Collection: Adult Non Fiction - Science and Technology

How is the climate where you are? And how did it get that way? How does the great complex global interaction of ice, ocean, and atmosphere combine to generate the rain that sustains us? And who figured all its secret processes out? From the glaciers of the Alps to the towering cumulonimbus clouds...

One bright February afternoon, on a beach in Cornwall, Gavin Pretor-Pinney took a break from cloudspotting and started watching the waves rolling into shore. Mesmerised, he wondered where they had come from, and decided to find out. He soon realised that waves don't just appear on the ocean, they...

At once far flung and intimate, a fascinating look at how finding our way make us human. In this compelling narrative, O'Connor seeks out neuroscientists, anthropologists and master navigators to understand how navigation ultimately gave us our humanity. Biologists have been trying to solve the m...

"Clustered yet scattered, we New Zealanders live across the country's physical landscapes, experiencing its varied weather and environments. We co-create its political, economic and social systems on a daily basis. Each of us has a particular view of Aotearoa, yet nobody comprehends the whole. Th...

Robots exist all around us. They populate our factories, assist our surgeons and have become an integral part of our armed forces. But they are not just working behind the scenes. David Hambling reveals the groundbreaking machines--once the realm of science fiction--that are by our sides today, a...

Even the most enthusiastic of maths students probably at one time wondered when exactly it would all prove useful in 'real life'. Well, maths reaches so far and wide through our world that, love it or hate it, we're all doing maths almost every minute of every day. David Darling and Agnijo Banerj...

David Darling and Agnijo Banerjee reveal the mathematics at the farthest reaches of our world - from its role in the plots of novels to how animals employ numerical skills to survive. Along the way they explore what makes a genius, why a seemingly simple problem can confound the best and brightes...

The millions of people around the world who read and loved What If? still have questions, and those questions are getting stranger. Planning to ride a fire pole from the moon back to Earth? The hardest part is sticking the landing. Hoping to cool the atmosphere by opening everyone's freezer doors...

Life is all around us, abundant and diverse. It is truly a marvel. But what does it actually mean to be alive, and how do we decide what is living and what is not? After a lifetime of studying life, Nobel Prize-winner Sir Paul Nurse, one of the world's leading scientists, has taken on the challen...