In a rather beautiful metallic navy blue tin box decorated with silver embossed bottles, contained within are 21 sonic feats to amaze your guests. Enjoy Glacial Glockenspiel in which the host plays it cool. Fill a baking tray with about 4cm of water and leave it in the freezer overnight. In the morning, remove the slab of ice and let it rest for around five minutes. With a large, serrated knife, gently and slowly saw the ice width ways into five slabs of decreasing size, in rough proportion. Scrape off the edges until they are fairly smooth and then put them back in the freezer for another few hours. Cut a cucumber into two, long flat strips and place about 8cm apart in parallel and balance the ice bars between them like railway sleepers. Your instrument is now ready. Your mallets, in this instance, are a pair of teaspoons. Virtuosi could use carrots as mallets with your ice now resonant, compose a hymn to polar extremes while we still have them and tap out a tribute to the penguins. Let the room temperature dictate how long your piece lasts and listen as it melts for new and undiscovered tunings. Free Jazz Popcorn needs the equipment of cooking oil, four saucepans, popcorn, tin foil, baking paper and elastic bands or string for a fantastic two minute drum solo. When the Marrow Blows involves a courgette and a wooden spoon and the Ballad of the Greengrocer a cucumber, knife, wooden spoon, apple corer or potato peeler, a carrot and a pepper. Purse your lips and blow through them like a high-pitched raspberry and place your fingers over the holes to make different notes. Dinner parties will never be tame again as you liven up evenings with these hilarious after dinner sound and music experiments, a favourite of which here is recreating the fizz and crackle of a barbershop quartet on an old-time gramophone. You're in for a good time. 21 handsome double sided colourful cards of a large size, get out those wine glasses now and start to sing! Pity the poor dog!

Smartly packaged in bottle green slipcase are 60 sturdy puzzle cards to quiz family and friends. The puzzles are linked to real world science, so you learn as you go through. Are there rainbows on the Moon? Can the Moon's light also produce a rainbow here on Earth? How do I make a toy boat? Does wind affect my mind? How could I tell if an egg is raw? How do you drive on ice? How do you walk on a tightrope? Should I run through the rain? How do you burst a barrel? Why do boomerangs come back? Why does a golf ball have dimples? Why do your feet feel cold on a wooden floor and of course how do you get an egg into a bottle? Bizarre, weird and wonderful puzzles from the world of science, each card has the full answer on the reverse. Perfect for organising that quiz night.

The hardback original edition had the sub-title 'Achieve the Impossible with the Apollo Mindset', and our new paperback edition 'How the Moon Landings Taught Us The 8 Secrets of Success.' The edition includes new stories and interviews from the team behind the Apollo 11 mission. Professor Wiseman presents a pioneering study of the mindset that took humanity to the Moon, and shows how you can harness and use it to achieve extraordinary things in your everyday life. Combining personal interviews, mission archives and cutting-edge psychology, he identifies eight key principals that make up the Apollo Mindset, including how pessimism is crucial to success, and how fear and tragedy can be transformed into hope and optimism. Lift off and find out how you can create ideas that are out of this world and shoot for the Moon, reap the rewards of self-belief, find out how you can learn from failure, develop an attitude that gives you altitude, find the courage to stop talking and start doing, how you can prepare for almost every eventuality and how you can thrive in the face of the unexpected. With useful timeline beginning in October 1957 when the Soviets launched Sputnik and November 1957 when Sputnik 2 carries Laika the dog into space and April 1961 when Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbits the Earth. 272pp, paperback with summaries and tips and Memos to Self.

From beneficial microbes to the way we eat, environmental chemicals we're exposed to, how we sleep and how we exercise, here you will discover natural, science-backed interventions to help you build your blueprint for strong immunity. Conduct a self-assessment to identify your weak spots, learn how to combat common and debilitating health challenges such as allergies, stress, infection and autoimmunity and how tweaking your lifestyle habits will allow your immune system to work at its best. Running deep into every aspect of our mental and physical health, our immune system is our wellness system, with vital roles far beyond just fighting germs. Learn the science of rest and the quality of sleep, healthy surroundings, gain mobility, muscle and momentum and navigate your immune-brain romance by supporting our immune system from the bottom up. The book will make sure you have all the tools to nail the best foundations and there are added in some nice-to-have extras for elevating your health. Learn about free radicals which are oxygen-containing molecules with an uneven number of electrons generated normally every day as part of our metabolism and used to fight off germs. As free radicals can be damaging to our own tissues, they are normally neutralised by antioxidants and if there is an imbalance, this results in biological damage to our DNA and the proteins that make up our bodies. This in turn can accelerate ageing and lead to a vast number of inflammatory health conditions. Rejuvenate your immune fitness, tackle gut and chronic inflammation and there are suggestions for snacks like less-meat meatballs, roasted chickpeas and the traditional oat baked Scottish dish made with whisky called Cranachan, a little like granola. Plus probiotics, pollen, hay fever, this experienced immunologist shares her 20 years' plus experience with us. 393 page paperback.

