'A quietly radical, three-dimensional view of issues such as reproduction, birth, death and disability that has the power, at times, to make you stop mid-sentence and carefully reassess some of your most basic assumptions.' - Scotsman. In a deft mix of the clinical and the lyrical, Francis moves skilfully between the scientific and aesthetic, anatomical fact and emotional consequence in his beautifully written and elegant series of essays. Drawing on his experiences as a doctor, he blends stories from the clinic with reflections on the way the body has been imagined and understood over millennia, offering new perspectives on everything from the ribbed surface of the brain to the unique engineering of the foot. His chapters are headed Brain, Head, Chest, Upper Limb, Abdomen and Pelvis, Lower Limb and cover Neurosurgery of the Soul, Seizures, Sanctity and Psychiatry, The Eye: A Renaissance of Vision, Face: Beautiful Palsy, Inner Ear: Voodoo and Vertigo, Heart: On Seagull Murmurs, Ebb and Flow, Shoulder: Arms and Armour, Wrist and Hand: Punched, Cut and Crucified, Kidney: The Ultimate Gift and Large Bowel and Rectum: A Magnificent Work of Art among them. From the threshold of life and death of the womb, to tips of our feet and toes, this is an extraordinary journey through the most intimate landscape of all - our own bodies. Index, 252pp, illustrated paperback.

Astrology combines two powerful human tendencies: our compulsion to find connections in everything, and our fascination with ourselves. The earliest civilisations had astrological structures, most famously Egypt's pyramids and our own Stonehenge, and what they may have meant for their originators is a centuries-old conundrum. For Boxer, astrology is intimately bound up with the development of science, and to start with he takes us through "a quick spin around the celestial sphere". In second-century Alexandria, the intellectual capital of the world, a remarkable collection of 123 unique horoscopes have been preserved, prompting the author to compute mathematically the probability of a horoscope's being repeated. Is it really unique? A chapter on algorithms follows, with the author discussing a 13th century system of Houses which seems to him to embody a theoretical ideal. Tycho, Kepler and the Gregorian Calendar play their part in the story, and "Big Astrology" examines the popular revival of astrology that strangely coincided with 20th century space exploration of the moon, turning it into a source of empirical data. The astrological almanac trade was at its highest in the 16th century and then became eclipsed, as one might say, until Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society gave it new impetus in the late 19th century. In 1930 the Sunday Express in London became the first modern newspaper to publish a horoscope, and it struck lucky by predicting that the infant Princess Margaret would experience important events at the age of seven, which she did in the form of the abdication that made her father King. A fascinating history. 319pp, colour photos, diagrams.

Sub-titled 'The Science of What Makes You You' the book gets right to the heart of what makes us tick. Popular science master Brian Clegg investigates what makes you the unique individual that you are. From the atomic level through life itself to consciousness, genetics and personality, we explore how your DNA, your memories, your flesh and bone has come to be. Full of fascinating true stories featuring royal ancestors, stellar deaths, real-life hobbits, and a self-reproducing crayfish to name a few, this wide-ranging exploration is a one-of-a-kind voyage of 'self' discovery. Chapters include Exponential Doubling, Chemical Components of You, The Cosmologist's Time Machine, The Star Dust Factories, The Life Thermodynamic, Feeding the World, Climate Change is Happening, Becoming A Mega-Brain, On Automatic Pilot, Going Batty, Words At the Speed of Light, Inhuman Computers, Polls Aren't Facts, Living in Chaos, Genes and Pathways, You Are What You Eat and more. 240pp, illus. paperback.

On a daily basis Consultant Paediatric Neurosurgeon Jay Jayamohan makes life-and-death decisions on the most vulnerable and fragile members of society - babies and children. Daily, parents and carers put their faith in him and his team. Developments in the field of neurosurgery have been massive over recent years, and many of the everyday procedures Jayamohan undertakes would have been undreamt of only a few years ago. Despite this he is on the cutting edge of his work in this area and faces new and puzzling challenges every day. Many of his patients are faced with a lifetime of surgery, with each step along the treatment path often leading to unknown or unexpected repercussions. Though he is proud of his successes he learns from every procedure that goes wrong. Compassionate, frank and revelatory, his book portrays a man faced with potentially devastating decisions who's driven to help as many children as possible. 'There are two ways to open a child's head. The pretty way and the quick way. Usually I shave the hair, use a scalpel to nick the skin then apply an electro-cautery device to burn down to bone level. It's a slow, precise method and leaves almost no scarring. But it takes time. Time, the interminable single note of the heart monitor reminds me, I don't have.' Jayamohan is an Asian who struggled in 1970s Britain as an Asian growing up and he has been featured in two highly acclaimed BBC fly-on-the-wall series following the work of neurosurgeons and their highs and lows. He is truly an inspirational man. 256pp.

