Throughout history, momentous, enabling discoveries have led to a giant leap in our understanding of the workings of the universe and fast-tracked human progress. 100 Discoveries presents the greatest 100 breakthroughs in science and technology, medicine, and the major areas of human endeavour of the past 10,000 years, from the development of agriculture in 10,000BC to the discovery of genomics and the unravelling and manipulation of genes in living things. In identifying and desc...

A triumphantly toxic tome. As a dedicated Macinnis fan, I relish this latest display of erudition, story-telling and fun. One of his very best.'Robyn Williams, Head, ABC Science UnitWas Abraham Lincoln really as mad as a hatter?Who poisoned Phar Lap?Can wallpaper really kill?Was Jack the Ripper an arsenic eater?Painting a broad canvas, from the early Egyptians to the arsenical tube wells in Bangladesh and the Sarin gas attacks in a Tokyo subw...

Our story starts around 700 BC when the Chinese used a form of gunpowder to fumigate their houses. The first real rockets were gunpowder filled sections of bamboo thrown under horses to scare them; the next development was to tie these to arrows.The Mongols took rockets from China to Europe where only some, including Admiral Nelson and the Crown Prince of Sweden, were impressed. The Royal Navy used them in all sorts of odd actions against restless natives in Tierra Del Fuego, Austr...

Forty years after first chewing on sugar cane in New Guinea, the home of sugar, the author underwent some complex dental work as a direct result of his sweet tooth. This led him to explore sugar cane's journey from New Guinea to Shakespeare's England. In the days before dentistry, people paid dearly for this sweet new food from exotic places. Queen Elizabeth I became so partial to hippocras, sugared almonds and pastilles that her teeth turned completely black.Bittersweet i...

Psst! It's true! This is the best book on POISONS you'll ever read!There's poison in pips, harm in herbs and definitely death in dyes. Poison is everywhere!Read about toxic wallpaper that killed even bedbugs. Find out why buns were bad for bun-buyers and how a poison might cure cancer. Bone up on murder mysteries, including the one about glow-in-the-dark soup. But don't tell anyone how much you know, or they might lock you up.WARNINGcontains toxic tales and ...

Our Lancaster raced over the perimeter track and then tore down the slope through the dispersal area... with its wheels thumping on the grass but still firmly on the ground. It now seemed that nothing could save us and that, in the next couple of moments, we would disappear in a great explosion. I could hear Bob saying "Get off the ground, you bastard, get off," while Harry just said nothing..."Into the Darkness" is the true story of a young Australian thown into the crucible of th...

In these pages, the beloved Bill Bryson gives us a fascinating history of the modern home, taking us on a room-by-room tour through his own house and using each room to explore the vast history of the domestic artifacts we take for granted. As he takes us through the history of our modern comforts, Bryson demonstrates that whatever happens in the world eventually ends up in our home, in the paint, the pipes, the pillows, and every item of furniture. Bryson has one of the liveliest, most in...

THE #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER, UPDATED FOR 2025 • A wonder-filled quest to understand everything that has happened in the history of the Earth, from the Big Bang theory to the rise of civilization and beyond—revised to reflect the last two decades of scientific advancement“Brims with strange and amazing facts . . . destined to become a modern classic of science writing.”—The New York TimesHow did we get from being nothing at all to wh...

The bestselling author of E=mc2 weaves tales of romance, divine inspiration, and fraud through an account of the invisible force that permeates our universe—electricity—and introduces us to the virtuoso scientists who plumbed its secrets.For centuries, electricity was seen as little more than a curious property of certain substances that sparked when rubbed. Then, in the 1790s, Alessandro Volta began the scientific investigation that ignited an explosion o...

A bestselling historian shows how the British Empire created the modern world.**“Scrupulous scholarship and a rattling good tale.” —**Wall Street JournalThe British Empire was the largest in all history, its reach the nearest thing to world domination ever achieved. By the eve of the Second World War, over a fifth of the world's land surface and nearly a quarter of the world's population were under some form of British rule. Yet fo...

This new edition of the acclaimed bestseller is lavishly illustrated to convey, in pictures as in words, Bill Bryson’s exciting, informative journey into the world of science.In A Short History of Nearly Everything, the bestselling author of A Walk in the Woods and The Body, confronts his greatest challenge yet: to understand—and, if possible, answer—the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as h...

Our world has been transformed beyond recognition, particularly in the twentieth century, and so were our lives and our aspirations.Throughout James May's Magnificent Machines, our Top Gear guide explores the iconic themes of the past hundred years: flight, space travel, television, mechanised war, medicine, computers, electronic music, skyscrapers, electronic espionage and much more.But he also reveals the hidden story behind why some inv...