Showing titles in History

Brought to you by Penguin. From the celebrated author of The Ends of the World, an epic biography of the molecule that made – and could now break – everything we know All life is made from CO2 . It was there at earth’s birth, and throughout evolution. It has kept our planet habitable for...

In what he says is the most important piece of environmental writing in his long and award-winning career, Mark Kurlansky, best-selling author of Salt and Cod, The Big Oyster, 1968, and Milk, among many others, employs his signature multi-century storytelling and compelling attention to...

Combining technical rigor and deep up-to-the-minute knowledge about AI development, the natural sciences (especially neuroscience), and philosophical literacy, "What Is Intelligence?" argues—quite against the grain—that certain modern AI systems do indeed have a claim to intelligence, consciousness, and free will.

Greg Eghigian tells the story of the world's fascination with UFOs and the prospect that they were the work of visitors from outer space. While accounts of great wonders in the sky date back to antiquity, reports of UFOs took place against the unique backdrop of the Cold War and space age. After the Flying Saucers Came traces how a seemingly isolated incident sparked an international drama involving shady figures, questionable evidence, suspicions of conspiracy, hoaxes, new religions, scandals, unsettling alien encounters, debunkers, and celebrities.

The story of the men and women who drove the Voyager spacecraft mission— told by a scientist who was there from the beginning. The Voyager spacecraft are our farthest-flung emissaries—11.3 billion miles away from the crew who built and still operate them, decades since their launch. Voyager...

You never knew that theoretical physics could be so simple! In this exciting and significant audiobook, Andrew Thomas reveals how all unifications in physics have been based on incredibly simple ideas.

Brought to you by Penguin. Summer 1939. War is coming. The British believe that, through ingenuity and scientific prowess, they alone have a war-winning weapon: radar. They are wrong. The Germans have it too. They believe that their unique maritime history means their pilots have no need of...

Financial Times Book of the Year Telegraph Top 50 Books of the Year Guardian Book of the Year New Statesman Book of the Year ‘Roundly debunks racism’s core lie – that inequality is to do with genetics, rather than political power’ Reni Eddo-Lodge For millennia, dominant societies have...

For over two thousand years, from the Medieval Arabic world to the midst of the covid-19 pandemic, scientific progress has relied on different methods of establishing fact from fiction. Achieve logical perfection, the reasoning went, and you would be rewarded with ultimate, universal truth. But there is far more to proof than axioms, theories and laws: when demonstrating that a new medical treatment works, persuading a jury of someone's guilt, or deciding whether you trust a self-driving car or a financial transaction, the weighing up of evidence is far from simple.

Space: the biggest geopolitical story of the coming century – new from the multi-million-copy international bestselling author of Prisoners of Geography. Spy satellites orbiting the moon. Space metals worth more than most countries’ GDP. People on Mars within the next ten years. This isn’t...

John Forbes Nash, Jr., a prodigy and legend by the age of 30, dazzled the mathematical world by solving a series of deep problems deemed "impossible" by other mathematicians. But at the height of his fame, Nash suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown and began a harrowing descent into insanity, resigning his post at MIT, slipping into a series of bizarre delusions, and eventually becoming a dreamy, ghostlike figure at Princeton, scrawling numerological messages on blackboards.

Brought to you by Penguin. The BBC presenter of 'Sky at Night', and Gresham Professor of Astronomy, Chris Lintott, takes us on an astonishing tour of bizarre accidents, big characters, and human error to tell the story of some of the most important astronomical events of the past hundred years...

‘This splendid and often moving work of history… Schama has a gift for combining novelistically colourful detail, serious analysis and wryly amusing asides’ Daily Telegraph ‘Superb’ Observer ‘Extraordinary… A meticulous retelling of a terrible yet scientifically innovative...

A crime scene. A murder. A mystery. The most important person on the scene? The forensic scientist. And yet the intricate details of their work remains a mystery to most of us. Silent Witnesses looks at the history of forensic science over the last two centuries, during which time a combination of remarkable intuition, painstaking observation, and leaps in scientific knowledge have developed this fascinating branch of detection.

When Donald Johanson found a partial skeleton, approximately 3.5 million years old, in a remote region of Ethiopia in 1974, a headline-making controversy was launched that continues today. Bursting with all the suspense and intrigue of a fast-paced adventure novel, here is Johanson’s lively account of the extraordinary discovery of “Lucy.” By expounding the controversial change Lucy makes in our view of human origins, Johanson provides a vivid, behind-the-scenes account of the history of paleoanthropology and the colorful, eccentric characters who were, and are, a part of it.

Illness is not simply a matter of biology. Our thoughts, conscious or otherwise, can make us feel pain or become unwell. If you experienced side effects from your Covid vaccine, the chances are that these were caused by your belief that you would experience them. When a nurse tells you 'this is...

We measure rainfall and radiation, the depths of space and the emptiness of atoms, calories and steps, happiness and fear. If we could not measure then we could not observe the world around us; we could not experiment, learn, and co-operate. But why did this urge to measure flourish? And when did measurement become ubiquitous? It is an incredible story that spans hunter-gatherer societies to ancient Egyptians, the French Revolution to the relentless quantification of the 21st-century self. It is a tale that tracks humanity's search for dependable truths in a chaotic universe.

How did an obscure academic idea pave the way to the Holocaust within just fifty years? Why does eugenics still loom large in the 21st century, despite its genocidal past? Did eugenics work? Could it work? Or was it always a pseudoscientific fantasy? Throughout history, people have sought to...

Dava Sobel, acclaimed and bestselling author of Longitude, chronicles the life and work of the most famous woman in the history of science – and the untold story of the young women who trained in her laboratory. ‘A fresh and feminist study of the pioneering Nobel laureate reveals her impact...

The fascinating story of America's secret post-WWII science programs, from the New York Times bestselling author of Area 51 and Biological War. “This book is a remarkable achievement of investigative reporting and historical writing.” ―Boston Globe In the chaos following World War II, the...