Philadelphia's Mütter Museum has an expansive and historic collection of crania and bones and is home to the towering skeleton of the Mütter American Giant, the remains of a woman so tightly corseted for so long that the garments changed the very structure of her bones together with dozens of other people whose final act is to educate the rest of us of what lives inside. The place is populated by the remarkable dead, a medical mausoleum where bones have taken on a second life. Here is the story of lives stripped down, of the vascularised tissue embedded in an extracellular matrix containing type I collagen - bone. Bone is our structural core giving us support while acting as a foundation for our flesh and internal protection that wraps around our vital organs. It never moves by itself but is essential to our ability to move. Bone has manifested itself in wings, sails, horns, armour and an ever greater array of appendages and ornaments since the time of its origin. We can define bone by its biochemical components, its evolutionary history, its shape and variation, but to boil down bone to numbers, measurements or landmarks will always seem incomplete. The truth of the bone very much depends on who is looking at it. Bones is a marvel, an adaptable and resilient building material developed over more than 400 million years of evolutionary history. Arguably no other part of the human anatomy has such rich scientific and cultural significance, brimming with life and with a potent symbol of death. In this delightful natural and cultural history, Switek explains where our skeletons came from, what they do inside us, and what others can learn about us when these artifacts of mineral and protein are all we have left behind. He makes a compelling case for getting better acquainted with our skeletons and their surprising roles and he bridges the worlds of palaeontology, anthropology, medicine and forensics to illuminate the complex life of bones inside our bodies and out. The elegant and surprising tales make a lyrical love letter to the 206 or so bones in the human skeleton and the colourful figures studied them over the centuries, considering in turn dinosaurs, saints, kings and our own possible future. 276pp, line art.

From an MIT scientist, gifted historian and SpaceX mission manager, here is a thrilling and irresistible history of human exploration. In one single, book-sized expedition, Rader retraces a 10,000 year history from the Stone Age to the Space Age in a smashing narrative about the innately human drive to explore. From the days of antiquity and the classical world, the people of the sea and early wanderings, the chronicle take us to meet barbarians from the north, to travel to the Mediterranean, see China's age of exploration, plunder and gold, empires of trade, opening continents, frontiers of science, lands of ice and snow, and the space race to the sky, seen through robotic eyes, into the future the road to Mars, becoming spacefaring, going interstellar and life on other worlds. An exciting trip, 344pp, maps. Tiny remainder mark.

Cannabidiol is used for a wide variety of ailments, mainly related to pain relief, and can be bought in the UK from pharmacies and health food outlets, though care must be taken with dosage and the form in which it is ingested. An introduction outlines the various forms in which the oil can occur, including a chart of dosage by body weight, and we learn that the author herself cooks with full-spectrum CBD infused into a fat- or oil-based product. The recipes start with breakfast, where Hearty Breakfast Potatoes are fried in CBD coconut oil with the addition of garlic, onion, peppers and a range of spices. Other breakfast dishes include Simple Egg Scramble, Glazed Blueberry Muffins, Cinnamon-Baked Doughnuts, and CBD Avocado Toast. Mains are equally mouthwatering, with a bias towards vegetarian dishes, though they also include Shrimp Summer Rolls with Sweet Chilli Sauce and Fish Tacos. Each recipe can be adjusted to use different ingredients. Side dishes include Spinach-Artichoke Gratin and Roasted Ginger Carrots, and there are accompanying drinks such as a Calming Berry Vanilla Smoothie and a Rum Thai Iced Tea. Pet snacks are not forgotten, with a choice of 10 treats, and the book concludes with Self-Care recipes, including Face Masks (of the cosmetic type), toners, exfoliation scrubs and a massage oil. 160pp, a beautifully produced book with colour photos of every recipe. 20 x 24.2cm.

Learning is an adventure, but education is a process of selection and the results can be destructive. The criteria used to separate pupils of differing aptitudes are riddled with cultural assumptions, as the author discovered when he flunked a unit in his engineering degree in India. Nowadays he is head of Open Learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the journey that got him to one of the world's most prestigious universities also showed him the fallacies in modern educational programmes. Selectivity, starting with IQ tests which became popular in the 1930s, represents a massive squandering of resources, because IQ tests are contingent on surroundings and circumstances, and fluctuating scores within families of lower socioeconomic status indicate the disproportionate effect environment has in those groups. Over 100 years ago E L Thorndike regarded learning as a mass-replicable response to stimuli, while at the other end of the educational theory spectrum was Dewey, who approached the cognitive science of learning as a multi-layered process. Thorndike saw forgetting as a negative aspect of learning, but in the 1970s Robert and Elizabeth Bjork of UCLA posited that forgetting was an essential tool in the mind's armoury of storage and retrieval. Examining in detail the neurological processes involved in learning, the author charts the different schools of learning theory including Montessori, Piaget and Loewenstein. He follows memory phenomenon Claire Wang to Elon Musk's elite training campus Ad Astra, where the ultimate goal is to teach knowledge that will affect world outcomes. The experience reinforces his misgivings about elite education, and access rather than exclusivity continues to be Sarma's mantra. 321pp, paperback.

