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£26.00
We love to believe in a meritocracy of ideas – that greatness is always recognised, innovation always seized upon and rewarded. Yet so many of the people we now recognise as the world’s great creators initially got little traction for their work. It was only later, often much later, that their work comes roaring back to life and made a lasting impact. Discoveries as diverse as dark matter to continental drift, technologies from solar panels to the steam engine, artists from Brueghel to Vermeer to Melville all created ‘sleeping beauties’. Ranging across many centuries and the full scope of human endeavour, Byrne explores their stories and gives us a lens for identifying future breakthroughs. Humbling yet hopeful, these stories celebrate the courage to try new things and the wisdom to embrace them.
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£12.99
What’s the Difference? Mathematics offers crystal-clear explanations of the key maths concepts you really need to know.
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£20.00
What can we really know about the world around us? With clarity and lightness, physicist Carlo Rovelli guides us through the speculative depths of modern physics, unafraid to test their limits, not least because, as he suggests, there may be no final ground to reach. Electrons and minds, stones and laws, judgements and galaxies are not essentially different in nature from one another. They are ideas that illuminate each other. Reality, he shows, is shaped by this continuous play of reflections. From this emerges Rovelli’s central insight: the equality of all things. Like the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, who dreams he is a butterfly and wakes unsure whether he is Zhuangzi dreaming to be a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming to be Zhuangzi, Rovelli invites us to see reality anew, recognizing our knowledge is coherent but also uncertain and circular.
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£16.99
A rollicking exploration of why the stuff we use (mostly) works – and a celebration of the mad genius of the engineers who ensure that it does.
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£11.99
A research-backed framework to help you accomplish your most ambitious goals by honing and harnessing your most powerful yet underutilised resource: intuition. In ‘You Already Know’, Laura breaks down the science behind intuition, explaining how it is formed from external data, accumulated wisdom and the subconscious insights we don’t even realise we have. What follows is a gut feeling, which shifts our perspective and drives us to act. Grounded in Huang’s pioneering research and enriched with insights from hundreds of illuminating interviews, this book offers a practical model for becoming better at recognising, understanding and enhancing your intuition to accomplish your most ambitious goals. What’s stopping you from unlocking your full potential? You already know.
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£10.99
'Consummate and thorough' – The Times
'Darkly entertaining' – The Spectator
A superbly written work of narrative non-fiction by an exciting new talent, The Anti-Catastrophe League is a brilliant study of the people and their teams who are trying to save the world.
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£25.00
From evolution to capitalism, ‘survival of the fittest’ has shaped our view of the world. But we got it wrong – and our mistake has brought us to the brink. For the history of life on Earth is much more than a story of competition. The natural world has been forged and sustained by small miracles of co-operation between animals and plants, insects and fungi, fish and bacteria – these partnerships are ubiquitous, lifelong and are an essential guide for a better future. In ‘Togetherness’, Rowan Hooper reveals the intimate connectedness of nature through these remarkable stories of symbiosis. From the female wasp venturing deep inside a fig and the intricate relationship between corals and the algae that sustain them to the symbiotic gut microbes that influence our moods, he explores how co-operation is fundamental to life itself and to protecting our shared future.
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£12.99
Extraordinary but true stories from over two hundred years of angling history.
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£18.99
Changing your diet may not change your life. But changing how you think about what you eat will. From dopamine hacks to meal-replacement ‘protocols,’ optimisation culture promises peak health, but leaves us burnt out, disconnected and at war with our own bodies. Amid the noise of macros, hormones, cold plunges and dopamine detoxes, we’ve skipped the one step that makes any of it matter. In this groundbreaking guide, leading nutritionist Sarah Ann Macklin fuses the latest science of nutrition, gut health and neuroplasticity to reveal a radical truth: self-compassion is the foundation of lasting health and happiness. Far from being indulgent, her research shows that how you speak to yourself directly alters your stress hormones, digestion and even your ability to absorb nutrients.
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£22.00
Go back even a quarter of a century and few people would have heard of DNA, except perhaps in a forensic case. Now genetics plays a part of our everyday culture and our interest in genetics is booming, particularly in the form of direct-to-consumer genetic testing for health, family history and ancestry testing. Professor Turi King, the UK’s preeminent scientist in DNA and genetics takes us on a journey through the key cases, legal and otherwise, which explain modern genetics and how it now informs policing, personal histories, migration, politics and health. From eugenics, to mistaken dinosaur DNA, the OJ Simpson trial to Angelina Jolie’s BRACA1 gene, we are led through the science to discover how genetics has impacted and shaped our society, and how our growing knowledge of the building blocks of life can inform our understanding of our past and how it will affect our future.
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£12.99
This is a story about you. It is the history of who you are and how you came to be. It is unique to you, as it is to each of the 100 billion modern humans who have ever drawn breath. But it is also our collective story, because in every one of our genomes we each carry the history of our species – births, deaths, disease, war, famine, migration and a lot of sex. In this captivating journey through the expanding landscape of genetics, Adam Rutherford reveals what our genes now tell us about human history, and what history can now tell us about our genes. From Neanderthals to murder, from redheads to race, dead kings to plague, evolution to epigenetics, this is a demystifying and illuminating new portrait of who we are and how we came to be.
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£14.99
A new, beautifully illustrated edition of David Attenborough’s groundbreaking Life on Earth.
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£10.99
Within this book are a series of Open When style letters from Dr Julie to help navigate the moments of overwhelm, confusion or self-doubt that we all face when life gets messy. Offering calm, clarity and a laser focus on the best way forward, each personal letter is followed by real-time tools that will help you re-frame the situation and decide on your next move. Every chapter covers a new scenario; universal problems that each of us will likely face at some point. So, whether you are experiencing stress, pressure to perform, dealing with difficult people, trying to fit in, making big decisions, arguments with your partner, or big emotions are that causing anxiety, this book brings the words you need to hear to get back on the front foot, feeling ready to take on everything life throws your way.
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£12.99
When long-time AI expert and journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a non-profit with safety enshrined as its core mission, it was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely market forces. But the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that it requires an unprecedented amount of proprietary resources: the ‘compute’ power of scarce high-end chips, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans on the ground ‘cleaning it up’ for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the need for energy and water underlying everything. In this book, Hao recounts the meteoric rise of OpenAI and shows us the sinister impact that this industry is having on society.
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£11.99
Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it. In 2019, John Green met Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone while travelling with Partners in Health. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal and dynamic advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, treatable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing 1.5 million people every year. John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how TB has shaped our world and how our choices will shape the future of the disease.
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£12.99
One of the most inspiring and counter-intuitive thinkers of our age, the author of ‘Seven Brief Lessons on Physics’, transforms the way we think about the world with his reflections on science, history, and humanity. In this collection of writings, the logbook of an intelligence always on the move, Carlo Rovelli follows his curiosity and invites us on a voyage through science, history, philosophy, and politics.
The Anti-Catastrophe League 