Bart Simpson's solution to the risk of an asteroid impact was to "party hard and wreck the place", and many people would echo that fatalistic judgment. The author concludes this no-nonsense guide by detailing the ways in which cosmic impact could be avoided, arguing that rather than seeking to explode the space invader with possible disastrous consequences to its destination as well, deflection is the modern scientific alternative. Earth has only one easily recognisable impact crater, the Meteor Crater in Arizona which is less that fifty thousand years old. For those who know what to look for, however, Earth has many more craters, for instance the 200 km-wide Chikxulub Crater on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula from 66 million years ago, which landed in an explosion five billion times worse than Hiroshima and extinguished the dinosaurs. Famous comets have often been considered to be bad omens, for instance Halley's Comet which appeared before the Battle of Hastings, though as the author points out, it must have been seen by both sides. Halley's is predictable, but in our own time Hale-Bopp of 1997 emerged as a surprise out of its elongated orbit. Pseudo-scientists have had a field day misinterpreting comets, for instance Immanuel Velikovsky in the 1950s, who based his theories on the belief that Jupiter had created a comet by colliding with Saturn. There is now a worldwide effort to protect our planet by monitoring the risk of comet impact. 168pp, paperback, black and white photos and diagrams.

A collaboration between ten authors, the book is sub-titled 'How the Modern World Was Changed by Technology'. It is a refreshing new 'take' on the history of technology and some of the most important aspects of modern development to culture and the many challenges they present to the modern world. We look at primitive ploughing, water wheels, windmills, lighthouses and space shuttles, the development in feeding people and agriculture, milling, the Industrial Revolution and power for industry and society, buildings and civil engineering, a brief history of shipping, the steam revolution on land and sea, a brief history of aeronautics, modern communications, technology and medicine, warfare and technological prospects into the future. It is an account of the tremendous transformative effect on human societies in the last two million years, particularly the last three centuries, the period of 'High Technology'. Humankind has acquired huge powers in the period since 1700. Man has tamed animals to help them in their hunting, improved crude stone implements to create well-shaped tools and weapons, devised intricate techniques of linguistic communication and discovered how to make and control fire. Stonehenge was built in stages over many years, but it was certainly in construction and use around 2000BC. Its stones were fixed in place by mortise and tenon joints, representing a dramatic advance in stone working techniques and marks a new phase of Median Technology in Western Europe. Superbly well illustrated in colour and black and white, 229 large glossy pages, diagrams.

To understand the Universe we must first comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed, the language of mathematics. The book is not merely a history of scientific learning but a stirring defence of Enlightenment values in the quest for human advancement, and how mankind discovered the size, trajectory and age of the Earth. Our planet's elliptical orbit around the Sun and its billions-of-years existence are facts we take for granted, but humanity's struggle towards these scientific truths have lasted millennia. Krivine tells the story of the thinkers and scientists whose work allowed our species to put an age to the planet and pinpoint our place in the solar system. It is a history of bold innovators - not only Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, but Halley, Kelvin, Darwin and Rutherford among many others. Courage, iniquity, religious dogmatism, genius and blind luck all played a part of freeing the mind from the constraints of cant, ideology and superstition. Chapters include The 20th Century and Radio Activity, The Construction of Heliocentrism and The Battle Over It. The crucial question of knowing whether earth really is immobile, the centre of the universe lay at the root of the battle between the Catholic Church and Galileo, and like many historical battles it has often been simplified. Until the 18th century, scientists (intellectuals) were all believers, even men of the church. Galileo was far from being isolated or misunderstood. Just like Kepler, with whom he corresponded, he was honoured as one of the leading mathematicians of his time and the protégé of the future Pope Urban VIII, who nonetheless had him condemned in 1633. Giordano Bruno and Tycho Brahe, the first a mystic obsessed by a vision of the cosmos, the second a meticulous observer of the positions of the heavenly bodies, were totally different individuals on different paths. Both helped to shatter Ptolemy's construction. Page turning history, beautifully told. 282pp, dozens of diagrams.

