Roger Highfield

A look at the scientific principles underpinning the magic of Harry Potter reveals some of the true magic behind science.

How Magic Really Works

The Science of Harry Potter

Martin A. Nowak

Everyone is familiar with Darwin's revolutionary idea about the survival of the fittest, and most people agree that it works, but Darwin's famous theory has one major chink. If life is about survival of the fittest, then why would we risk our own life to jump into a river to save a stranger?Some people argue that issues such as charity, fairness, forgiveness and cooperation are evolutionary loose ends, side issues that are of little consequence. But as Harvard's celebrated evolutionary biologist Martin Nowak explains in this ground-breaking book, cooperation is central to the four-billion-year-old puzzle of life. In his first book for a wide audience, this hugely influential scientist explains his cutting-edge research into the mysteries of cooperation, from the rise of multicellular life to Good Samaritans. With wit and clarity, Martin Nowak and the bestselling science writer Roger Highfield make the case that cooperation, not competition, is the defining human trait. Supercooperators will expand our understanding of evolution and human behaviour, and provoke debate for years to come.

Evolution, Altruism and Huamn Behaviour Or why We Need Each Other to Succeed

Super Cooperators

Peter Coveney

Arrow of Time

Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz

The New Science of How a Single Cell Becomes a Human Being

Dance of Life

'Quite simply the best book about science and life that I have ever read' - Alice Roberts How does life begin? What drives a newly fertilized egg to keep dividing and growing until it becomes 40 trillion cells, a greater number than stars in the galaxy? How do these cells know how to make a human, from lips to heart to toes? How does your body build itself? Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz was pregnant at 42 when a routine genetic test came back with that dreaded word: abnormal. A quarter of sampled cells contained abnormalities and she was warned her baby had an increased risk of being miscarried or born with birth defects. Six months later she gave birth to a healthy baby boy and her research on mice embryos went on to prove that – as she had suspected – the embryo has an amazing and previously unknown ability to correct abnormal cells at an early stage of its development. The Dance of Life will take you inside the incredible world of life just as it begins and reveal the wonder of the earliest and most profound moments in how we become human. Through Magda’s trailblazing research as a professor at Cambridge – where she has doubled the survival time of human embryos in the laboratory, and made the first artificial embryo-like structures from stem cells – you’ll discover how early life is programmed to repair and organise itself, what this means for the future of pregnancy, and how we might one day solve IVF disorders, prevent miscarriages and learn more about the dance of life as it starts to take shape. The Dance of Life is a moving celebration of the balletic beauty of life’s beginnings.

Symmetry, Cells and How We Become Human

The Dance of Life

Venki Ramakrishnan

How Building Your Digital Twin Will Revolutionize Medicine and Change Your Life

Virtual You

The Search for Order in a Chaotic World

Frontiers of Complexity

A renowned biologist's cutting-edge and unconventional examination of human reproduction and embryo research Scientists have long struggled to make pregnancy easier, safer, and more successful. In The Dance of Life, developmental and stem-cell biologist Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz takes us to the front lines of efforts to understand the creation of a human life. She has spent two decades unraveling the mysteries of development, as a simple fertilized egg becomes a complex human being of forty trillion cells. Zernicka-Goetz's work is both incredibly practical and astonishingly vast: her groundbreaking experiments with mouse, human, and artificial embryo models give hope to how more women can sustain viable pregnancies. Set at the intersection of science's greatest powers and humanity's greatest concern, The Dance of Life is a revelatory account of the future of fertility -- and life itself.

Paul Carter

A less-than-flattering biography of the great genius draws on archives and interviews to expose a man of powerful emotions and a deeply troubled family life.

