This book became famous as the suggestion in Chris Hadfield's 'An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth' for its excellent quality artistic photos. It proves the talent of Don Pettit as being not only a well trained astronaut, but also a professional photographer, and the printing quality of these pictures is excellent. It is a collection of stunning photographs from the ISS, a space station in continual freefall, and they are spellbinding images of our planet, its cities, weather patterns and landforms, a rainbow of blurry colourful stars shooting by, aerial shots of such familiar cities as Cairo where you can try and spot the pyramids, the Panama Canal, Chicago and nightscapes of cities with scatterings of lights in patterns, light and dark all with a story to tell. An urban core shaped by a modern master plan appears as a matrix laid out in a perfect grid. Older cities have more organic, even chaotic shapes. The scattered lights of the countryside form fractal patterns that resemble a snapshot from Mandelbrot space. 'I've lived in space for months on end. Light patterns readily become a guide to the part of the world passing below.' The Northern Lights, a European Space Agency un-piloted cargo vehicle approaches the ISS snorting fire from its nozzles, the transit of Venus across the face of the Sun in June 2012, there are even pictures of the Space Station toilet! See an Expedition 31 crew portrait, submerged coral sand dunes in the Bahamas, an erupting volcano in Patagonia, an asteroid impact crater, the Mongolian desert and even some amazing shots in black and white for the eyes to discover as new pleasures and new perspectives come into focus. Page after page covering nighttime, black and white, infrared, inner space, cities by night, star trails and shooting space which are the most spectacular colours. Save £40! 176pp, 25.4 x 33cm.
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Named a Best Book of 2021 by the Financial Times and a Best Science Book of 2021 by The Guardian. "Rovelli is a genius and an amazing communicator... This is the place where science comes to life." - Neil Gaiman. A startling new look at quantum theory, from the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and The Order of Time. One of the world's most renowned theoretical physicists, Carlo Rovelli has entranced millions of readers with his singular perspective on the cosmos. In Helgoland, he examines the enduring enigma of quantum theory. The quantum world Rovelli describes is as beautiful as it is unnerving. Helgoland is a treeless island in the North Sea where the 23 year old Werner Heisenberg made the crucial breakthrough for the creation of quantum mechanics, setting off a century of scientific revolution. Full of alarming ideas (ghost waves, distant objects that seem to be magically connected, cats that appear both dead and alive), quantum physics has led to countless discoveries and technological advancements. Today our understanding of the world is based on this theory, yet it is still profoundly mysterious. As scientists and philosophers continue to fiercely debate the meaning of the theory, Rovelli argues that its most unsettling contradictions can be explained by seeing the world as fundamentally made of relations rather than substances. We and everything around us exist only in our interactions with one another. This bold idea suggests new directions for thinking about the structure of reality and even the nature of consciousness. Rovelli makes learning about quantum mechanics an almost psychedelic experience. Shifting our perspective once again, he takes us on a riveting journey through the universe so we can better comprehend our place in it. "There is something called Schrodinger's wave equation, which explained the behaviour of atomic particles. We learn of this important concept before branching off into some theories such as many worlds, hidden variables, and physical collapses." 256 pages. Line art. Remainder mark.

'From Ancient Egypt to The Martian, A Deep-Space Dive into Our Obsession with the Red Planet', here is the most comprehensive look at our relationship with Mars yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using history, archival images, pop culture ephemera, and interviews with NASA scientists, Mars has been a source of fascination and speculation ever since the ancient Egyptians observed its blood-red hue and named it for their god of war and plague. It wasn't until the 19th century when 'canals' were observed on the surface of the Red Planet, suggesting the presence of water, that scientists, novelists, filmmakers and entrepreneurs became obsessed with the question of whether there's life on Mars. Since then Mars has fully invaded pop culture, inspiring its own day of the week (Tuesday), and many novels and movies from Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles to The Martian and to inspire advancements in exploration from NASA's launch of the Mars rover Perseverance to Elon Musk's quest to launch a manned mission to Mars through SpaceX. Mars has been a muse for many early writers and Isaac Asimov the great sci-fi writer, Arthur C. Clarke and The Empire Strikes Back have all been inspired by Mars, and not forgetting of course in the wonderful world of sweeties, the Mars bar. Beautifully decorated large softback with many colour photos, book covers, film stills, tales of pranksters, screwballs and believers, artists' impressions, Mars Exploration scientific photographs, news articles, early telescopes and all the big hopes and big misunderstandings about Mars through history. There is so much to be discovered. 20.5 x 25.4cm, 304pp in colourful well illustrated softback with tiny remainder mark.

In the 1950s, radio observations revealed the presence of often millions of solar masses of interstellar gas, showing that some galaxies emitted much of their power at radio wavelengths, a process requiring massive injections of electrons moving at nearly the speed of light. These data and x-ray observations led to the recognition that multimillion solar mass blackholes lurk in the centres of most giant galaxies. With the confirmation of the Big Bang model, it was obvious that galaxies had to form in the early universe and then evolve into their present-day structures. However, theoretical model for galaxies consisting of only normal baryonic matter failed to produce credible results and the answer came from an unexpected quarter. An extra invisible component, the dark matter halos, evidently surround galaxies and make up most of their mass. In the late 20th century, the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based 8-10m aperture telescopes opened the way to the study of useful galaxies. So where are we now? This book introduces the world of galaxies from a 21st century perspective with the help of fully realised why what we are seeing is one of nature's wonders. Very clear explanations, good graphics and wonderful galaxy pictures in colour, nice layout and typography. 22.3 x 25.9cm, small remainder mark. 256pp.