The science presenter, journalist and author who writes for BBC's Science Focus magazine developed her love of wildlife while growing up in the Caribbean. Here we are taken into adventures that changed everything, from the navigational instruments that have led us through unknown lands, to the advanced engineering that carried us into the depths of the ocean, to the rocket science that propelled us into space. Our insatiable curiosity has driven our survival as a species and here we can chart the ground-breaking sea voyage in 1735 that settled the debate raging between Descartes and Newton about the shape of the earth, to the balloon ride that led to the discovery of cosmic rays, and adventures yet to come, and whether some regions would be better left untouched by human hands. We go into the Amazon, read about an amorous butterfly collector Margaret Fountaine born in 1862, about SA Agulhas gliding slowly under Tower Bridge emblazoned with the words Seeing is Believing, the Great Northern Expedition, finding the Titanic, a cutaway drawing of a space shuttle, a huge robotic arm of the International Space Station and the Gedi mission of December 2018 and out to worlds beyond. 272pp, illus.

The story of life on Earth began in the sea which was mostly shallow and very warm and contained a potent blend of the chemicals that were to become the stuff of living organisms. Popularly known as 'primordial soup', molecules mixed and mingled and reacted with one another, creating new copies of itself. Seaweeds have their origins in the very earliest multicellular life on Earth and have been used medicinally by human for centuries. The first fish-like animals were small, jawless creatures known as agnathans and here are examples of Late Jurassic fossils which have clearly preserved the shape of the earliest bony fish. As marine scientists begin to penetrate even the most inaccessible of ocean depths, there has never been a better time to learn about the bizarre and beautiful creatures below water. Produced on very glossy large white pages and with hundreds of colour artworks and photographs, sections cover the major types of marine habitat, sea watching, and a world directory of 600 marine species including sponges, corals, jelly animals, worms, crustaceans, molluscs, echinoderms, fish, reptiles and sea mammals. Read about the plate-like armour of creatures that endure the crash of the incoming tide, the reefs that teem with colourful life, and the formidable creatures that hunt in remote waters. Each profile contains habitat type, size, breeding and feeding behaviour. In over 1000 colour photos, we can meet new creatures like the Lantern Fish, Opah and Ribbon Fish, Crocodilians like the Marine Iguana, the flashily coloured Scorpion Fish like the Red Lionfish, Sawfish and Electric Rays with their razor teeth, stunning starfish to stoutly built Blenny. 256 large pages, 1000 illus and photos.
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The Pacific accounts for nearly half the earth's water surface, falling to a depth of seven miles, and this gorgeously illustrated book, divided into the four categories Passionate, Voracious, Mysterious and Violent rises magnificently to the challenge of depicting a major natural phenomenon. Symbolising nature at its most terrible, the Great White Shark is endowed with keen sensory organs, identifying a single drop of blood in 10 billion of water. The Blue Whale is the largest animal ever to have lived on earth, stretching to 30 metres as an adult and with a heart the size of a Volkswagen Beetle car. In social terms Blue Whales are solitary creatures but they have the loudest, strongest vocalisations on the planet, calling to each other across a distance of 1000 miles. Another massive creature is Nomura's Jellyfish, now causing trouble for Japanese fishermen as a result of global warming. The yellow-eyed penguin is one of the world's rarest, a model parent who never leaves the chicks unguarded. One of the most spectacular-looking creatures of the Pacific is the Red Lionfish, striped and bristling with spikes capable of delivering a lethal sting. The Galapagos Archipelago has one of the highest levels of endemism, or species unique to the place, on the planet. A prime example is the Marine Iguana, captured here in close-up with some superb photography. There are also fine pictures of Galapagos tortoises and their predators, the Galapagos Hawks. The white spotted pufferfish creates patterns like crop circles on the seabed, while the Firefly Squid is surrounded by luminescence while spawning. The edge of the Pacific, particularly the northwest, encompasses a volatile geological cauldron known as the Ring of Fire, while the world's largest tidal bore, known as the Silver Dragon, occurs near the Chinese city of Hangzhou. A fascinating and wonderfully illustrated book which blends a wealth of stunning Ultra HD images with spellbinding storytelling to take you into a realm teeming with exotic life rarely witnessed up close, until now. 240pp, landscape format, colour photos on most pages.
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