Coming Soon

In late 2017, scientists at a Hawaiian observatory glimpsed a strange object soaring through our inner solar system. Astrophysicist Avi Loeb conclusively showed it was not an asteroid; it was moving too fast along a strange orbit and leaving no trail of gas or debris in its wake. There was only one conceivable explanation: the object was a piece of advanced technology created by a distant alien civilisation.

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, shares what he has learnt in over a decade of studying climate change and investing in innovations to address climate problems. He explains how the world can work to build the tools it needs to get to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions - investing in research, inventing new technologies and deploying them quickly at a large scale. Gates is optimistic that the world can prevent the worst impacts of the climate crisis.  

Each day we pass dozens of small weather signs that reveal what the weather is doing all around us - and what is about to happen. The clues are easy to spot when you know how, but remain invisible to most people. In The Secret World of Weather you'll discover the simple rules that explain the weather signs. And you'll learn rare skills that enhance every minute you spend outdoors, whether you are in a town, on a beach or in a wilder spot.

In June 1925, 23-year-old Werner Heisenberg, suffering from hay fever, retreated to a small, treeless island in the North Sea called Helgoland. It was there that he came up with one of the most transformative scientific concepts: quantum theory. Almost a century later, quantum physics has given us many startling ideas: ghost waves, distant objects that seem magically connected to each other, cats that are both dead and alive. Today our understanding of the world around us is based on this theory. And yet it is still profoundly mysterious.

In 1799, a French Army officer was rebuilding the defenses of a fort on the banks of the Nile when he discovered an ancient stele fragment bearing a decree inscribed in three different scripts. So begins one of the most familiar tales in Egyptology - that of the Rosetta Stone and the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. This book draws on fresh archival evidence to provide a major new account of how the English polymath Thomas Young and the French philologist Jean-François Champollion vied to be the first to solve the riddle of the Rosetta.

Creation by Adam Rutherford tells the entire spellbinding story of life in two gripping narratives. The Origin of Life is a four-billion-year detective story that uses the latest science to explain what life is and where it first came from, dealing with life's biggest questions and arriving at a thrilling answer. The Future of Life introduces an extraordinary technological revolution: 'synthetic biology', the ability to create entirely new life forms within the lab.

How does Einstein’s description of space and time compare with Doctor Who? Can James Bond really escape from an armor-plated railroad car by cutting through the floor with a laser concealed in a wristwatch? What would it take to create a fully intelligent android, such as Star Trek’s Commander Data? Exploring Science Through Science Fiction addresses these and other intriguing questions, using science fiction as a springboard for discussing fundamental science concepts and cutting-edge science research. 

In This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs - opium, caffeine, and mescaline - and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs, while consuming (or in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants and the equally powerful taboos with which we surround them.  

Sea State is, on the one hand, a portrait of an overlooked industry, and a fascinating subculture in its own right: ‘offshore’ is a way of life for generations of British workers, primarily working class men. Offshore is also a potent metaphor for a lot of things we might rather keep at bay – class, masculinity, the North-South divide, the transactional nature of desire, the terrible slipperiness of the ladder that could lead us towards (or away from) real security, just out of reach...

Today many of us live indoor lives, disconnected from the natural world as never before. And yet nature remains deeply ingrained in our language, culture and consciousness. For centuries, we have acted on an intuitive sense that we need communion with the wild to feel well. Now, in the moment of our great migration away from the rest of nature, more and more scientific evidence is emerging to confirm its place at the heart of our psychological wellbeing.

In Sweden, refugee children fall asleep for months and years at a time. In upstate New York, high school students develop contagious seizures. In the US embassy in Cuba, employees complain of headaches and memory loss after hearing strange noises in the night. These disparate cases are some of the most remarkable diagnostic mysteries of the 21st century, as both doctors and scientists have struggled to explain them within the boundaries of medical science and - more crucially - to treat them. 

Why does it feel like something to be alive? For one of the boldest thinkers in neuroscience, solving this puzzle has been a lifetime's quest. Now at last, Mark Solms, who discovered the brain mechanism for dreaming, has arrived at his answer. More than just a philosophical argument, the Free Energy theory will profoundly change how you understand your own existence.

In 2004, Stephen C. Meyer, one of the preeminent scientists studying the origins of life, ignited a firestorm of media and scientific controversy when a biology journal at the Smithsonian Institution published his peer-reviewed article advancing the theory of Intelligent Design. Then, in his two best-selling books, Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt, he helped unravel a mystery that Charles Darwin did not address - How did life begin? - and offered further scientific proof to bolster his arguments on the history of life and our origins.

How can we defuse extremism, spur positive action, and win allies in the fight against climate change? Ask United Nations Champion of the Earth and World Evangelical Alliance climate ambassador Katharine Hayhoe.

Bushcraft and survival legend Ray Mears takes us on his own lifetime's journey through the natural world, into the British countryside and across continents, and shows us how to tune our senses, enhance our experience of nature, and understand our place within it. Guiding us through practical fieldcraft tips, Ray brings us up close with creatures we share our planet with, and reveals how we can learn from them, from the stealth of the leopard to the patience and stillness of the crocodile, and even the colour-changing camouflage of the octopus.

The best-selling author of Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs returns with a gripping account of how Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues launched a revolution that will allow us to cure diseases, fend off viruses, and have healthier babies. 

In this irreverent and illuminating popular science show, award-winning geneticist Dr Adam Rutherford teams up with mathematics guru Dr Hannah Fry to solve puzzling conundrums sent in by listeners. For the past five years, they've been scrutinising a cornucopia of cases using the power of science - from why people shout on their mobile phones to how much the bacteria in our body weighs. In these 50 episodes, they tackle topics including what makes gingers ginger, how to make the perfect cup of tea, whether being left-handed affects your brain and why we get static shocks. 

There’s no shortage of books about public speaking or language or song. But until now, there has been no book about the miracle that underlies them all - the human voice itself. Beginning with the novel - and compelling - argument that our ability to speak is what made us the planet’s dominant species, John Colapinto guides us from the voice’s beginnings in lungfish millions of years ago to its culmination in the talent of Pavoratti, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Beyoncé - and each of us, every day. 

In this memoir, Richard Fortey, one of our most brilliant scientists – a palaeontologist and natural historian – tells the story of how as a young boy he became fascinated with the natural world, leading to a long life and career exploring its secrets. He leads a journey through the botany and birds, fossils and fungi, using a different object to lead each chapter.

With stories that entertain as much as they inform, renowned evolutionist David Sloan Wilson outlines the basic principles of evolution and shows how, when properly understood, they can illuminate the length and breadth of creation, from the origin of life to the nature of religion.