The music journalist has covered weird, rare and collectable records for Record Collector magazine and by mixing lo-fi charm into hi-fi science Scott's book is 'skipping with real analogue delight'. It is the story of recorded sound - the technological developments, the people that made them happen, and the impact they had on society, from the earliest inventions via the phonograph to LPs, EPs and the recent resurgence of vinyl. While Thomas Edison's phonograph represented an important turning point in the story of recorded sound, it came only after decades of invention, tinkering and experimentation. The book looks at the origins of record-playing machinery and the development of the first commercial discs. We learn about the rise of the LP record, the drama of competing speed and format wars, and the fall of the 7-inch, the story of a format repeatedly written off, threats from radio, tape, compact disc and download, vinyl only seems to endure and come back stronger. The story starts with grooves in tin foil in a workshop in New Jersey in 1877 and sees records evolving and blossoming to become a cornerstone for musical culture worldwide, and even into outer space. 320pp.

A profound meditation on climate change and the Anthropocene and an urgent search for the fossil - industrial, chemical, geological - that humans are leaving behind. Farrier explores what traces we will leave in the very deep future, from long-lived materials like plastic and nuclear waste, to the 50 million kilometres of roads spanning the planet. In modern times we have created numerous objects and landscapes with a potential to endure through deep time. Our carbon could linger on the atmosphere for 100,000 years, and the remains of our cities will still exist millions of years from now as a layer in the rock. These future fossils have the potential to tell remarkable stories about how we lived in the 21st century. Through literature, art and science, the book invites us to think about how we will be remembered by our distant descendants. Travelling from the Baltic Sea to the Great Barrier Reef, and from an ice core laboratory in Tasmania to Shanghai, one of the world's biggest cities, fossilised remains will speak of life rather than death. Even the contents of our sandwiches will tell a story. 60 billion chickens are killed for human consumption each year and in the future, fossilised chicken bones will be present on every continent within a layer in the geological strata, as a testimony to the intrusion of human appetites in the geological record. 'In my search for future fossils, I look to the air, the oceans, and the rock, from a bubble of ice drawn from the heart of Antarctica to a tomb for radioactive waste deep beneath the Finnish bedrock.' 307pp.

Entomologist and TV presenter Dr George McGavin looks at the weird and wonderful world of insects and reveals how they created our world and how they could shape our future. Insects conquered the Earth long before we did and will remain here long after we are gone. They outnumber us in the billions and are essential to keep many of the natural processes that keep us alive and that we take for granted, and every page is a very readable argument that we should appreciate the hidden world of six-legged creatures far more. McGavin takes a deep dive to reveal the unknown truths about the most successful and enduring animal groups the world has ever seen and explores not only the incredible traits that insects have evolved to possess, such as dragonflies that can fly across oceans without resting, or beetles that can lay their eggs exclusively in corpses, but also the vital lessons we have learned from them, including how therapy using maggots can save lives, and how bees can help grow rich tomato yields. The four distinct groups are millipedes and centipedes with elongated bodies and lots of pairs of legs, eight legged species such as mites and scorpions, crustaceans such as shrimp, crabs and lobsters and barnacles with a few terrestrial species such as woodlice and the fourth and by far biggest group are the Insecta, which comprise ¾ of all animal species, and well over half of all known species and their total biomass is at least ten times that of all humans and our livestock combined. Let's let that fact sink in... Crawling with detail and glowing with extraordinary facts and rich with humour and personality. 266pp.

Just the word makes you smile, let alone the shape, the look or if you're lucky the feel of them! Here line art boobs are sweaty, veiny, freckly, tiny-nippled, close set, teardrop, bell shape, round, relaxed, athletic, peachy, long, wide, enormous, medium sized, little sized, to reconstructed, hairy, double-mastectomy, half fed and squirty boobs, pregnant boobs and tan lined boobs. Pictured in fun, focussed cartoons in different shades, this is a real ice breaker of a book which ends on a more serious notes of how to check your breasts. 'This book is a call to celebrate the story our boobs have to tell and come to love what's on our chests.' Colour illus.
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The beautiful blonde arithmetician on Channel 4's longest-running quiz show Countdown, Rachel Riley has a Master's degree in mathematics, covering quantum theory, fluid mechanics and applied maths. But do you know your fractions from your percentages, your adjacent from your hypotenuse? Who really knows how to do long division? Fret not. You won't be at sixes and sevens for long with this brilliant guide as Rachel takes you back to the very basics to revisit what you learnt at school and may have promptly forgotten, giving you the essential toolkit to improve your numerical abilities. Packed with fool-proof methods, quirky trivia and puzzles to try, chapters include mental arithmetic, ravishing ratios, geometric bliss, trigonometry, algebra made awesome, graphs and other ways of displaying data, probability and statistics and thankfully all of the puzzle solutions. Rachel is the most personable and friendly guide. Mathematical diagrams and examples throughout. 376pp.

Mind and bottom-blowing facts from history, science, sport and the universe by the bestselling author of Does Anything Eat Wasps? Did you know that ostriches don't bury their heads in the sand, that powdered rice is used as cement in the Great Wall of China, what 60% of the human population cannot smell and what on earth rhinotillexomania is? From flatulence, the solar system and the Universe, history, life on Earth, food, maths, science, the ocean, transport, arts, music and films, sport, the weather, royalty, religion, politics, human body, there are huge scientific questions and a quest for knowledge and the seemingly trivial has never been more fascinating. 208pp, paperback.