Popular Science

'Lucid, calm, informed, directly helpful in trying to think about where we are now... The literature of the time after begins here' Evening Standard'Taking a breather from bewildering statistics and...

Automation, artificial intelligence and robotics are changing our lives quickly - but digital disruption goes much further than we realize.Richard Baldwin, one of the world's leading globalization experts, argues that...

Gravity is the weakest force in the everyday world yet it is the strongest force in the universe. It was the first force to be recognised and described yet it...

Perception is the foundation of human experience, but few of us understand how our own perception works. By revealing the startling truths about the brain and perception, Beau Lotto shows...

'A fantastic compendium of skeptical thinking and the perfect primer for anyone who wants to separate fact from fiction.' Richard Wiseman, author 59 Seconds'Thorough, informative, and enlightening... If this book...

Every physicist agrees quantum mechanics is among humanity's finest scientific achievements. But ask what it means, and the result will be a brawl. For a century, most physicists have followed...

'A beautifully crafted love letter to physics.' Nature'A book more about life and passion than physics. People who have never cared a jot about physics (like me) must read this...

'A book more about life and passion than physics. People who have never cared a jot for physics (like me) must read this book.' SUZANNE O'SULLIVAN'A beautifully crafted love letter...

'A typically Mayesque celebration of classic engineering ... May is extraordinarily good at explaining what a carburettor is or outlining how a governor works... It's charming, transfixing and surprisingly intimate...It...

In May 1997, the world watched as Garry Kasparov, the greatest chess player in the world, was defeated for the first time by the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue. It was...

From the phenomenal New Scientist series, with over 2,500,000 copies soldDo Polar Bears Get Lonely? is the third compilation of readers' answers to the questions in the 'Last Word' column...

Zero, zip, nada, zilch. It's all too easy to ignore the fascinating possibilities of emptiness and non-existence, and we may well wonder what there is to say about nothing. But...

One of Britain's foremost astrobiologists offers an accessible and game-changing account of life on Earth.__________________Why is all life based on carbon rather than silicon? And beyond Earth, would life -...

FUTURE-PROOFING FOR THINKERS.'What skills and abilities will a student need to prosper in five, ten, or fifteen years' time?' In a world of change, where skills become out of date...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE 2017'When I was twelve, my grandfather began to act strangely. It started with inexplicable walks. He'd leave the dinner table and we...

'This is history with a surgeon's touch: deft, incisive and sometimes excruciatingly bloody' The Sunday Times'Utterly eccentric and riveting' Mail on Sunday 'Eye-opening and, frequently, eye-watering . . . a...

In this pioneering book Rupert Sheldrake shows how science helps validate seven practices on which all religions are built, and which are part of our common human heritage:* Meditation* Gratitude*...

There's a whole universe out there...Imagine you had a spacecraft capable of travelling through interstellar space. You climb in, blast into orbit, fly out of the solar system and keep...

How did we get here? All cultures have a creation story, but a little over 150 years ago Charles Darwin introduced a revolutionary new one. We, and all living things,...

As you read this, billions of neutrinos from the sun are passing through your body, antimatter is sprouting from your dinner and the core of your being is a chaotic...

Sometime in the future the intelligence of machines will exceed that of human brain power. So are we on the edge of an AI-pocalypse, with superintelligent devices superseding humanity, as...

What is this strange mental world that seems so essential to being human? The conscious mind brings together sensations, perceptions, thoughts and memories to generate the seamless movie of a...

How did it all begin? Where is it all going?A little over a century ago, a young Albert Einstein presented his general theory of relativity to the world and utterly...

Congratulations! You're the proud owner of the most complex information processing device in the known universe. The human brain comes equipped with all sorts of useful design features, but also...

A journey through 55 alternative realities, parallel worlds and possible futures.It's lucky you're here. But for a series of incredible coincidences and roads not taken, your life could be very...

A Sunday Times bestsellerHow long is 'now'? The short answer is 'somewhere between 2 and 3 seconds'. The long answer involves an incredible journey through neuroscience, our subconscious and the...

Charles Darwin: the man who discovered evolution? The man who killed off God? Or a flawed man of his age, part genius, part ruthless careerist who would not acknowledge his...

Written by Dr Alexandre Zagoskin, who is a Reader at Loughborough University, Quantum Mechanics: A Complete Introduction is designed to give you everything you need to succeed, all in one...

Find your way around the night sky with this handy guide to stargazing for the complete novice. In Philip's Guide to the Night Sky, Sir Patrick Moore explains how to...

Rogue waves remain something of a mystery. Long believed to be a myth or an exaggeration, they haven't been the subject of any kind of serious in-depth research - until...

Tuberculosis has twisted through the millennia hand-in-hand with humanity, leaving its marks on our culture, our history and our DNA, from the birth of Homo sapiens right up to the...

Humans are mammals. Most of us appreciate that at some level. But what does it mean for us to have more in common with a horse and an elephant than...

'Highly recommended' Financial Times Today we know of only a single planet that hosts life: the Earth. But across a Universe of at least 100 billion possibly habitable worlds, surely...

Twenty years ago, the search for planets outside the Solar System was a job restricted to science-fiction writers. Now it's one of the fastest-growing fields in astronomy with thousands of...

If you could bring back just one animal from the past, what would you choose? It can be anyone or anything from history, from the King of the Dinosaurs, T....

Heat and fire have been at humanity's command for at least 100,000 years, but we've been in control of the cold for barely one hundred. Why it took so long...

'Gripping and wonderfully informative' Tom Holland, New StatesmanAdored by children and adults alike, Tyrannosaurus is the most famous dinosaur in the world, one that pops up again and again in...

NASA's history is a familiar story, one that typically peaks with Neil Armstrong taking his small step on the Moon in 1969. But America's space agency wasn't created in a...

The incredible story of spaceflight before the establishment of NASA.NASA's history is a familiar story, one that typically peaks with Neil Armstrong taking his small step on the Moon in...

The language of genes has become common parlance. We know they make your eyes blue, your hair curly or your nose straight. The media tells us that our genes control...

Silence is a mysterious and unfathomable realm, perhaps the most under-used of all resources, and one our modern culture has all but obliterated by turning up the volume control. Graham...

Here are the stories of the ten most popular equations of all time as voted for by readers of Physics World, including - accessibly described here for the first time...

The atom. The Big Bang. DNA. Natural selection. All ideas that have revolutionised science - and that were dismissed out of hand when they first appeared. The surprises haven't stopped:...

In a series of 50 accessible essays, Jo Baker introduces and explains all of the essential concepts, major discoveries and the very latest thinking in astrophysics.From heliocentrism to Newton's theory...

Charles Darwin is best known for his work on the evolution of animals, but in fact a large part of his contribution to the natural sciences is focused on plants....