Non Fiction > Science

What do proteins and pop-up cards have in common? How is opening a grocery bag different from opening a gift box? How can you cut out the letters for a whole word all at once with one straight scissors cut? How many ways are there to flatten a cube? With the help of 200 colour figures, author Joseph O'Rourke explains these fascinating folding problems starting from high school algebra and geometry and introducing more advanced concepts in tangible contexts as they arise. He shows how variations on these basic problems lead directly... read more

Do we have bigger brains than dolphins? Does your dog remember where it buried its bone? Why don't sheep laugh or gorillas lie? Why do we remember faces but not names?
In 21 short walks around the human brain, acclaimed psychologist Michael Corballis answers these and other questions by introducing us to what we've learned about the human mind in the last fifty years. Corballis leads us through behavioural experiments and neuroscience, cognitive theory and Darwinian evolution, puncturing a few hot-air balloons ("You only use... read more

This captivating book contains a treasury of fascinating facts on the science, art, history, folklore, and mythology of the weather--a fundamental process that shapes the earth's environment. It's beautifully illustrated throughout with images of weather phenomena from the ground, the air, and from space, as well as clear diagrams that explain how various elements of the weather work. Includes lists, tables, and anecdotes of weather records, extreme events, and surprising facts about the weather.

From the author of the bestselling Solar System iPad app, a glorious full-colour guide to our planetary neighbours from one of the world's top science writers.
In this title, bestselling author Marcus Chown leads us on a grand tour through the incredible diversity of planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft that surround the Sun in our cosmic backyard. Illuminating his insightful and surprising text are a wealth of beautiful images and diagrams, printed in full colour, richly detailed and accurately based on real s... read more

Albert Einstein called the first discoveries that launched quantum physics spooky," as they suggested a random universe that seemed to violate the laws of common sense. Now bestselling author and physicist Stephen Hawking introduces the nonscientific reader to this fascinating and befuddling world. This collection gathers together the most important papers on quantum physics, including the scholarship of Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, Ervin Schrodinger, and Richard Feynman. This is the first time all of the... read more

‘For some scientific questions, Antarctica is the best – and sometimes the only – place to look for answers. Visiting this frozen landscape is to gain a fresh perspective on our world, almost like going to another planet and looking back with renewed wonder on Earth.’ In Science on Ice, award-winning science broadcaster and writer Veronika Meduna follows deep-south scientists who huddle in tents and dive under ice to study ancient mud, fat fish, migrating penguins and fossilised forests. Meduna presen... read more

For years, tourists have trekked across cracked rock at Hawaii's Kilauea volcano to witness the awe-inspiring sight of creeping lava and its devastating effects on the landscape. In 2010, Eyjafjallajokull erupted in Iceland, stranding travellers as a cloud of ash covered western and northern Europe, causing the largest disruption of air travel since the Second World War. And just a few months later, Mount Merapi blew in Indonesia, killing over 350 people and displacing over 350,000 others, awakening people once more to the dangerou... read more

With their fountains of glistening spray, overwhelming roar and terrifying might, waterfalls are extraordinary features of the natural world. While many flock to sites such as Niagara Falls and Victoria Falls, until now the rich cultural background of these natural wonders has been neglected. The beautiful, the sublime and the picturesque are among the ideas considered in relation to waterfalls, but in Waterfall Brian J. Hudson portrays these natural wonders in an entirely new light. There are many myths and legends of waterfalls ... read more

The extraordinary role of viruses in evolution and how this is revolutionising biology and medicine. Darwin's theory of evolution is still the greatest breakthrough in biological science. His explanation of the role of natural selection in driving the evolution of life on earth depended on steady variation of living things over time -- but he was unable to explain how this variation occurred. In the 150 years since publication of the Origin of Species, we have discovered three main sources for this variation -- mutation, hybridisa... read more

In the ten years since its publication in 1988, Stephen Hawking's classic work has become a landmark volume in scientific writing, with more than nine million copies in forty languages sold worldwide. That edition was on the cutting edge of what was then known about the origins and nature of the universe. But the intervening years have seen extraordinary advances in the technology of observing both the micro- and the macrocosmic worlds. These observations have confirmed many of Professor Hawking's theoretical predictions in the fir... read more

No doubt about it, sex sells. From homosexual penguins, lesbian ostriches to necrophiliac snakes and fellating fruitbats, it's all here in this unusual little book. Dr John Long discovered the Gogo Fish. What's that you say? It's a 380-million-year-old fossilised armoured shark-like fish replete with a perfectly preserved embryo still attached by an umbilical cord. The Gogo is described as the oldest mother in the world and its discovery three years ago has pretty much rewritten evolutionary history. His find showed the first evid... read more

What do psychologists do? Why do they do it? Does it take some sort of special aptitude to become a psychologist? How do you think psychologists feel about us asking all these questions about them? A psychologist friend of yours tells you that he is unhappy all the time and thinks it might have something to do with how he makes a living how would you help? Now substitute the word "people" for psychologist and you have some idea of the kinds of questions the science of psychology tries to answer questions about behavior, motive, apt... read more

50 Years of NZ and United States Cooperation in Antarctica. 'A partnership well worth celebrating' is how Sir Edmund Hillary sums up the way New Zealand and the United States have worked together in Antarctica over the 50 years since their stations were established on Ross Island in the Ross Sea Region south of New Zealand. Sir Edmund, the leading New Zealand figure at the outset of the partnership in the 1956-57 summer, describes the partnership as 'unique' among the 28 nations active today in the world's coldest, windiest, hi... read more

What's the meaning of it all? Or rather: what exactly is 'it?'. Here Frank Wilczek, Nobel Prize-winning physicist and legend, examines the very nature of reality itself, showing how almost everything we think we know about 'it' is wrong. "The Lightness of Being" is an engaging tour de force, revealing a universe where matter is the hum of strange music, mass doesn't weigh, and empty space is a multilayered, multicoloured superconductor. Physicists' understanding of the essential nature of reality changed radically over the past qua... read more

'What is it all for? Why are we here?' Bernard Beckett , was awarded a Royal Society Fellowship for Teachers of Maths, Science and Technology in 2005, during which he worked at the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Evolution. During that year he found himself asking why some cultural myths and stories were still so powerful, so moving, so believable, given that science often claims to offer the rational, final explanation for many aspects of nature. Beckett, one of our most popular fiction writers for young adults, dazzles readers ... read more

Since Darwin's day, we've been told that sexual monogamy comes naturally to our species. Mainstream science as well as religious and cultural institutions - has maintained that men and women evolved in families in which a man's possessions and protection were exchanged for a woman's fertility and fidelity.

This practical hour-by-hour tracker of the stars and constellations is an essential travel accessory for astronomy enthusiasts visiting Australia, New Zealand, South Africa or southern South America. Turn the oval panel to the required date and time to reveal the whole sky visible from your location.

A lively and eclectic sequence of more than 150 concise and intellectually challenging essays in which the world's leading thinkers reflect on how the internet has changed their modes of thought.
In How is the Internet Changing the Way you Think?, 154 of the world's leading intellectuals - scientists, artists and creative thinkers - explore exactly what it means to think in the new age of the Internet: from Nicholas Carr's reflections on what the Internet is doing to our brains, to Richard Dawkins's sanguine assessment of it... read more

Can anyone get a perfect memory? The author used to be like most of us, forgetting phone numbers and mislaying keys. Then he learnt the art of memory training, and a year later found himself in the finals of the US Memory Championship. In this book, he takes us on a journey through the mind, from ancient 'memory palace' techniques to neuroscience.