Understand your genetic code and a lot more about evolution, ancestry, health, genomics and epigenetics with a leading consultant from Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital who specialises in rare diseases and conditions with a genetic cause. In the big colour graphic layout Haynes Publishing is renowned for, explained simplistically but accurately is the history of DNA discovery, the law of dominance, segregation and independent assortment, inheritance patterns, gametes and zygosity. The DNA molecule is a double helix made up of two strands each containing a backbone of sugar and phosphate. Chromosomes are structures found inside the cell nucleus, tightly coiled strands of DNA, twisted around special proteins called histones. We should each have 46 chromosomes in total, 23 from our mother and 23 from our father. Females have two X chromosomes and males have one X and one Y chromosome. The X chromosome contains about 800 genes and in comparison the Y has only about 70 including the so-called sex-determining genes that makes someone with a Y male. There are sections on sequencing the human genome, genetic disorders, gene editing and outstanding breakthroughs in archaeology and science which are informing us about our past and defining our future. The book tracks DNA's fates in defining many aspects of our lives today, includes practical experiments, DNA in crime investigation, human evolution and medical science and the latest debates on cloning, commercial genetic testing and the microbiome. In this way the book brings together all the fascinating strands of genetic science and how DNA is being mapped, classified, utilised and understood. 160 very large pages, 21.6 x 28cm approx. Hundreds of colour illus. and diagrams and flow charts.

Fans of Oliver Sacks will welcome this Wellcome Collection publication in which we discover the ethereal world of the brain in a rather elegant little book. Find out how we all think and feel. There are more than 100 billion brain cells in our heads, and every single one represents a fragment of thought and feeling. Each possesses a mysterious beauty, with branching, intricate patterns like shattered glass, and colours like rainbows and sparkling tendrils. Richard Wingate has been scrutinising them for decades and is still gripped by the myriad of forms when he looks down the microscope. With his lyricism and clarity he shows how each type of cell possesses its own personality and history, illustrating a milestone of scientific discovery. He illuminates the stories of pioneering scientists like Santiago Ramón y Cajal, and Francis Crick. What is it in the quality of information that each cell carries that makes it grow this way? What is the meaning of this beautiful, elegant form? Chapters include Purkinje's Cell and the Method of Silhouettes, The Retinal Ganglion Cell, The Astrocyte and Neural Glue, Freud's Throwback, The Leech Neurone and the Nerve Net, Betz's Brain Cell and the Mapping of the Cortex, Consciousness, the Motoneuron, The Giant Axon, The Storytelling Brain and more. Awesome in every sense. 214pp.

Costing over £100 in hardback, we have imported a very large softback paperback facsimile reproduction of Albert Einstein's (1879-1955) 1912 manuscript on the special theory of the relativity, one of the most revolutionary and influential scientific documents of the 20th century. It includes faithful reproductions of each of the 72 handwritten pages along with an English translation of the original German text. A tribute to Einstein's genius, the book opens with a brief essay, a chronology of his life, a selection of quotes, and a detailed description of the manuscript, its contents, publication history and provenance. Each page is reproduced in full colour, with the English translation facing and subtle variations in paper and ink are clearly visible in the excellent reproductions, indicating where and when Einstein drafted certain parts of it. These extensive reworkings reveal his thought processes more than any other of his handwritten works. Einstein contributed to many branches of physics and it was undoubtedly his theory of relativity which revolutionised the old, established Newtonian picture of space, time and gravitation which brought him unprecedented fame. 176 page large softback edition in facsimile, 20.3 x 30.5cm.

