'From Ancient Egypt to The Martian, A Deep-Space Dive into Our Obsession with the Red Planet', here is the most comprehensive look at our relationship with Mars yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using history, archival images, pop culture ephemera, and interviews with NASA scientists, Mars has been a source of fascination and speculation ever since the ancient Egyptians observed its blood-red hue and named it for their god of war and plague. It wasn't until the 19th century when 'canals' were observed on the surface of the Red Planet, suggesting the presence of water, that scientists, novelists, filmmakers and entrepreneurs became obsessed with the question of whether there's life on Mars. Since then Mars has fully invaded pop culture, inspiring its own day of the week (Tuesday), and many novels and movies from Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles to The Martian and to inspire advancements in exploration from NASA's launch of the Mars rover Perseverance to Elon Musk's quest to launch a manned mission to Mars through SpaceX. Mars has been a muse for many early writers and Isaac Asimov the great sci-fi writer, Arthur C. Clarke and The Empire Strikes Back have all been inspired by Mars, and not forgetting of course in the wonderful world of sweeties, the Mars bar. Beautifully decorated large softback with many colour photos, book covers, film stills, tales of pranksters, screwballs and believers, artists' impressions, Mars Exploration scientific photographs, news articles, early telescopes and all the big hopes and big misunderstandings about Mars through history. There is so much to be discovered. 20.5 x 25.4cm, 304pp in colourful well illustrated softback with tiny remainder mark.

The music journalist has covered weird, rare and collectable records for Record Collector magazine and by mixing lo-fi charm into hi-fi science Scott's book is 'skipping with real analogue delight'. It is the story of recorded sound - the technological developments, the people that made them happen, and the impact they had on society, from the earliest inventions via the phonograph to LPs, EPs and the recent resurgence of vinyl. While Thomas Edison's phonograph represented an important turning point in the story of recorded sound, it came only after decades of invention, tinkering and experimentation. The book looks at the origins of record-playing machinery and the development of the first commercial discs. We learn about the rise of the LP record, the drama of competing speed and format wars, and the fall of the 7-inch, the story of a format repeatedly written off, threats from radio, tape, compact disc and download, vinyl only seems to endure and come back stronger. The story starts with grooves in tin foil in a workshop in New Jersey in 1877 and sees records evolving and blossoming to become a cornerstone for musical culture worldwide, and even into outer space. 320pp.

A profound meditation on climate change and the Anthropocene and an urgent search for the fossil - industrial, chemical, geological - that humans are leaving behind. Farrier explores what traces we will leave in the very deep future, from long-lived materials like plastic and nuclear waste, to the 50 million kilometres of roads spanning the planet. In modern times we have created numerous objects and landscapes with a potential to endure through deep time. Our carbon could linger on the atmosphere for 100,000 years, and the remains of our cities will still exist millions of years from now as a layer in the rock. These future fossils have the potential to tell remarkable stories about how we lived in the 21st century. Through literature, art and science, the book invites us to think about how we will be remembered by our distant descendants. Travelling from the Baltic Sea to the Great Barrier Reef, and from an ice core laboratory in Tasmania to Shanghai, one of the world's biggest cities, fossilised remains will speak of life rather than death. Even the contents of our sandwiches will tell a story. 60 billion chickens are killed for human consumption each year and in the future, fossilised chicken bones will be present on every continent within a layer in the geological strata, as a testimony to the intrusion of human appetites in the geological record. 'In my search for future fossils, I look to the air, the oceans, and the rock, from a bubble of ice drawn from the heart of Antarctica to a tomb for radioactive waste deep beneath the Finnish bedrock.' 307pp.

Entomologist and TV presenter Dr George McGavin looks at the weird and wonderful world of insects and reveals how they created our world and how they could shape our future. Insects conquered the Earth long before we did and will remain here long after we are gone. They outnumber us in the billions and are essential to keep many of the natural processes that keep us alive and that we take for granted, and every page is a very readable argument that we should appreciate the hidden world of six-legged creatures far more. McGavin takes a deep dive to reveal the unknown truths about the most successful and enduring animal groups the world has ever seen and explores not only the incredible traits that insects have evolved to possess, such as dragonflies that can fly across oceans without resting, or beetles that can lay their eggs exclusively in corpses, but also the vital lessons we have learned from them, including how therapy using maggots can save lives, and how bees can help grow rich tomato yields. The four distinct groups are millipedes and centipedes with elongated bodies and lots of pairs of legs, eight legged species such as mites and scorpions, crustaceans such as shrimp, crabs and lobsters and barnacles with a few terrestrial species such as woodlice and the fourth and by far biggest group are the Insecta, which comprise ¾ of all animal species, and well over half of all known species and their total biomass is at least ten times that of all humans and our livestock combined. Let's let that fact sink in... Crawling with detail and glowing with extraordinary facts and rich with humour and personality. 266pp.

Just the word makes you smile, let alone the shape, the look or if you're lucky the feel of them! Here line art boobs are sweaty, veiny, freckly, tiny-nippled, close set, teardrop, bell shape, round, relaxed, athletic, peachy, long, wide, enormous, medium sized, little sized, to reconstructed, hairy, double-mastectomy, half fed and squirty boobs, pregnant boobs and tan lined boobs. Pictured in fun, focussed cartoons in different shades, this is a real ice breaker of a book which ends on a more serious notes of how to check your breasts. 'This book is a call to celebrate the story our boobs have to tell and come to love what's on our chests.' Colour illus.
Click YouTube icon to see this book come to life on video.

