A groundbreaking new series from bestselling author Sean Carroll

'Luminous and straightforward.' Carlo Rovelli

What have the invention of the wheel, Pompeii, the Wall Street Crash, Harry Potter and the internet got in common? Why are all forecasters con-artists? What can Catherine the Great's lovers tell us about probability? Why should you never run for a train or read a newspaper? This title deals with this questions.

To some, science is simply a means to an end; to others it is an almost spiritual meditation on theories and formulae.

Human space journeys are awe-inspiring but risky and immensely expensive. Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees argue that science calls for leaving space exploration to AI-guided robots, since robots range more widely and see more than any human can. Humanity's future in space must await decisions based on results from our ever-better machines.

Five times our world has stood on the brink of Armageddon - it's been incinerated, frozen, drained, flooded and smothered by poison gas. We are very lucky to be alive...

Richard Dawkins's ground-breaking exploration of the power of DNA and what it can reveal about the deepest patterns of evolution.

How would we live if insects no longer existed?

A deep-dive into kindness, the science behind it and how we can better build it into our lives, from the author of The Art of Rest

A playful, sharp-eyed myth-busting reassessment of the part numbers and statistics play in our lives.

Bestselling author Marcus Chown explains the one thing you need to know to understand some of the most important and mind-blowing concepts of the twenty-first century in twenty-one accessible and engaging chapters.

Assesses author's life in terms of the chemical elements. This title reflects on the difficult course of his life from his birth into an Italian Jewish family through his training as a chemist, to the pain and darkness of the Holocaust and its aftermath.

For fans of Ed Yong, Brian Cox and Carl Zimmer: a dazzling cultural and scientific adventure through our ideas about extraterrestrial life and the cosmos

A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explore the greatest enigmas of the universe in this scintillatingly original book about the limits of human knowledge

A thrilling re-evaluation of the creatures that ruled the earth for 150 million years by one of the world's leading paleontologists.

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, the story of the mammals, our own kind, from their earliest development and their co-existence with the great lizards to their emergence out of the shadows to dominance of the recent history of our planet.