This volume brings together key chapters from Darwin's most important books, including the Journal of Researches on the Beagle voyage (1845), the Origin of Species (1859), the Descent of Man (1871), and the full text of his delightful autobiography. They are accompanied by responses from 19th-century readers from around the world.

If we send a message into space, will extraterrestrial beings receive it? Will they understand?

The all-but-forgotten heroes and highlights of everyday science

A deftly written story of nature's most mystreious force, magnetism, and the spell it cast over three champions of enlightenment. Tales abounded of magnets' ability to attract reluctant lovers, but its expertise lay in he hands of seafarers, who had long used compasses to guide their ships.

Explores the ways science, politics, and large corporations affect race in the twenty-first century, discussing the efforts and results of the Human Genome Project, and describing how technology-driven science researchers are developing a genetic definition of race.

The natural and cultural history of how people, birds, and the feather came together

Known as the `four horsemen' of New Atheism, these four big thinkers of the twenty-first century met only once. Everything that was said as they agreed and disagreed with one another, interrogated ideas and exchanged insights - about religion and atheism, science and sense - speaks with urgency to our present age.

In this learned romp of science writing, Cambridge professor Simon Conway Morris cheerfully challenges six assumptions-what he calls 'myths'-that too often pass as unquestioned truths amongst the evolutionary orthodox.

Recording memories, mind reading, videotaping our dreams, mind control, avatars, and telekinesis - no longer are these feats of the mind solely the province of overheated science fiction. The author takes us on a tour of the top laboratories around the world to meet the scientists who are already revolutionising the way we think about the brain.

Brian Clegg was always fascinated by Isaac Asimov's classic Foundation series of books, in which the future is predicted using sophisticated mathematical modelling of human psychology and behaviour. Only much later did he realise that Asimov's 'psychohistory' had a real-world equivalent: game theory.

An investigation of the evolution and economics of human relationships. It arms readers with knowledge of the scientific principles that ethologists, psychologists, economists, and other behavioural scientists have discovered in their quest to unravel the complexities of behaviour.

Gives us an account of the fundamental unit of heredity - and a vision of both humanity's past and future. In this book, the story begins in an obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in 1856 where a monk stumbles on the idea of a "Unit of heredity". It intersects with Darwin's theory of evolution, and collides with the horrors of Nazi eugenics.

Crack the code to your future dreams Since 2012, the organization Girls Who Code has been leading the charge to get girls interested in technology and coding.

While Europe is becoming increasingly secularized, the rise of religious fundamentalism, whether in the Middle East or Middle America, is dramatically and dangerously dividing opinion around the world. In this book, the author attacks God in all his forms. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry and abuses children.

As inhabitants of planet Earth, our next logical move is to break free of the confines of the Earth and colonize another body in the solar system, such as the Moon or Mars. How and when will we do this? Or is it all just science fiction? These questions, in a nutshell, make up the core of astrobiology--the study of the origins and evolution and biology of life elsewhere in the universe, and the search for it. This book provides an introduction to this astro-science, asking, "Are we alone in the universe?"