ESC- Award Winning Books : Royal Society

Stir up some sticky slime, build a Solar System with rubber bands, power a speed boat using soap, and construct an erupting volcano. 'Home Lab' is packed with 28 projects, using clear step-by-step instructions, everyday ingredients that can be found around the house and photographs to guide you from start to finish.

Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) is the great lost scientist: more things are named after him than anyone else. There are towns, rivers, mountain ranges, the ocean current that runs along the South American coast, there's a penguin, a giant squid - even the Mare Humboldtianum on the moon. Taking us on a fantastic voyage in his footsteps, Andrea Wulf shows why his life and ideas remain so important today.

We live in epoch-making times. Literally. The changes we humans have made in recent decades have altered our world beyond anything it has experienced in its 4.5 billion-year history - we have become a force on a par with earth-shattering asteroids and planet-cloaking volcanoes. As a result, our planet is said to be crossing a geological boundary - from the Holocene into the Anthropocene, or Age of Man. Quitting her job at science journal 'Nature', Gaia Vince decided to travel the world at the start of this new age, to explore what all these changes really mean for the people living on the frontline of the planet we've made. She found ordinary people solving severe crises in ingenious, effective ways.

Why is glass see-through? What makes elastic stretchy? How come concrete pours? Why does a paperclip bend? Why does any material look and behave the way it does? From the towering skyscrapers of our cities to the most ordinary objects in our homes, 'Stuff Matters' tells enthralling stories that explain the science and history of materials we take entirely for granted, while introducing some of humankind's most ingenious and improbable inventions.

Scientists have just announced an historic discovery on a par with the splitting of the atom: the Higgs boson, the key to understanding why mass exists has been found. In The Particle at the End of the Universe, Caltech physicist and acclaimed writer Sean Carroll takes readers behind the scenes of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN to meet the scientists and explain this landmark event. The Higgs boson is the particle that more than six thousand scientists have been looking for using the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and highest energy particle accelerator, which lies in a tunnel 17 miles in circumference, as deep as 575 feet beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It took ten years to build and this search has now cost over $9 billion and required the collaboration of engineers from more than one hundred countries. What is so special about the Higgs boson? We didn't really know for sure if anything at the subatomic level had any mass at all until we found it. The fact is, while we have now essentially solved the mass puzzle, there are things we didn't predict and possibilities we haven't yet dreamed. A doorway is opening into the mind boggling, somewhat frightening world of dark matter. We only discovered the electron just over a hundred years ago and considering where that took us--from nuclear energy to quantum computing--the inventions that will result from the Higgs discovery will be world-changing. The Particle at the End of the Universe not only explains the importance of the Higgs boson but also the Large Hadron Collider project itself. Projects this big don't happen without a certain amount of conniving, dealing, and occasional skullduggery-- and Sean Carroll explores it all. This is an irresistible story (including characters now set to win the Nobel Prize among other glories) about the greatest scientific achievement of our time.

James Gleick, the author of the best-sellers 'Chaos' and 'Genius', brings us his crowning work: a revelatory chronicle that shows how information has become the modern era's defining quality - the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.

Where does DNA come from? What is consciousness? How did the eye evolve? Drawing on a treasure trove of new scientific knowledge, Nick Lane expertly reconstructs evolution's history by describing its ten greatest inventions--from sex and warmth to death--resulting in a stunning account of nature's ingenuity.