Книги жанра научно-популярная литература
‘Brilliant and fascinating. No one is better at making the recondite accessible and exciting’ Bill BrysonBritain’s most famous mathematician takes us to the edge of knowledge to show us what we cannot know.Is the universe infinite?Do we know what happened before the Big Bang?Where is human consciousness located in the brain?And are there more undiscovered particles out there, beyond the Higgs boso…
Obesity, autism, mental health problems, IBS, allergies, auto-immunity, cancer. Does the answer to the modern epidemic of ‘Western’ diseases lie in our gut?You are 10% human. For every one of your cells, there are nine impostors hitching a ride. You are not just flesh and bone, but also bacteria and fungi. And you are more ‘them’ than you are ‘you’.Your gut alone hosts 100 trillion of them and unt…
What is Life? Where did it come from? Why does it end?In this beautiful and definitive new book, Professor Brian Cox takes us on an incredible journey to discover how a few fundamental laws gave birth to the most complex, diverse and unique force in the Universe – life itself.There are thought to be as many as 100 million different species on Earth – each and every one governed by the same laws. E…
Top ten Sunday Times Bestseller‘Engaging, ambitious and creative’ GuardianWhere are we? Are we alone? Who are we? Why are we here? What is our future?Human Universe tackles some of the greatest questions that humans have asked to try and understand the very nature of ourselves and the Universe in which we live.Through the endless leaps of human minds, it explores the extraordinary depth of our kno…
Quantum Evolution presents a revolutionary new scientific theory by asking: is there a force of will behind evolution? In his astonishing first book, Johnjoe McFadden shows that there is.‘McFadden’s bold hypothesis that quantum physics plays a key role in the origin and evolution of life looks increasingly plausible. The weird behaviour of matter and information at the quantum level could be just …
Jonathan Franzen's ‘The Corrections’ was the best-loved and most written-about novel of 2001. Nearly every in-depth review of it discussed what became known as 'The Harper's Essay,' Franzen's controversial 1996 look at the fate of the novel. This essay is reprinted for the first time in ‘How to be Alone’, alongside the personal essays and painstaking, often funny reportage that earned Franzen a wi…
Over the years, millions of school children must have written out their address in the same way – their house number and street, their town, their country, their continent, planet Earth, the universe… Following this simplest of patterns, taking each line of the address as a starting point, Tim Radford explores our place in the scheme of things – why we are attached to a particular geographical pla…
The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum CryptographyFrom the best-selling author of Fermat’s Last Theorem, The Code Book is a history of man’s urge to uncover the secrets of codes, from Egyptian puzzles to modern day computer encryptions.As in Fermat’s Last Theorem, Simon Singh brings life to an anstonishing story of puzzles, codes, languages and riddles that reveals man’s continual p…
Winner of the Guardian First Book Award 2011Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction 2011Shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book PrizeShortlisted for the Duff Cooper PrizeNow, as cancer becomes an ever more universal experience, the need to understand it, and its treatment, has never been more compelling. In this groundbreaking and award-winning account Siddhartha Mukherjee tells the fascinati…
Our use of light at night is negatively affecting the natural world in ways we’re barely beginning to study. Meanwhile, our physical, psychological, and spiritual health are significantly influenced by darkness or a lack thereof; it’s not a matter of using light at night or not, but rather when and where, how and how much.We live awash in artificial light. Since the 1930s its increase has been gra…
In this provocative, mind-bending international bestseller, prize-winning neuroscientist Mariano Sigman reveals his life’s work exploring the inner workings of the human brain.Sigman's ambition is to explain the mind so that we can understand ourselves and others more deeply. He shows how we form ideas during our first days of life, how we give shape to our fundamental decisions, how we dream and …
Why is it that the behaviour of teenagers can be so odd? As they grow older, young children steadily improve their sense of how to behave, and then all of a sudden, they can become totally uncommunicative, wildly emotional and completely unpredictable.We used to think that erratic teenage behaviour was due to a sudden surge in hormones, but modern neuroscience shows us that this isn’t true. The Te…
From one of our greatest science writers, this biography of a beech-and-bluebell wood through diverse moods and changing seasons combines stunning natural history with the ancient history of the countryside to tell the full story of the British landscape.‘The woods are the great beauty of this country… A fine forest-like beech wood far more beautiful than anything else which we have seen in its vi…
A hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and prophetic writers in Europe: a relentless critic of the popular media’s manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumerism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But even though his followers included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely pr…
Steve Jones’s highly acclaimed, double prize-winning, bestselling first book is now fully revised to cover all the new genetic breakthroughs from GM food to Dolly the sheep. ’An essential sightseer’s guide to our own genetic terrain.’ Peter Tallack, Sunday Telegraph ’Superb and stimulating…an exhilarating trip around the double spiral of DNA, a rush of gravity-defying concepts and wild swerves of…