In the popular Haynes series and published in association with the Big Pit Museum Wales, the book reveals what it was really like to work in a coal mine and live in a community it fostered and includes interviews and anecdotes from miners and engineers. It explains in detail all the core engineering processes of underground mining from early bell-pits to modern long wall continuous mining. It explains key elements that made a mine function from shaft thinking, cage winding and mine layout, to manual and powered haulage, coal-cutting technologies and surface coal processing. It also looks at how successive generations of mining engineers have met perennial dangers through innovations in props and supports, ventilations, illumination, drainage systems, gas detection and much more. At its peak in 1920s, the British coalmining industry employed 1.1 million people with more than 1,300 mines across the nation producing nearly 300 million tonnes of coal for domestic and industrial use. Dirty and dangerous, and with complex engineering, extracting a raw material at depths of up to 1,400 metres below the surface, the roadways spread out from the pit bottom for many miles beneath town and country. Here are hundreds of colour and archive photos such as traditional safety lamps, an impressive diagram from 1908 showing a coal-washing plant, a duckbill loader, a continuous miner machine with a combined cutter and conveyer, a lattice steel headframe, pit ponies and early tram sledges pulled by a young woman in ropes and chains crawling on all fours along a basic wooden roadway. Covers history, engineering, technology and safety. 156 very large pages. Colour illus.

Does size matter? This ground-breaking book explores human size difference, specifically unusual bodies big and small, as a cultural marker in western scholarship, exploring miniaturism, giganticism, obesity, and the lived experiences of actual big and small people. The work addresses the use of physical measures to judge normalcy, goodness, gender identity and beauty while examining art, literature, folklore, social practices and scientific discourse ranging from the 17th century to the present. The book begins looking at the 'little man' (how Edmund Burke believed the miniature man inspired wonder) and small bodies, before moving on to big bodies and the concept of the "monstrous giant". Discover that the much loved fairy tale character Tom Thumb aligns with three characters in legend, a miniature valiant knight in King Arthur's court, a lustful and over-confident person who attempted to ravish a Queen and someone of similar stature who found success as an instructor, teaching children their letters and moral lessons in words of few syllables. One section of the book looks at the figure of the pygmy in postcolonial revision and brings Roald Dahl's 1964 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory under the lens, critiquing the Oompa-Loompa characters who are 'clearly constructed as African pygmies' as they are described as 'pure black' with 'fuzzy heads' and are no taller than Wonka's knee. While considering larger bodies, the author considers how giants have historically been thought of as not smart, whether that is Homer's Polyphemus tricked by Odysseus or an early edition of Jack the Giant Killer in which the young boy outsmarts the two-headed Welsh giant through clever sleights and illusions. The study also considers Ted Hughes' fable The Iron Giant and the modern idea of a friendship between boy and giant or boy and technology as the iron man (who also happens to be an enormous sentient machine) consumes metal in order to survive but handles the human boy sensitively. To bring the ideas and theories to life, the book also includes fantastic images such as the cover design for Tom Swift and His Giant Robot in 1954, Louise Lentz Woodruff's sculpture featuring an enormous robot guiding a young male and female figures, and a painting by Anthony van Dyck of Queen Henrietta Maria with Sir Jeffrey Hudson in 1633 which portrays the monarch with a favoured member of her household, the 'court dwarf' Jeffrey Hudson. Colour images, 346pp.

