Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in Science & Engineering

It's well known that Covid-19 may have come from a bat, but diseases are often transmitted in the other direction too. Humans have passed diseases to animals countless times through history, and it's the cross-currents of this relationship between humans, animals and disease that are explored by Liz Kalaugher in The Elephant in the Room.

Blood carries life, yet the sight of it makes people faint. It is a life-saver, and can transmit deadly infections. It is medicine, and a commodity dearer than oil. Each of us has nine to 12 pints of it, yet many don’t know their own blood type. For all its ubiqutousness, menstruation is perhaps the single most demonized biological event. In Nine Pints, Rose George takes us from ancient practices of bloodletting to a cutting-edge trauma ward. 

Each animal on the planet owes its existence to one very simple but crucial piece of evolutionary engineering: the egg. It's time to tell a new story of life on Earth.

A thoughtful, illuminating rumination on the life lessons we can take from those who work the land and the millennia of wisdom they draw upon when they go about their day, 'making a living by turning light and time into money'. As with his previous bestsellers, John Connell skilfully synthesises...

In the late 1940s, a handful of visionaries were working to steer Europe towards a more peaceful future through science, and CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, was duly born. James Gillies tells the gripping story of particle physics, from the original atomists of ancient Greece, through the people who made the crucial breakthroughs, to CERN itself, one of the most ambitious scientific undertakings of our time, and its eventual confirmation of the Higgs boson.

Brian Clegg's acclaimed popular science book Inflight Science explored the science experienced on a plane flight. Interstellar Tours takes that concept and goes large. It takes the listener on a tour of our galaxy on the starship Endurance.

Required to have a college education, speak two languages and possess the political savvy of a Foreign Service officer, a jet-age stewardess serving on iconic Pan Am between 1966 and 1975 also had to be between five foot three and five foot nine, between 105 and 140 pounds and under 26 years of age at the time of hire. Cooke’s intimate storytelling weaves together the real-life stories of a memorable cast of characters.

Leading transplant surgeon Dr. Joshua Mezrich creates life from loss, moving organs from one body to another. In this intimate, profoundly moving work, he examines more than one hundred years of remarkable medical breakthroughs, connecting this fascinating history with the stories of his own patients. Gripping and evocative, How Death Becomes Life takes us inside the operating room and presents the stark dilemmas that transplant surgeons must face daily.

Announced in 1912, the Schneider Trophy was a series of glamorous air contests, popularly known as races, that captivated both sides of the Atlantic. While there were many other aviation competitions, the Schneider proved to be, after a rocky start, by far the most memorable attracting a hugely popular and glamorous following whether Trophy races were held in Monaco, the Venice Lido, the Solent or Chesapeake Bay.

As end-of-the-world scenarios go, an apocalyptic collision with an asteroid or comet is the new kid on the block, gaining respectability only in the last decade of the 20th century with the realisation that the dinosaurs had been wiped out by just such an impact. Now the science community is making up for lost time, with worldwide efforts to track the thousands of potentially hazardous near-Earth objects and plans for high-tech hardware that could deflect an incoming object from a collision course - a procedure depicted in several Hollywood movies.

An iconic piece of design and style–and a gold standard in motorcycle engineering–the Triumph has roved through the twentieth century, making its mark in hearts and minds. Founded in Coventry in1885, Triumph Engineering had humble beginnings, importing bicycles and sewing machines. Little did anyone know that in the coming years the company would birth an historic series of motorcycles that have lit up the arenas of racing, popular culture and even warfare for well over a century.

The Victorians invented the idea of the future. They saw it as an undiscovered country, one ripe for exploration and colonization. And to get us there, they created a new way of ordering and transforming nature, built on grand designs and the mass-mobilization of the resources of the British Empire.

Britain has a single pod of orca, also known as killer whales, native to its home waters, although other orca visit from more northern regions. In 2014, Dr. Natalie Sanders joined the crew of the HV Silurian to seek them out and study them before we lose them forever. In The Last Sunset in the West, she discusses them one by one, and the many issues surrounding their lives in a captivating account that will take the listener deep into the history of our relations with the sentient and beautiful creatures.

It is hard to imagine that the busy townscape of South London was once a great wood, stretching almost seven miles from Croydon to Deptford or that, scattered through the suburbs, from Dulwich to Norwood, a number of oak woodlands have survived since before the Norman Conquest. These woods were intensively managed for a thousand years, providing timber for construction, furniture and shipbuilding, and charcoal for London's blacksmiths, kilns and bakeries. Now they afford important green space, a vital habitat for small mammals, birds and insects.

In the heroic days of rail travel, you could dine on kippers and champagne aboard the Brighton Belle, smoke a postprandial cigar as the Golden Arrow approached Paris or be shaved by the Flying Scotsman's onboard barber. Everyone from schoolboys to socialites knew of these glamorous trains. Andrew Martin recreates famous train journeys by travelling aboard their nearest modern-day equivalents, describing the disappearance of the extravagance and luxury.

Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid is the first major audiobook by a biologist to focus on the fascinating story of how the natural world is adjusting, adapting, and sometimes measurably evolving in response to climate change. Lyrical and thought-provoking, this audiobook broadens the climate focus from humans to the wider lattice of life.

The possibility of life elsewhere in the cosmos is one of the most profound subjects that human beings can ponder. Astrophysicist Andrew May gives an expert overview of our current state of knowledge, looking at how life started on Earth, the tell-tale ‘signatures’ it produces and how such signatures might be detected elsewhere in the solar system or on the many ‘exoplanets’ now being discovered by the Kepler and TESS missions.

Gavin Plumley considered himself a distinctly urban being… until he met his rural husband, Alastair. Together, they bought Stepps House—a three-storey building in Pembridge, Herefordshire—on love at first sight. But then came the inevitable question from an insurance salesman: 'How old is it?' The date they'd been given of 1800 seemed out by centuries. As Gavin traced Stepps House through various hands and eras, he uncovers a past steeped in history and art, memory and nature that resonates powerfully with our present.

A small group of eccentric researchers, experimenting on themselves from inside pressure tanks in the middle of the London air raids, explored the deadly science needed to enable the critical reconnaissance vessels and underwater breathing apparatuses that would enable the Allies' dramatic, history-making success during the next major beach landing: D-Day.

Former close protection officer Mickey Bale has a dangerous skillset. One that many men—good and bad—want to make use of. That's why a powerful Russian oligarch wants to hire Mickey to protect him. And with his wife gone and his track record with the Met in tatters, Mickey doesn't feel he has a choice. But when a terrorist attack kills a police firearms team, MI5 suspect that Mickey's new client and the Russian GRU are involved. The bomb was a Sunburn missile warhead, military-grade and able to vaporise everything in its blast radius. And there are more warheads out there.