Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Science & Engineering

As the country's top forensic pathologist, Dr Richard Shepherd has spent a lifetime uncovering the secrets of the dead. When death is sudden or unexplained, it falls to Shepherd to establish the cause. Each post-mortem is a detective story in its own right - and Shepherd has performed over 23,000 of them. Through his skill, dedication and insight, Dr Shepherd solves the puzzle to answer our most pressing question: how did this person die?

In 2015, England's last and loneliest golden eagle died in an unmarked spot among the remote eastern fells of the Lake District. It was a tragic day for the nation's wildlife, but the fight to restore the landscape had already begun. Lee Schofield, ecologist and site manager for RSPB Haweswater, is leading efforts to breathe life back into two hill farms and their 30 square kilometres of sprawling upland habitat. The farms sit at the edge of the region's largest reservoir, beneath which lie the remains of a submerged village.

Guenther Steiner is one of motor racing's biggest and most celebrated characters, known to millions for his show-stealing appearances on Netflix's hugely popular fly on the wall series, Drive to Survive. In Surviving to Drive, the Haas team principal takes readers inside his Formula 1 team for the entirety of the 2022 season, giving an unobstructed view of what really takes place behind the scenes. Through this unique lens, Guenther takes us on the thrilling rollercoaster of life at the heart of high stakes motor racing.

Neither plant nor animal, it is found throughout the earth, the air and our bodies. It can be microscopic, yet also accounts for the largest organisms ever recorded, living for millennia and weighing tens of thousands of tonnes. Its ability to digest rock enabled the first life on land, it can survive unprotected in space and it thrives amidst nuclear radiation. In this captivating adventure, Merlin Sheldrake explores the spectacular and neglected world of fungi: endlessly surprising organisms that sustain nearly all living systems.

Nobody needs telling that there isn't enough time. We're obsessed by our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, the struggle against distraction and the sense that our attention spans are shrivelling. Yet we rarely make the conscious connection that these problems only trouble us in the first place, thanks to the ultimate time-management problem: the challenge of how best to use our 4,000 weeks. Four Thousand Weeks is an uplifting, engrossing and deeply realistic exploration of this problem.

Sand, iron, salt, oil, copper and lithium. The struggle for these tiny, magical materials has razed empires, demolished civilizations, fed our greed and our ingenuity for thousands of years. But the story is not over. We are often told we now live in a weightless world of information but in fact we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. And it's getting worse. To make one bar of gold, we now have to dig 5,000 tons of earth. For every tonne of fossil fuels, we extract six tonnes of other materials - from sand to stone to wood to metal.

In the Rutherford and Fry's comprehensive guidebook, they tell the complete story of the universe and absolutely everything in it - skipping over some of the boring parts. It's a celebration of the weirdness of the cosmos, the strangeness of humans and the very fact that amid all the mess, we can somehow make sense of life.

Internationally renowned political commentator Noam Chomsky examines America's pursuit and exercise of power in a post-9/11 world. Noam Chomsky is the world's foremost intellectual activist. Over the last half century, no one has done more to question the great global powers who govern our lives, forensically scrutinizing policies and actions, calling our politicians, institutions and media to account. The culmination of years of work, Who Rules the World? is Chomsky's definitive intellectual investigation into the major issues of our times.

October 24th, 2023 will mark 20 years since Concorde disappeared from our skies. Yet still Mike Bannister, the last Concorde Chief Pilot, faces the same questions. Concorde is an enthralling personal account of what it takes to fly planes faster than the speed of sound, and of the events that lay behind 114 needless deaths—the 113 victims of the crash and, ultimately, Concorde herself.

The existence of free will - our ability to choose between one course of action and another, to determine our own destiny - is a foundation stone of Western society, dictating our notions of fairness and justice, punishment and reward, our very identity as individuals and humans. But as world-renowned scientist Robert Sapolsky shows, there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that free will exists, even while everything in our biology leads us to believe that it does.

Chris Harris has driven more cars than most people could ever dream of. His vast knowledge is legendary. He calls it 'unhinged geekery'. But we call it infectious enthusiasm, adrenaline-fueled escapism and peerless journalistic rigour and integrity. And then there are his famous skills at the wheel, from city cars to rally cars, F1 to vintage, not forgetting the Guinness World Record 3.4km sideways in an electric car. And now for the first time, Harris is going all out with that unhinged geekery, and takes us down the road of his life-long adventure with the automobile

When Churchill's top secret Special Operations Executive needed to destroy the Gestapo HQ in the centre of downtown Copenhagen to prevent a devastating Nazi last stand that might prolong the war for many months, there was only one machine for the job - the Mosquito. This is the story of that legendary aircraft told through that one impossible mission.

The acclaimed Science of Discworld centred on an original Pratchett story about the Wizards of Discworld. In it they accidentally witnessed the creation and evolution of our universe, a plot which was interleaved with a Cohen & Stewart non-fiction narrative about Big Science. In The Science of Discworld II our authors join forces again to see just what happens when the wizards meddle with history in a battle against the elves for the future of humanity on Earth. London is replaced by a dozy Neanderthal village.

What does it mean to be female? Mother, carer, the weaker sex? Think again. In the last few decades a revolution has been brewing in zoology and evolutionary biology. Lucy Cooke introduces us to a riotous cast of animals, and the scientists studying them, that are redefining the female of the species. Meet the female lemurs of Madagascar, our ancient primate cousins that dominate the males of their species physically and politically. Or female albatross couples, hooking up together to raise their chicks in Hawaii.

We are capable of savage acts of violence but also spectacular feats of kindness: is one side of our nature destined to win out over the other? Every act of human behaviour has multiple layers of causation, spiralling back seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, even centuries, right back to the dawn of time and the origins of our species. In the epic sweep of history, how does our biology affect the arc of war and peace, justice and persecution? How have our brains evolved alongside our cultures?

In The Power of Habit, award-winning New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distil vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation.

I am 93. I've had an extraordinary life. It's only now that I appreciate how extraordinary. As a young man, I felt I was out there in the wild, experiencing the untouched natural world - but it was an illusion. The tragedy of our time has been happening all around us, barely noticeable from day to day - the loss of our planet's wild places, its biodiversity. I have been witness to this decline.

An Immense World will take us on an insider's tour of the natural world by describing the biology, physics and chemistry animals use to perceive it. We may lack some of their senses, but our own super-sense lies in our ability to understand theirs. And in the face of the largest extinction event since the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, our only hope of saving other species is bound up with our ability to see what they see, and feel what they feel.

When LSD was first discovered in the 1940s, it seemed to researchers, scientists and doctors as if the world might be on the cusp of psychological revolution. It promised to shed light on the deep mysteries of consciousness, as well as offer relief to addicts and the mentally ill. But in the 1960s, with the vicious backlash against the counter-culture, all further research was banned. In recent years, however, work has quietly begun again on the amazing potential of LSD, psilocybin and DMT. Could these drugs in fact improve the lives of many people?

When the Falkland Islands were invaded by Argentina in April 1982, Britain’s immediate response was to send a task force. But behind the pomp and bravado of its departure, a sober reality lurked. A mere 20 Sea Harriers operating from two aircraft carriers would take on the might of the Argentine air force, some 200 planes strong. The MOD estimated that within four days and against such formidable air power, half the harriers would likely be lost. To reinforce that meagre force, and in just three weeks, the Navy formed, trained and equipped a brand new squadron from scratch.