The Private Lives of Albert Einstein

From the Aerodynamics of Reindeer to the Thermodynamics of Turkey

The Physics of Christmas

Christopher Brooke

Christopher Nugent Lawrence Brooke

Dixie Professor Emeritus of Ecclesiastical History Christopher N L Brooke

Traces the history of the two British universities, describes their architecture, and looks at changes in the two towns

Oxford and Cambridge

Ian Wilmut

An argument for the benefits of cloning, co-written by a scientist whose team was responsible for a famous cloned sheep, presents the reasons for his opposition to the cloning of humans and explains that cloning technology can be ethically applied to free families from serious hereditary diseases. Reprint.

The Promise and Perils of Human Cloning

After Dolly

nauka i magia

Harry Potter

Drawing on new archival evidence from Berlin, Zurich, Boston, Edinburgh and Oxford; and on unpublished papers and interviews with scholars, family and friends; this biography challenges the carefully-cultivated image of Einstein as a modern saint.

Martin Nowak, ein weltweit führender Experte im Bereich Evolution und Spieltheorie, erklärt in seinem fesselnden, zugänglichen Buch, warum Kooperation - und nicht Egoismus - der Schlüssel zum Spiel des Lebens ist. Die brillante Antwort auf Frank Schirrmachers Bestseller "Ego". Im Spiel des Lebens treibt uns das Streben nach Erfolg an. Wir alle wollen Sieger sein. Selbst unsere Gene, so heißt es, seien egoistisch. Aber Konkurrenz erzählt nicht die ganze Geschichte der Biologie. Etwas Grundlegendes fehlt. Um zu überleben, betreiben die Geschöpfe jeder Spezies und auf jeder Stufe der Komplexität auch Kooperation. In der menschlichen Gesellschaft ist Kooperation sogar allgegenwärtig. Selbst einfachste Abläufe bestehen aus mehr Zusammenarbeit, als man meinen könnte. Dabei beschränkt sich Kooperation nicht darauf, auf ein gemeinsames Ziel hinzuarbeiten. Kooperation bedeutet darüber hinaus, dass Menschen, die potenziell Konkurrenten sind, stattdessen beschließen, einander zu helfen. "Kooperative Intelligenz" entschlüsselt das Rätsel, wie es dazu kommt und warum auf lange Sicht Kooperation immer gewinnt. Es erweitert unser Verständnis von Evolution und Solidarität und hat das Zeug, Debatten auszulösen.

Das Erfolgsgeheimnis der Evolution

Kooperative Intelligenz

Martin Nowak

Examines the importance of cooperation in human beings and in nature, arguing that this social tool is as an important aspect of evolution as mutation and natural selection.

Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed

SuperCooperators

How does snow form? Why are we always depressed after Christmas? How does Santa manage to deliver all those presents in one night? (He has, in fact, little over two ten-thousandths of a second to get between each of the 842 million households he must visit.) This book contains information on how drugs might make us see flying reindeer, how pollution is affecting the shape of Christmas trees, and the intriguing correlation between the length of our Christmas card list and brain size.

The Science of Christmas

Can Reindeer Fly?

In our century, the subject of time has become an area of serious inquiry for science. Theories that contain time as a simple quantity form the basis of our understanding of many scientific disciplines, yet the debate rages on: why does there seem to be a direction to time, an arrow of time pointing from past to future? In this authoritative and accessible Sunday Times bestseller, physical chemist Dr Peter Coveney and award-winning science journalist Dr Roger Highfield demonstrate that the common sense view of time agrees with the most advanced scientific theory. Time does in fact move like an arrow, shooting forward into what is genuinely unknown, leaving the past immutably behind. The authors make their case by exploring three centuries of science, offering bold reinterpretations of Newton’s mechanics, Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity, quantum mechanics, and advancing the insights of chaos theory. In their voyage through science the authors link apparently irreconcilable subjects, from Einstein’s obsession with causality to chaos theory, from Marvell’s winged chariot to that Monday morning feeling. Finally, drawing together the various interpretations of time, they describe a novel way to give it a sense of direction. And they call for a new fundamental theory to take account of the Arrow of Time. Foreword by Ilya Prigogine, Nobel laureate.

Roger Highfield

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