The growth of the scientific study of earthquakes is woven into this far-reaching history. The story begins with a series of earthquakes in England in 1750. Today seismologists can monitor the vibrations of the planet second by second, and the movement of tectonic plates millimetre by millimetre, yet even in the 21st century great earthquakes are still essentially 'acts of god', striking with much less warning than volcanoes, floods, hurricanes and even tornadoes and tsunamis. Since antiquity on every continent human beings in search of attractive landscapes and economic prosperity have made a Faustian bargain with the risk of devastation by an earthquake. Today around half of the world's largest cities, as many as 60, lie in areas of major seismic activity. Many such as Lisbon, Naples, San Francisco, Teheran and Tokyo have been severely damaged or destroyed by earthquakes in the past. Throughout history starting with ancient Jericho, Rome and Sparta, cities have proved to be extraordinarily resilient. Only one, Port Royal in the Caribbean, was abandoned after an earthquake. The book seeks to understand exactly how humans and earthquakes have interacted. In some cases, physical devastation has been followed by decline but in others, the political and economic reverberations of earthquake disasters have presented opportunities for renewal. After its wholesale destruction in 1906, San Francisco went on to flourish, eventually giving birth to the high-tech industrial area on the San Andreas fault known as Silicon Valley. An earthquake in Caracas in 1812 triggered the creation of new nations in the liberation of South America from Spanish rule. Another in Tang Shan in 1976 catalysed the transformation of China into the world's second largest economy. Other chapters look at grief and growth in the land of Gandhi, Gujarat 2001, the tsunami in the Indian Ocean 2004, and meltdown and after in Fukushima 2011. With chronology of earthquakes, maps and references, a very well illustrated 256 page Thames & Hudson 2016 first edition.

Make your own press-out easy to assemble four fantastic models of spacecrafts, without damaging the book and learn about the marvels of our solar system and explore the Milky Way through informative texts and vivid illustrations. The 3D models are assembled by tearing out the prepared cardboard pieces indicated by the dotted lines and in following the instructions like pasting the red flaps before placing the red cone over the engines or rolling the engines into a cylinder shape and paste them before attaching them to the stands. One huge and bright purple, one circular, one with a tripod stand and one your classic red coned space rocket, this is for all aeronauts ages 5-95. Extra large softback.

The Hubble Space Telescope is an astronomical observatory situated in space beyond the cloudy effects of the earth's atmosphere. Following the first Sputnik flight into space in 1957, astronomers immediately began to study the feasibility of such an observatory, and in 1965 NASA launched its programme for the Large Space Telescope, though it was unable to get funding until 1977. The original idea was for the LST to be permanently manned, but the development of the space shuttle in the 1970s led to a modified plan of occasional maintenance visits to replace instruments and upgrade as necessary. In 1983 the project was named after the astronomer Edwin P. Hubble, the early 20th century discoverer of new galaxies who led the way in proving that the universe was expanding, giving him a scientific status equal with that of Einstein. The book includes photos, drawings and specifications of key components such as the Support Systems Module or the high-gain Antennas (pictured here bearing the short-lived and unpopular NASA "worm" logo) which are hinged on opposite sides of the Forward Shell. Photographs of the telescope's structure include cross-sections of the Equipment Section, Light Shield and Forward Shell, with shots of the end elevation and deployed positions of the antennae, while a section on the scientific instruments describes the work of spectrographs and guiding sensors. A chapter on launch and deployment follows the telescope's inaugural journey and the corrective optics that became necessary as problems arose. When the LST was finally operating as well as intended, or even better, there were four servicing missions between 1996 and 2002, with advanced computers and cameras being fitted. This fascinating book, with colour photos and diagrams on every page, provides not only a history of the telescope but also an insight into its technical wizardry. 180pp, colour photos and diagrams.

The remarkable untold story of a miracle drug, the forgotten pioneer who discovered it, and the fight to bring Lithium to the masses. From insulin comas and lobotomy to incarceration, those who suffered bipolar disorder endured dangerous, ineffective treatments for centuries until a breakthrough in the 1950s offered salvation. Lithium's efficacy at both ending and preventing manic depressive episodes was discovered by John Cade, whose years running a psychiatric ward as a prisoner of war sparked a hunch that put him on the path to revelation. This miraculous metal has since salvaged an untold number of lives, but even after its healing power was discovered, it was decades before the medical community could be convinced that lithium was not only safe but life-saving. It has now prevented millions of suicides and salvaged an untold number of lives yet its fascinating story has been long overlooked. Psychiatrist Walter A. Brown traces the incredible life of Dr John Cade from his childhood among chronic mental patients, through his years as a POW in Japan to his work in a golden age of scientific research. Brown shows superbly well that Cade made his discovery without access to advances in technology or to modern facilities. Along the way he chronicles the foibles of 19th century pseudoscience, the difficulties professionals faced in giving up old ideas and the personal development of scientific imagination, and the challenges of translating clinical discovery into practice. Particularly insightful is the distinction between systematic scientists and artistic scientists, the former operating by rule, the latter by intuition. 222pp, paperback.