming a five-pointed star. Inspired by Einstein, Coltrane had...

Options have been traded for hundreds of years, but investment decisions were based on gut feelings until the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the Black-Scholes options pricing model in 1973 ushered...

Geometry defines the world around us, helping us make sense of everything from architecture to military science to fashion. And for over two thousand years, geometry has been equated with...

In 1980, Ronald Reagan created one of the most stupid talking points of all time: "I'm not a scientist, but...". Since then, politicians have repeatedly committed egregious transgressions against scientific...

In Women After All, anthropologist Melvin Konner traces the arc of evolution to explain the relationships between women and men. Drawing on colourful examples from the natural world-the octopus, the...

With her celebrated blend of scientific insight, clarity, and curiosity, Diane Ackerman explores our human capacity both for destruction and for invention as we shape the future of the planet...

Is this the right book for me? Are you looking for a clear, accessible guide to mathematics that can help you brush up your skills and rediscover the key concepts...

Did you know that breast milk contains substances similar to cannabis? Or that it's sold on the Internet for 262 times the price of oil? Feted and fetishized, the breast...

In 1543, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus lay on his deathbed, reportedly holding his just-published masterpiece, The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, in his hands. Placing the sun at the...

James T. Costa takes readers on a journey from Charles Darwin's youth and travels on the HMS Beagle to Down House, his bustling home of forty years. To test his...

A hidden history of the twentieth century's brilliant innovations-as seen through art and images of electronics that fed the dreams of millions. A rich historical account of electronic technology in...

Over the centuries, the search for the answer to how life began has been entwined with some of science's most revolutionary advances. Now, in an age of genetic engineering and...

We evolved to eat berries rather than bagels, to live in mud huts rather than condos, to sprint barefoot rather than play football-or did we? Are our bodies and brains...

On a summer day in 1674, in the small Dutch city of Delft, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek-a cloth salesman, local bureaucrat, and self-taught natural philosopher-gazed through a tiny lens set into...

Space is a world devoid of the things we need to live and thrive: air, gravity, hot showers, fresh produce, privacy, beer. Space exploration is in some ways an exploration...

Survival of the fittest or survival of the nicest? Since the dawn of time man has contemplated the mystery of altruism, but it was Darwin who posed the question most...

In August 2006, the International Astronomical Union voted Pluto out of planethood. Far from the sun, wonder Pluto has any fans. Yet during the mounting debate over rallied behind the...

The wolf evolved into the Pekingese, the wildcat into the tabby cat and the auroch into the milk-producing cow. This happened through the process called "domestication". Domesticated creatures have served...

In this riveting, eye-opening new book, preeminent astrophysicist Martin Rees charts out the future of science, offering a compelling vision of how scientists and laypeople can work together to address...

Although Einstein was the greatest genius of the twentieth century, many of his ground-breaking discoveries were blighted by mistakes, ranging from serious misconceptions in physics to blatant errors in mathematics....

Who is not interested in how the body works: how it grows, develops, and ages; how it goes wrong; how it has inspired artists and been the focus of ceremony...

Stephen Jay Gould's writing remains the modern standard by which popular science writing is judged. Ever since the last 1970s, his monthly essay in Natural History and his full-length books...

In 1913, a young unschooled Indian clerk wrote a letter to G H Hardy, begging the pre-eminent English mathematician's opinion on several ideas he had about numbers. Realising the letter...

What is the principle purpose of a brain? A simple question, but the answer has taken millennia for us to begin to understand. So critical for our everyday existence, the...

History is not a prerogative of the human species, Edward O. Wilson declares in Half-Earth. Demonstrating that we blindly ignore the histories of millions of other species, Wilson warns us...

Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity is possibly the most perfect intellectual achievement in modern physics. Anything that involves gravity, the force that powers everything on the largest, hottest or...

In August 1930, on a boat trip from Bombay to England, the young Indian scientist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar calculated that certain stars could end their lives by collapsing indefinitely to a...

WINNER OF THE ANDRE SIMON FOOD BOOK AWARD 2023SHORTLISTED FOR THE GUILD OF FOOD WRITERS AWARDS 2024THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'Brilliant - a must read' Tim Spector'Ravenous is a truly important...

'A future classic of popular science' Mail on Sunday'A dazzling account' Financial Times'Absorbing, surprising and at times profound. After reading this, reality will never be quite the same' Dave GoulsonOur...

As a writer for SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, John Horgan has an unsurpassed window on contemporary science, routinely interviewing the scientific geniuses of our times, scientists such as Richard Dawkins, Murray Gell-Mann,...

Don't let your mathematical skills fail you! In Engineering, Construction, and Science examinations, marks are often lost through carelessness or from not properly understanding the mathematics involved. When there are...

A Beginner's Guide to Reality is an introduction to philosophy for people who don't read philosophy. Jim Baggott's sources range from Aristotle to The Matrix. He examines the major developments...

Temptation and control are like two players in an arms race, displaying competition like that between predators and prey, parasites and hosts, and Americans and Russians during the Cold War....

On January 30, Rubik applied for a patent on his cube (1975). On the next day, 17 years earlier, the first U.S. Satellite passed through the Van Allen radiation belt....

An acclaimed science historian uncovers the fascinating story of a "lost" project to unlock humanity's common denominator that prefigured the emergence of Big Data Just a few years before the...

Pathbreaking research offers new hope for treating brain diseases and injuries and for maintaining brain health even into old age In the past, the brain was considered an autonomous organ,...

Eighty-one years after America witnessed the Scopes trial over the teaching of evolution in public schools, the debate between science and religion continues. In this book scholars from a variety...

We like to think of ourselves as exceptional beings, but is there really anything special about us that sets us apart from other animals? Humans are the slightest of twigs...

'Charming, compelling and packed with information. I learned more about biology from this short book than I did from years of science lessons. A weird and wonderful read' PETER FRANKOPAN...

A brilliant, beautiful account of how British boffins triumphed across the decades in creating everything from computer games to Martian landers.The book contains chapters on the Beagle II, Elite -...

Widely considered the greatest genius of all time, Albert Einstein revolutionised our understanding of the cosmos with his general theory of relativity and helped to lead us into the atomic...

Numerous updates and a state-of-the-art ancillary package make the Tenth Edition of this best-selling textbook the most up-to-date book of its kind. New chapters include: End-of-Life Care, Genetics Perspectives in...

From the Large Hadron Collider rap to the sins of Isaac Newton, The Science Magpie is a compelling collection of scientific curiosities.Expand your knowledge as you view the history of...

'A book that would have had Darwin swooning - anyone seriously interested in who we are and how we function should read this.' Guardian At the beginning of this century...

'Everything about [this] book, which combines a healthy dose of lucid neuroscience with a dash of sensitive personal narrative, delights ... a beautifully balanced piece of popular-science writing' Boyd Tonkin,...

Previously published as A History of the Universe in 21 Stars.'A delight and triumph ... A thing of beauty ... Truly, truly magical' talkRADIOLook up on a clear evening, and...