Written between 1838 and 1865 by the father of Charles Darwin, Doctor Robert Darwin, and after Robert's death in 1848 continued by Charles's sister Susan, this hitherto unknown garden diary was a chance discovery. Susan Campbell made the discovery in 1986 and spent the next 35 years researching its background before writing this book. It describes the horticultural and domestic activities at The Mount, a large house with extensive and beautiful gardens and pastures on the banks of the River Severn in Shrewsbury. It was the home of the Darwin family from 1800 until Susan's death in 1866 and, in 1809, it was Charles's birthplace. It was in the seven acres that Charles climbed trees and learned to observe animals and plants, watched his mother keep doves and where he and his older brother set up a chemistry laboratory in the tool shed. The garden was designed by his parents Susannah Darwin (born into the Wedgwood family) and her physician husband Robert and took shape soon after their marriage in 1796. The garden included many striking features including a 680 foot long terrace walk, a steep river cliff, a large circular flower garden, and facilities for supplying the house with seasonable fruit and vegetables, as well as specialities like winter cucumbers and hot house delicacies such as pineapples and bananas. The great virtue of this garden diary is that it brings the garden vividly to life and the book is written by an internationally acknowledged garden historian and illustrator known for her writings on walled kitchen gardens. The book evokes the constant routines of planning, planting, pruning, mowing and harvesting, of the traffic between kitchen and garden, servants, family and friends, and with cosmic events such as the sight of Donati's Comet across the sky in 1858 witnessed, but what really matters is the passing of the seasons. A really beautifully designed volume with border decoration line art, beautiful typography, lists reproduced as were pencilled on sheets of paper watermarked 1858, lists of plants grown in the hothouse, stove-houses and vinery, the hybrid perpetuals and a month-by-month calendar of jobs and planting such as a new brick melon frame which took almost the whole of February 1844 to complete and the planting of mint, angelica and thyme, potatoes and rhubarb being forced in the frame and capsicums, mustard and cress and tomatoes sown. Outside sowings include parsley, lettuces, radishes, cauliflowers, turnips and more peas, beans, carrots and celery and the asparagus and strawberry beds are manured and the ground prepared for carrots. Full page colour photos, colour scale drawings on endpapers, modern colour photos, this is a very special garden history from a Victorian plus a modern gardener's viewpoint. 320 glamorous pages, 19.7 x 24.1cm. Colour.

In the early 19th century, Richard Trevithick discovered that to power a small engine you required high pressure steam, and the end-result was a railway network. Railway engineer Joseph Locke first worked for his father's colliery in West Yorkshire, and when he moved to the Newcastle area he joined the Stephenson family business, acting as an assistant to Robert Stephenson over the surveys and plans for the Liverpool and Manchester railway. The scheme was initially rejected by parliament, and there was also a faction arguing for cable haulage. Joseph and Robert prepared a report that George Stephenson put out in his name, and finally their prototype Rocket won the contest. Meanwhile Joseph was engaged with engineering problems traversing Chat Moss. The directors of the line had a disagreement with George Stephenson, who left the company, and Locke felt his only option was to stay with his mentor, but when trustees of the Liverpool and Manchester Line called him back to correct George's calculations, the embarrassment caused a temporary rift. The ceremonial opening of the line is famous for the death of William Huskisson MP who moved forward to shake hands with his old antagonist the Duke of Wellington and was hit by the locomotive. George Stephenson moved to the Grand Junction Railway in the Midlands with Locke as his assistant, but when the two-mile Woodhead tunnel under the Peak District ran into problems, partly because shareholders with no engineering experience kept arriving at the site and giving orders, and partly because the men were housed in inadequate shelters, Locke was called in to sort out the disaster in spite of his aversion to tunnels, asking for a budget that was twice the original estimate. Locke later worked on a range of railways including the route north over Shap Fell, and deserves to be mentioned alongside the Stephensons as one of railway's great pioneers. 16.5 x 24cm, 180pp, colour photos.

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2022 BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY. In the racy style of a tell-all confession addressed to us poor uncomprehending humans, Moiya McTier takes on the personality of the galaxy to tell its story, turning it into a lively, fun-loving character that wreaks havoc in the day to day life of the heavens and just happens to know all the secrets of the universe. The author developed a love for night-time as a small child, and at university her passion for the celestial aesthetic became a fascination with the logical, data-driven nature of astronomy. Her study of astrophysics led her more and more to listen to what the universe was saying. At the same time her interest in mythology led her to the stories that educate, entertain and explain in all cultures, and she found that science and myth were not as contradictory as seemed on the surface. So "Every time you use your phone to find the nearest coffee shop - and I make at least five new stars and move ten billion miles every year, but you don't see me chugging caffeine every morning - you interact with satellites." With the latest discoveries, "the sky isn't the limit any more, it's the sensitivity of your telescopes" and this has allowed astronomers to make observations of galaxies at redshifts (increasing wavelengths) even greater than eleven, which was previously the extent of observable distance. GN-z11 is 13.4 billion light years away, and Milky Way has observed that numbers of this kind make humans disheartened by their meaninglessness. But to cheer us up, she points out that in the light of such vastness everything, including the programmes of world leaders, is meaningless too. Solace can be found in mythology, where a pervasive modern myth is the united human race beloved of sci-fi. Back in the present, Milky Way is impressed by the good-looking galaxy Andromeda, and starts to make approaches. Should we be worried? 244pp, illustrations. Remainder mark.