"3... 2... 1... We have lift off!" It was thirty two minutes past the hour and Apollo 11 saw humanity take a giant leap forward as the mission took off, shown on live television across the world. From 1903 when man was considering places "a place beyond the sky", to the "space age" between 1964 and 1966 and the "final frontier" between 1970 and 1979, this book offers readers the history of our journey from Cape Canaveral to the Moon. Transport yourself to 16 July, 1969: the day that saw nearly a million people gathered in Florida to wave off the first humans flying of to try and land on the moon, 239,000 miles away, and on which the US space team would beat the Russians who had been first to launch an artificial satellite, to fly past the Moon and the first orbit around the earth (during a 180-minute flight). Relive the excitement (and stress) of the landing as Neil Armstrong hovered above the Moon's surface to gently find the best landing spot more than half a minute passed the projected touchdown time and with the descent engine's fuel running dangerously low as it only had a few seconds of propellant remaining - all while Houston remained out of the know until Armstrong announced on the transmitter "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed". Learn about figures such as John F Kennedy, President of the United States, who realised that publicising flights on television would transform America's attitude towards spaceflight the way it had towards politics during the Cold War, and Wernher von Braun in the early days of the US space programme, the German rocket engineer who experimented with confiscated German V-2s on test range at White Sands, New Mexico, launching them as high as one hundred miles above the Earth. There also stunning photographs to pique the imagination, from the iconic image of Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface with Armstrong reflected in the mirror visor and the portrait of a grinning Armstrong in the lunar module after landing on the moon, to an action shot of the first Saturn V moon rocket being launched into space on 9 November 1967, astronaut Ed White floating at zero gravity after becoming the first American to walk in space during the June 1965 Gemini 4 mission, and an amusing image of what a human settlement on the Moon in 2024 may look like as part of the General Motors' Futurama exhibit at the 1964 - 1965 New York World's Fair. Soar above the Earth with this brilliant history that collates Cold War history, American politics and epic space travel in this fascinating book. Paperback, colour and black and white photographs, 370pp.

Sub-titled ' The Hundred Year Hunt to Cure the Deadliest Disease In History'. 'Even though the initial influenza tested to be negative, Murray now repeated it using a much more sensitive technique. It revealed that Autumn had had the H1N1 Influenza virus, the same virus behind the swine flu outbreak of 2009. In a matter of hours, the virus had destroyed her lungs and was now attacking her heart muscle.' 'Autumn was finally strong enough to return to work. Her medical bills were close to two million dollars. She pulled through because she was close to a medical facility?' An academic from University College, London, Dr Jeremy Brown explores the terrifying and complex history of the flu virus. He looks at the controversy over vaccinations and governments' roles in preparing for pandemic outbreaks. Although a hundred years of advancement in medical research and technology have passed since the 1918 disaster, Dr Brown at the time of writing his book was warning that many of the most vital questions about the flu virus continue to confound even the leading experts. In his book he talks with leading epidemiologists, policymakers, and the researcher who first sequenced the genetic building blocks of the original 1918 virus. How close are we to finding a cure? Timely, interesting, engaging and sobering here is the data, intuition and other weapons of war, the fault in our stockpiles, Tamiflu and the cure that wasn't there, the continuing hunt for a flu vaccine traced right back to enemas, bloodletting and whisky cures of the past. Remainder mark, 258pp, paperback. Cover may vary.

