$29.95
Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller; but even when he stays safely in his own study at home, he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him. A Short History of Nearly Everything is his quest to find out everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization - how we got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us. Bill Bryson's challenge is to take subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry and particle physics, and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. It's not so much about what we know, as about how we know what we know. How do we know what is in the centre of the Earth, or what a black hole is, or where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out? On his travels through time and space, he encounters a splendid collection of astonishingly eccentric, competitive, obsessive and foolish scientists, like the painfully shy Henry Cavendish who worked out many conundrums like how much the Earth weighed, but never bothered to tell anybody about many of his findings. In the company of such extraordinary people, Bill Bryson takes us with him on the ultimate eye-opening journey, and reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before.
$19.95
Children can put their flying skills to the test with this chunky pad of brightly patterned spaceships. Each tear-out, patterned paper sheet can be folded, origami-style, into a flying spacecraft by following the step-by-step instructions included.$34.95
What do you need to know to prosper for 65,000 years or more? The First knowledges series provides a deeper understanding of the expertise and ingenuity of Indigenous Australians.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders people are the oldest scientists in human history.
Many Indigenous people regard the land as a reflection of the sky and the sky a reflection of the land. Sophisticated astronomical expertise embedded within the Dreaming and Songlines are interwoven into deep understanding of changes on the land, such as weather patterns and seasonal shifts, that are integral in knowledges of time, food availability and ceremony.
In Astronomy: Sky Country, Karlie noon and Krystal De Napoli explore the connections between Aboriginal environmental and cultural practices and the behaviour of the stars and consider what must be done to sustain our dark skies, and the information they hold, into the future.
$39.95
Here is the essential guide to biology, an authoritative reference book and fold out timeline that examines how we have uncovered the secrets of lifethe most complex process in the Universe.
From the workings of molecules to the way entire oceans or continents of lifeforms interact, biology seeks to understand how it is that something can be alive, how it fends off death and how it leaves more life in its wake.
We follow the journey through the history of life science to find out why the dolphin got its name (it is the womb fish), how a seven-foot strand of DNA is able to build your body, and what gives a lobster its blue blood. The great names, such as Darwin and Linnaeus, are joined by lesser known discoverers, such as Karl von Frisch who discovered that bees dance and Jan Baptist van Helmont who found a plant uses air and water to grow. Biology today is still very much a live science, finding a purpose in robot design and helping us to understand non-living complex systems like the Internet. Biology has changed the way we understand ourselves. What will it tell us next?