Mind and bottom-blowing facts from history, science, sport and the universe by the bestselling author of Does Anything Eat Wasps? Did you know that ostriches don't bury their heads in the sand, that powdered rice is used as cement in the Great Wall of China, what 60% of the human population cannot smell and what on earth rhinotillexomania is? From flatulence, the solar system and the Universe, history, life on Earth, food, maths, science, the ocean, transport, arts, music and films, sport, the weather, royalty, religion, politics, human body, there are huge scientific questions and a quest for knowledge and the seemingly trivial has never been more fascinating. 208pp, paperback.

Computers rule the world. Data floods from everything we do. Robots are building our products in factories. Our homes are computerised and we can talk to these digital home assistants, receiving detailed and coherent replies. Behind the scenes, artificial intelligence is making everything work and you cannot live in the modern world without it or being impacted by AI and robots. Every time you make a purchase, AIs are handling your money, checking for fraud, using your data to understand you better, recommending new products. Inside our homes we have smart TVs, computerised fridges, washing machines, central heating, air conditioning systems all AI robotic devices. Decisions about whether we should or should not be accepted for financial products are made by AIs. Our future anti-viral and antibacterial drugs are being designed by AI. Internet connections, utilities and mobile phones are all adjusted by smart AI algorithms that try to optimise supply while minimising waste. The book takes us on a short journey through the strange world of computers, robots and building brains and the surprisingly long life and ups and downs AI has already had. Leading expert Professor J. Bentley breaks down the fast-moving world of computers in the time of automata into 10 pivotal lessons, presenting the reader with the essential information, the origins and motivation behind AI and robotics, the smart algorithms that allow us to build good computers, how computers interpret sensory information and the challenges of emotional intelligence, unpredictable environments and imagination. 192pp, line art and short biographies of important figures such as Michael Maudlin or 'Fuzzy' and his creation, the Lycos web search engine and portal, launched in 1994.

A companion to code 94840 10 Short Lessons in Artificial Intelligence & Robotics, here a research scientist in mathematics and astrophysics provides a timely look at the essential lessons learned from our voyages into outer space. In an era of rapidly developing technology and renewed ambition, the 21st century has ushered in an exciting new age of space flight, but what has brought us to this point in our exploration of the universe? Soon space travel will open itself up to paying members of the public and this short and essential guide describes how we will leave the planet, stay alive in space, when to let machines take over, space is big business, the next giant leap which has already begun, the small solar system and coverage of unmanned satellites and the chances of reaching the stars. Glossary, 184pp, line art and other illus.

With a passion for engineering history, John Hannavy has written extensively on railways, steam-powered machines, the history of photography and the Industrial Revolution of Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Power without control is unusable power, and long after the invention of the steam engine, finding ways of applying that power to tasks where consistency was of paramount importance was the Holy Grail which many steam engineers sought to find. It was the centrifugal governor which brought precision to the application of steam power, and its story can be traced back to 17th century Holland and Christiaan Huygens' development of both the pendulum clock and system controls for windmills. Governors are still at the heart of sophisticated machinery today, albeit electronic rather than mechanical. As machine speed increased, the governor had to evolve to keep pace with the demands for greater precision. Over 100 British patents were applied for in the 19th century alone for 'improvements' in governor design, many of which could be fitted or retro-fitted to engines from every large manufacturer. This is the first book to deal with the subject, telling the story of the evolution of the original 'spinning-ball' governor from its first appearance to the point where it became a small device entirely enclosed in a housing to keep it clean, and thus hidden from view. Over 200 photographs, engravings, plans and diagrams, one of which is a series of colour photographs of one of the few large mill engines to survive, Wigan's 2500hp Trencher Field Mill Engine and some of the more than 60,000 spindles in operation, all belt-driven from the massive steam engine. Chapters include James Watt Harnessing Steam, Selected Patents 1698-1913, British Governor Makers and Suppliers and Places to See Governors at Work including Showman's Road Locomotive No.3555 the Busy Bee, pumping stations, Twyford Waterworks, the Robey Trust's New Perseverance Ironworks in Tavistock or the shiny red balls of the Armstrong Engines which provided hydraulic power at Ellesmere Port, now the National Waterways Museum. Packed with colour, 160 large pages, 21.6 x 28cm.
Click YouTube icon to see this book come to life on video.

"...a monumental survey... The Computer is a richly illustrated history of society's ever-evolving relationship with the silicon chip."-- "Wallpaper". "Almost pop art history of the technology". The story of the evolution of machines in computer history is full of the disruptive innovations that have led to today's world. From the early beginnings of computing to the bulky mainframe to the personal computer era, we now live in an almost entirely digital age. This visual tome explores steps from the first ideas of a calculating machine in the 19th century and early experiments with autonomous driving in the 1920s to oversized office computers in the 1950s to laptops and wearables of today. Tracing the stories of tech visionaries, pioneers, and entrepreneurs, the book combines compelling visuals, historical documents, and in-depth explanations to reveal significant events in computer history. Encompassing the invention of machines, coding, and software development, as well as technology's influence on today's political landscape, this incredible survey presents creations from Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, Grace Hopper, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs. Showcasing forgotten gadgets and prototypes connecting iconic products such as the Apple Macintosh and the Sony Play Station as well as remembering milestones in software development, videogaming, and the web. Infographics explain wireless communication and other fundamental technical concepts, while the history of corporations such as IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Atari, Amazon, and Google is retraced through rare photographs and advertising campaigns. A fascinating read, this book acknowledges the computer's stupendous power and social impact. For techies and everyone interested in culture, economics, politics, and science. 24.6 x 37.2 cm, a weighty 3.89 kg, 472 pages. Text in English, Italian and Spanish.