Natural sciences

Randall Munroe is . . .'Nerd royalty' Ben Goldacre'Totally brilliant' Tim Harford'Laugh-out-loud funny' Bill Gates'Wonderful' Neil GaimanAN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERThe world's most entertaining and useless self-help guide, from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the million-selling What If?

Official U.S. edition with full color illustrations throughout. #1 New York Times Bestseller  The Summer Reading Pick for President Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg,  now available as a beautifully packaged paperback From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—t

From the creator of the wildly popular xkcd.com, hilarious and informative answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask. Millions visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. Fans ask him a lot of strange questions: How fast can you hit a speed bump, driving, and live? When (if ever) did the sun go down on the British Empire? When will Facebook contain mo

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration - NASA - was established on July 29, 1958. Ever since that day, NASA has been at the forefront of efforts to explore outerspace, resulting in the Apollo missions to the moon, the Skylab space-station and today's space shuttle.But behind the open face of NASA, there is a much more mysterious world. NASA has been linked to a wealth of high-level cove

A violinist sees a scarlet form when he plays a certain note; a rock star sees waves of blue and green as he composes a ballad; an actress tastes cake when she utters the word "table." Described by some as a superpower this mingling of the senses is called “synesthesia,” and the people who possess this amazing gift are called “synesthetes.” What happens when a journalist turns her lens on a myster

A gripping portrait of modern Tibet told through the lives of its people, from the bestselling author of Nothing to Envy.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Deepak Chopra joins forces with leading physicist Menas Kafatos to explore some of the most important and baffling questions about our place in the world.  "A riveting and absolutely fascinating adventure that will blow your mind wide open!" —Dr. Rudolph E. Tanzi   What happens when modern science reaches a crucial turning point that c

The world-famous cosmologist and #1 bestselling author of A Brief History of Time leaves us with his final thoughts on the universe's biggest questions in this brilliant posthumous work. Is there a God? How did it all begin? Can we predict the future? What is inside a black hole? Is there other intelligent life in the universe? Will artificial intelligence outsmart us? How do we shape the future?

Hope Jahren is an award-winning scientist, a brilliant writer, a passionate teacher, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. In The Story of More, she illuminates the link between human habits and our imperiled planet.

Can reading a book make you more rational? Can it help us understand why there is so much irrationality in the world? Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now (Bill Gates's "new favorite book of all time") answers all the questions here Today humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding--and also appears to be losing its mind.

Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species' is a book that changed the way we think about the development of life on earth. The text used for this edition was the last to be published during Darwin's lifetime and is considered to be the definitive version.

A captivating exploration of how underwater animals tap into sound to survive, and a clarion call for humans to address the ways we invade these critical soundscapes—from an award-winning science writer “Sing Like Fish is that rare book that makes you see the world differently.”—Mark Kurlansky, New York Times bestselling author of Salt and Cod For centuries, humans ignored sound in t

Quanta and Fields, the second book of Sean Carroll´s already internationally acclaimed series The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, is an adventure into the bare stuff of reality.   Sean Carroll is creating a profoundly new approach to sharing physics with a broad audience, one that goes beyond analogies to show how physicists really think. He cuts to the bare mathematical essence of our mos

From prehistoric cave paintings to the prints and etchings of Picasso, owls have captivated and inspired us for millennia. Whether they appear as ancient Athenian symbols of wisdom, ghostly harbingers of death, or the cuddly sidekicks of Harry Potter and Winnie the Pooh, these birds have continued to fascinate and disturb us in equal measure. Through revelatory new behavioural research, Jennifer

The millions of people around the world who read and loved What If? still have questions, and those questions are getting stranger. Thank goodness xkcd creator Randall Munroe is here to help. Planning to ride a fire pole from the Moon back to Earth? The hardest part is sticking the landing. Hoping to cool the atmosphere by opening everyone's freezer door at the same time? Maybe it's time for a bri

An “important and deeply researched” (The Wall Street Journal) exploration of allergies, from their first medical description in 1819 to the cutting-edge science that is illuminating the changes in our environment and lifestyles that are making so many of us sick Hay fever. Peanut allergies. Eczema. Either you have an allergy or you know someone who does. Billions of people worldwide—an est

You make hundreds of decisions every day, from what to eat for breakfast to how you should invest, and not one of those decisions would be possible without emotion. It has long been said that thinking and feeling are separate and opposing forces in our behavior. But as Leonard Mlodinow, the best-selling author of Subliminal, tells us, extraordinary advances in psychology and neuroscience have pr