Sub-titled 'A History of the Heart In Eleven Operations' here is the cut and thrust of cardiac surgery demystified lest we forget that venturing into the thoracic cavity was once so daunting. For thousands of years, the human heart remained a deep mystery to medical science. Even as surgery made tremendous strides thanks to the progress of anesthesia and antisepsis, this one organ seemed untouchable. Then in the late 19th century, medics began going where no one had dared and the following decade saw the secrets of the heart exposed. Through the stories of 11 landmark operations, Thomas Morris shows the astounding achievements made by cardiac surgeons and the committed bravery, occasional arrogance, jealous rivalry, and incredible ingenuity they displayed in order to do the job. In the two pages before the Introduction are two stunning line drawings of the heart and its blood vessels and the interior structure with its parts named. It is easily forgotten that just 50 years ago heart surgeons were the most glamorous and best paid professionals in the world photographed with royalty and film stars in an almost exclusively male club. Today there are close to 50 centres of cardiac surgery in the UK alone and every developed nation has hundreds or even thousands of highly trained surgeons. Although the body count in this story is high, it is also full of unexpected recoveries, exhilarating moments of discovery, and celebrations of human ingenuity, those who held the surgical instruments are the heroes and heroines but also the armies of nurses, physiologists, engineers, biochemists and inventors who made this work possible and of course the many patients and their families who willingly allowed their bodies to be used as glorified laboratory specimens. Chapters include Blue Babies, Ice Baths and Monkey Lungs, Rubber Balls and Pig Valves, Metronomes and Nuclear Reactors, Clinical Trial by Media, Fantastic Voyage and I, Robot (Surgeon). 414pp, eight pages of photos the last of which is where the surgeon sits at a console controlling plastic-covered robotic arms.

A Grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die... Darwin's theory of natural selection issued a profound challenge to orthodox thought and belief: no being or species has been specifically created; all are locked into a pitiless struggle for existence, with extinction looming for those not fitted for the task. Yet The Origin of Species (1859) is also a humane and inspirational vision of ecological interrelatedness, revealing the complex mutual interdependencies between animal and plant life, climate and physical environment, and - by implication - within the human world. Written for the general reader, in a style which combines the rigour of science with the subtlety of literature. 392pp. Paperback reprint.

First published in hardback as 'James May's 20th Century', the book looks at how men in sheds have changed our lives in an unashamedly personal selection of magnificent machines, inventions and discoveries. In the space of just 100 years, the sky has filled with aeroplanes, humans set foot on another planet, the globe was shrunk by radio and television, the common man was liberated by the car and the motorcycle, we swam with exotic undersea creatures purely for recreation and we listened out for signs of life from the other side of the universe. We also investigated the nature of ourselves, learning to discover in our own bodies that there is just as much to discover as there is in the vastness of space. Here is the former Windows on the World Bar in the World Trade Centre 107 floors up making Manhattan look like a trophy cabinet of gleaming towers as we learn that only the hard Manhattan schist provides the ideal bedrock to support the massive foundations needed to build into the sky. Design, science, space travel, UFOs, electricity, cats? eyes and traffic signals, nylon stockings, artificial legs - the excitement of discovery is captured in the mood of the most exciting 100 years in history. Sharp writing from James May, 324pp in illustrated paperback.

Published by the Natural History Museum the author is internationally known for his research on the evolution and ecology of plants. Nature's Web is solar powered driven by the energy that land plants and ocean phytoplankton capture from sunlight and lock away in carbon compounds in their cells. Plants and phytoplankton not only feed all life on the planet, but by capturing carbon dioxide they help control the concentration of this gas in the Earth's atmosphere. Their capacity to lock-up carbon is now overwhelmed by the amount that we are returning to the atmosphere through burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil which now threatens to heat our world to levels that will change it beyond recognition. Regulation of the climate is just one of the services that biodiversity provides to humanity. Geologists of the future may look back at this mass extinction as equivalent to the one that ended the reign of the reptiles. A quarter of our mammals are threatened, 40% of amphibians and perhaps a quarter of land plants. All major ocean fisheries are over-exploited and many have collapsed. Life in freshwaters is threatened by pollution, over-extraction of water for human use, and by invasions of non-native species that destroy the fabric of nature's web. Climate change is tugging at the links in the web, threatening to dislocate relationships with unpredictable consequences. What can we do? We must halt deforestation, restore habitats and fisheries, create and protect reserves for nature, find sustainable livelihoods for the poor and feed our growing population without endangering biodiversity. Homo sapiens or 'wise human' should be up to the task. The authors of this book are passionate about biodiversity in this book of science distilled from independent studies and subjected to peer review. The book begins with taking a look at breakfast which contains the product of many species, the human ecological footprint including population density, land transformation, electrical power infrastructure and access to land. World population projections, a warning from Easter Island way back in 1772 with the discovery of the remains of over a thousand chicken houses standing testament to the large human population that the island once supported and of course those famous statues. There are geological timescale charts, superb diagrams, fact boxes, colour photographs of astonishing occurrences like a silent seashore dogwhelk inserting its proboscis into one of the smaller mussels attached to the rocks, gorging on its soft parts. Here are coal swamps, a chart of the evolutionary radiation of mammals and an evolution atlas, an explanation of how the Amazon basin became so diverse and extraordinary wildlife pictures of butterflies and insects and mammals and leaves and crops and amphibians in crisis. Beautifully presented with hundreds of pictures, 192pp in large softback.