Showing results by publisher "John Murray" in Science

WHAT IF... one man decided to answer all the unanswerable questions, using science. The Sunday Times-bestselling author and xkcd creator, Randall Munroe is here to provide the best answers yet to the important questions you probably never thought to ask The millions of people around the world...

The world's most eminent scientist of space explains why he believes in extraterrestrial life 'VISIONARY' Stephen Greenblatt Harvard's top astronomer lays out his controversial theory that our solar system was recently visited by advanced alien technology. In late 2017, scientists at a Hawaiian...

** THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ** 'Gripping... the wildlife is so fantastical that the images on the page feel like works of the imagination.' Evening Standard 'THIS IS THE STORY OF OUR OCEAN AND WE MUST WRITE ITS NEXT CHAPTER TOGETHER. FOR IF WE SAVE THE SEA, WE SAVE OUR WORLD. AFTER A...

Myth-shattering social scientist Brian Klaas dives deeply into the phenomenon of random chance and the chaos it can sow, taking aim at most people's neat and tidy storybook version of reality. The book's argument is that we willfully ignore a bewildering truth: but for a few small changes, our lives - and our societies - could be radically different. Offering an entirely new lens, Fluke explores how our world really works, driven by strange interactions and apparently random events.

DOES ANYTHING EAT WASPS meets INFORMATION IS BEAUTIFUL: A journey through life, the universe and everything. From what actually happened in the Big Bang to the accidental discovery of post-it notes, science is packed with surprising discoveries. Did you know, for instance, that if you were to...

Read by Ben Whishaw and Garrick Hagon, with an afterword read by Lucy Hawking. The world-famous cosmologist and #1 bestselling author of A Brief History of Time leaves us with his final thoughts on the universe's biggest questions in this brilliant posthumous work. How did the universe begin?...

The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation - of both human life and the natural environment - and the origin of our contemporary climate crisis. Tracing the threats to our future to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean, The Nutmeg's Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. The story of the nutmeg becomes a parable revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials.

'From a very early age I loved the countryside as much as any garden and was fascinated by the life that I saw all around me from trees, wildflowers, birds, insects and mammals. In a sense this book has been over sixty years in gestation. I have kept notebooks and journals ever since I could...

The world's most entertaining and useless self-help guide, from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the million-selling What If? and Thing Explainer. For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally bad that no one would...

The untold story of the heretical thinkers who challenged the establishment to rethink quantum physics and the nature of reality. Every physicist agrees quantum mechanics is among humanity's finest scientific achievements. But ask what it means, and the result will be a brawl. For a century, most physicists have followed Niels Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation and dismissed questions about the reality underlying quantum physics as meaningless. 

What's the nature of reality? Does the universe ever end? What is time, and does it even exist? These are the biggest imagination-stretching, brain-staggering questions in the universe - and here are their fascinating answers. From quantum weirdness to freaky cosmology (like white holes - which spew out matter instead of sucking it in), This Book Will Blow Your Mind takes you on an epic journey to the furthest extremes of science, to the things you never thought possible.

When Monty Don's golden retriever Nigel became the surprise star of BBC Gardeners' World inspiring huge interest, fan mail and even his own social media accounts, Monty Don wanted to explore what makes us connect with animals quite so deeply. In many respects Nigel is a very ordinary dog...

WINNER OF THE 2015 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD WINNER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY PRIZE 2016 'Dazzling' Literary Review 'Brilliant' Sunday Express 'Extraordinary and gripping' New Scientist 'A superb biography' The Economist 'An exhilarating armchair voyage' GILES MILTON, Mail on Sunday Alexander von...

As the celebrated author of Akenfield, Ronald Blythe, turns 100 this year, Next to Nature brings together a seasonal collection from the very best of a lifetime of writing. Ronald Blythe lives at the end of an overgrown farm track deep in the rolling countryside of the Stour Valley, on the...

From the ancient Greeks to Buddhism, our ability to check reality and recalibrate has fascinated philosophers for thousands of years. Yet it is only recently that we've developed the technology to create a rigorous science of self-awareness, what we call metacognition. Head of the Metacognition Lab at University College London, Stephen Fleming is the world's leading expert in this new field of neuroscience. In Know Thyself, he explains both the vast potential of metacognition and why it is that we still so often get it wrong. 

'LOEB IS AN ASTRONOMICAL SHERLOCK HOLMES' Washington Post 'A JOY IN CONJECTURE AND AN OMNIVOROUS SPIRIT OF INQUIRY. . . CARL SAGAN WOULD HAVE LIKED THIS BOOK' The Times From the iconoclastic Harvard astronomer and New York Times best-selling author of Extraterrestrial, an urgent explanation of...

You've got questions: about space, time, gravity and the odds of meeting your older self inside a wormhole. All the answers you need are right here. An eminent physicist at CERN and the cartoonist behind the hugely successful PhD Comics answer the most important, most outrageous and funniest questions about everything.

Our age will be defined by the climate emergency. But contrary to the doomist narrative that's taken hold, the world has already begun deploying the solutions needed to deal with it. On a journey across five continents, Climate Capitalism tracks the unlikely heroes driving the fight against climate change. Through stories that bring people, policy and technology together, Akshat Rathi reveals how the green economy is not only possible, but profitable.

No other life form on the planet has generated a brain like ours. How did a bundle of cells weighing just 1.2 kg give rise to conscious, self-aware beings capable of understanding time, language, mathematics and music, of exploring outer space and sequencing their own DNA? The answer to such questions is a seven-million-year saga. How the Mind Changed is the definitive audiobook on human brain evolution: a sweeping natural history.

Wild Fictions brings together Amitav Ghosh's extraordinary writing on the subjects that have obsessed him over the last twenty-five years: literature and language; climate change and the environment; human lives, travel, and discoveries. The spaces that we inhabit, and the way in which we occupy them, is a constant thread throughout this striking and expansive collection.