Popular science

This book is a long-term history of optics, from early Greek theories of vision to the nineteenth-century victory of the wave theory of light.

The next wave of science writing is here.

The next wave of science writing is here.

In the developing world, the choices available to couples for fertility treatments in the 21st century are wider than ever before.

In the developing world, the choices available to couples for fertility treatments in the 21st century are wider than ever before.

We are living in a Golden Age of Physics.

We are living in a Golden Age of Physics.

Computation and its Limits is an innovative cross-disciplinary investigation of the relationship between computing and physical reality.

This is a story about sand and how science and silicon changed our lives.

This book is a long-term history of optics, from early Greek theories of vision to the nineteenth-century victory of the wave theory of light.

It is generally thought that science, by its very nature, must always progress.

In this magnificently illustrated book, Christopher Wills takes us on a series of adventures.

Just over four hundred years ago, in 1610, Galileo published the Siderius nuncius, or Starry Messenger, a 'hurried little masterpiece' in John Heilbron's words.

The highly admired scientist Linus Pauling, a double Nobel laureate in chemistry and peace, was once asked by a student.

This is the story of a single pebble.

From the mathematics of mazes, to cones with a twist, and the amazing sphericon - and how to make one - Ian Stewart is back with more mathematical stories and puzzles that are as quirky as they are fascinating, and each from the cutting edge of the world of mathematics.

Gray's Anatomy is probably one of the most iconic scientific books ever published: an illustrated textbook of anatomy that is still a household name 150 years since its first edition, known for its rigorously scientific text, and masterful illustrations as beautiful as they are detailed.

The nineteenth century seems to have been full of hysterical women - or so they were diagnosed.

Diabetes is a disease with a fascinating history and one that has been growing dramatically with urbanization.

From time immemorial, poets and philosophers have looked in awe and wonder at the Universe.

Asthma is a familiar and growing disease today, but its story goes back to the ancient world, as we know from accounts in ancient texts from China, India, Greece and Rome.

Galaxies are the building blocks of the Universe: standing like islands in space, each is made up of many hundreds of millions of stars in which the chemical elements are made, around which planets form, and where on at least one of those planets intelligent life has emerged.

What do road and railway systems, electrical circuits, mingling at parties, mazes, family trees, and the internet all have in common?

Modern physics has revealed the universe as a much stranger place than we could have imagined.

What would alien visitors in the far future, piecing together the history of earth, find of our brief reign?

A charismatic naturalist, bird-watcher, teacher, artist, photographer, film-maker, and winner of the Nobel Prize, Niko Tinbergen was a prominent and influential scientist.

Darwin's theory that our ancestors were apes caused a furore in the scientific world and outside it when The Origin of Species was published in 1859.

This is a marvellously engaging tour covering the whole of modern science, from transgenic crops to quantum tangles.

Special relativity provides the foundations of our knowledge of space and time.

In 1912 Lawrence Bragg explained the interaction of X-rays with crystals, and he and his father, William thereby pioneered X-ray spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography.

Through an innovative, closely integrated design of images and text, and his characteristically clear, precise, and economical exposition, Peter Atkins explains the processes involved in chemical reactions.

Michael Faraday's celebrated series of lectures,The Chemical History of a Candle, turned into one of the most successful science books ever published and was a classic work of Victorian popular science.

The enormous recent progress in fighting cancer, and the science behind it, is revealed fully for the first time in this book.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed such fervent investigations of the natural world that the period has been called the 'Scientific Revolution.

Patterns are everywhere in nature - in the ranks of clouds in the sky, the stripes of an angelfish, the arrangement of petals in flowers.

For 150 years, Down's Syndrome has constituted the archetypal mental disability, easily recognisable by distinct facial anomalies and physical stigmata.

Why do we find polar bears only in the Arctic and penguins only in the Antarctic?

Through an innovative, closely integrated design of images and text, and his characteristically clear, precise, and economical exposition, Peter Atkins explains the processes involved in chemical reactions.

Michael Faraday's celebrated series of lectures,The Chemical History of a Candle, turned into one of the most successful science books ever published and was a classic work of Victorian popular science.

The enormous recent progress in fighting cancer, and the science behind it, is revealed fully for the first time in this book.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed such fervent investigations of the natural world that the period has been called the 'Scientific Revolution.

In this scientific 'Credo', Peter Atkins considers the universal questions of origins, endings, birth, and death to which religions have claimed answers.

What are neutrinos?

In this scientific 'Credo', Peter Atkins considers the universal questions of origins, endings, birth, and death to which religions have claimed answers.

In The Artful Universe (OUP, 1995) John D.

What are neutrinos?

From the sudden expansion of a cloud of gas or the cooling of a hot metal, to the unfolding of a thought in our minds and even the course of life itself, everything is governed by the four Laws of Thermodynamics.

Thalassaemia is the most common type of genetic disorder in the human population, and one of the first whose genetic basis was established.

According to the World Health Organization we are in the midst of a global obesity crisis.

Britain's mining and quarrying industries date back to the Stone Age flint mines of 2500 BC and still exist.