4th Estate The Evolution of Everything. How Small Changes Transform Our World Ridley Matt

How did a piece of gold foil completely change our understanding of atoms? • What part did a hot air balloon play in the discovery of cosmic rays? • How did the experiments in the run-up to the Large Hadron Collider lead to the invention of the World Wide Web? • Asking questions has always been at the heart of physics, our unending quest to understand the Universe and how everything in it behaves. How do we know all that we know about the world today? It's not simply because we have the maths – it's because we have done the experiments • Accelerator physicist Suzie Sheehy introduces us to the creative and curious people who, through a combination of genius, persistence and luck, staged the ground-breaking experiments of the twentieth century. From the serendipitous discovery of X-rays in a German laboratory, to the scientists trying to prove Einstein wrong (and inadvertently proving him right), The Matter of Everything takes us on a journey through the history of experiments that transformed our world

How did a piece a gold foil completely change our understanding of atoms? • What part did a hot air balloon play in the discovery of cosmic rays? • How did the experiments in the run-up to the Large Hadron Collider lead to the invention of the World Wide Web? • Asking questions has always been at the heart of physics, our unending quest to understand the Universe and how everything in it behaves. How do we know all that we know about the world today? It's not simply because we have the maths - it's because we have done the experiments • In The Matter of Everything, accelerator physicist Suzie Sheehy introduces us to the people who, through a combination of genius, persistence and luck, staged the ground-breaking experiments of the twentieth century that changed the course of history

From the ultimate insider – a former General Motors executive and current advisor to the Google Self-Driving Car project – comes the definitive story of the race between Google, Tesla and Uber to create the driverless car • We stand on the brink of a technological revolution. In the near future, most of us will not own automobiles, but will travel instead in driverless electric vehicles summoned at the touch of an app. We will be liberated from driving, so that the time we spend in cars can be put to more productive use. We will prevent more than 90 percent of car crashes, provide freedom of mobility to the elderly and disabled and decrease our dependence on fossil fuels • Autonomy tells the story of the maverick engineers and computer experts who triggered the revolution

Acclaimed author Matt Ridley's thrilling follow-up to his bestseller Genome. Armed with the extraordinary new discoveries about our genes, Ridley turns his attention to the nature versus nurture debate to bring the first popular account of the roots of human behaviour • What makes us who we are? • In February 2001 it was announced that the genome contains not 100,000 genes as originally expected but only 30,000. This startling revision led some scientists to conclude that there are simply not enough human genes to account for all the different ways people behave: we must be made by nurture, not nature • Matt Ridley argues that the emerging truth is far more interesting than this myth. Nurture depends on genes, too, and genes need nurture. Genes not only predetermine the broad structure of the brain; they also absorb formative experiences, react to social cues and even run memory

How did a piece of gold foil completely change our understanding of atoms? What part did a hot air balloon play in the discovery of cosmic rays? How do we know all that we know about the world today? • It's not simply because we have the maths – it's because we have done the experiments • Accelerator physicist Suzie Sheehy introduces us to the creative and curious people who, through a combination of genius, tenacity and luck, staged the groundbreaking experiments of the twentieth century. From the serendipitous discovery of X-rays in a German laboratory, to the scientists trying to prove Einstein wrong (and inadvertently proving him right), The Matter of Everything takes us on a journey through the history of experiments that transformed our world

In Growing Up Human, Brenna Hassett explores how our evolutionary history has shaped a phenomenon every reader will have experienced - childhood • Tracking deep into our evolutionary history, anthropological science has begun to unravel one particular feature that sets us apart from the many, many animals that came before us - our uniquely long childhoods. Growing Up Human looks at how we have diverged from our ancestral roots to stay 'forever young' - or at least what seems like forever - and how the evolution of childhood is a critical part of the human story • Beginning with a look at the ways animals invest in their offspring, the book moves through the many steps of making a baby, from pair-bonding to hidden ovulation, points where our species has repeatedly stepped off the standard primate path

X knows only obedience – has only seen hatred. Until one bright soul pierces the darkness • Zoe rages against a world turning to ice. Her father's body lies unrecovered in the wilderness and no one seems to care • X and Zoe were never meant to meet. But when their worlds collide, they dare to love ... They stand on the edge of everything – and risk it all

A delightful and witty treasure trove of utterly useless information by the author of The Things That Nobody Knows • Most encyclopaedias are boring. They are so packed with worthy but dull facts that a great deal of weird and wonderful material is squeezed out. The Encyclopaedia of Everything Else takes the opposite approach and leaves out all the dreary stuff you can find elsewhere • The result is the most fascinating, astonishing, varied and utterly useless collection of information ever assembled and organized between two covers. From aardvark tooth bracelets to the genus of tropical weevils known as Zyzzyva, via Mark Twain’s views about cabbages, this is a quarter of a million words of sublime pointlessness

The book covers the details and technical wonders of 60 wristwatch models that went down in history for their innovation in shapes, materials, and production methods • A style icon is linked to each decade the book covers, with the decade's preferred and most famous model decade after decade, the reader will become immersed in the world of watches from the early years of the 20th century, to the various technical innovations that revolutionized the creation of watches, up to the most modern - yet already iconic - models • Time is a great mystery. A changeable element, which expands or vanishes, but that appears concrete as it is marked by the passing of seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years. The path toward the capture of minutes and seconds coincided with the phases of scientific evolution that allowed man to manufacture watches that are increasingly reliable, but that are also in tune with changes in customs, social needs, and aesthetic canons

Everybody has regrets. They’re a fundamental part of our lives. In The Power of Regret, Pink explains how we can enlist our regrets to make smarter decisions, perform better and deepen our sense of meaning and purpose • Drawing on the largest sampling of attitudes about regret ever conducted from his own World Regret Survey, Pink identifies the four core regrets that most people have. With his signature blend of big ideas and practical takeaways, captivating stories and crisp humour, he argues that by understanding what people regret the most, we can understand what they value the most. We can transform our regrets into a positive force for working smarter and living better