An epic tour through cosmic scale by the award winning astrobiologist drawing on cutting-edge science. Together with acclaimed artist Ron Miller, they begin at the limits of the observable universe, a scale spanning 10 to 27 meters, about 93 billion light-years. They end in the subatomic realm, at 10 to 35 meters, where the fabric of space-time itself confounds all known rules of physics. In between there are galaxies, stars and planets, oceans and continents, plants and animals, microorganisms, atoms, black holes, alien lifeforms, walking a rocky globe where maybe a human will take us to the next level of insight. There is a diagram of brains of the world built out of neurons, of individual cells, a meteorological plane venturing across the eyewall of the hurricane, time machine depictions, three different interpretations of quantum mechanics, Pluto's sky with its moon Charon, and the Sun a dim star more than 4.4 billion km away. The over 100 original illustrations are utterly captivating and the infographics will captivate explorers of every age. Packed with bleeding-edge facts, vivid prose and sumptuous illustrations in a huge dose of dazzle from the fringes of the visible universe to the heart of the atom. 21 x 24.4cm, 224pp, colour.

Do you recoil in arachnophobic horror with the sight of a spider, or twitch with monophobia when you misplace your mobile phone? We are all guilty of book buying habits which verge on bibliomania! Mired in indecision? Would it be reassuring to give this a name - aboulomania? A Book of the Year In The Times, Financial Times, Spectator and Daily Mail and as heard on BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour and Start the Week, plunge into this rich, surprising and stunningly designed A-Z compendium. Discover how our fixations have taken shape from the Middle Ages to the present day as bestselling author Kate Summerscale deftly traces the threads between past and present, psychological and social, personal and political. Our phobias and manias are contradictory and multiple, deeply intimate, yet forged by the times we live in. It is the most common form of anxiety disorder, but rarely given a formal diagnosis. There are phobias for washing, of course flying and heights and open spaces, but also frogs, thunder, clowns, blushing, seaweed, being touched, buttons (Koumpounophobia), dentists, smells, eggs, choking, beards, hoarding, forests, zoophobia (animals) andmany more. Endlessly fascinating popular science. Line art of rats and mice and spiders decorate the 256 pages. SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR.

Sub-titled 'The Hidden 95% of the Universe', all the matter and light we can see in the universe makes up a trivial 5% of everything. The rest is hidden. This could be the biggest puzzle that science has ever faced. Since the 1970s astronomers have been aware that galaxies have far too little matter in them to account for the way they spin around. They should fly apart, but something concealed holds them together and that 'something' is dark matter - an invisible material in five times the quantity of the familiar stuff of stars and planets. By the 1990s we also knew that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. Something named dark energy was pushing it to expand faster and faster. Across the universe this requires enough energy that the equivalent mass would be nearly 14 times greater than all the visible material in existence. Brian Clegg explains this major conundrum in modern science and looks at how scientists are beginning to find solutions to it. From the Hot Science series of Icon Books. 164 page illustrated paperback.

The images of nuclear hell he depicts will be etched in many readers' minds - the stunning flash (pika) of the bomb, followed by the colossal blast (don), nakedness or semi-nakedness from the blast stripping clothing away, eerie silence, people walking in lines with their hands outstretched and skin peeling off like scarecrows or a line of ants and corpses frozen by death while in full action of flight. A dead man on a bicycle. A burned and blinded horse. Mothers with dead children. Corpses without faces. Water everywhere clogged with dead bodies. Survivors in crowded ruined buildings, lying in vomit, urine and faeces and everywhere flies and maggots. The heart-breaking, inspiring true life story of Dr Michihiko Hachiya whose hospital was less than a mile from the epicentre of the atomic bomb that hit Hiroshima. In immense shock and pain, he and his wife Yaeko dragged themselves to the devastated hospital building and what colleagues they could find. In time they begin to heal and start to treat the impossible numbers of patients - a small girl covered in burns, an elderly man with pneumonia, a young boy and his little sister looking for their parents - and they also began to investigate the strange and inexplicable symptoms afflicting his patients. The triumph of the writing lies in the doctor's ability to chronicle a nuclear horror into an affirmation of life so naturally, without preaching, usually without philosophising, just by being himself and setting down his daily thoughts and activities. Somehow in August 1945, when the rhetoric of war, hate and race hate was at fever pitch, and the most devastating weapon in history had just shattered his life, this modest and conspicuously patriotic physician managed to express himself almost entirely in the language of a common humanity. Paperback, 268pp.