Throughout history, momentous, enabling discoveries have led to a giant leap in our understanding of the workings of the universe and fast-tracked human progress. 100 Discoveries presents the greatest 100 breakthroughs in science and technology, medicine, and the major areas of human endeavour of the past 10,000 years, from the development of agriculture in 10,000BC to the discovery of genomics and the unravelling and manipulation of genes in living things. In identifying and desc...

Forty years after first chewing on sugar cane in New Guinea, the home of sugar, the author underwent some complex dental work as a direct result of his sweet tooth. This led him to explore sugar cane's journey from New Guinea to Shakespeare's England. In the days before dentistry, people paid dearly for this sweet new food from exotic places. Queen Elizabeth I became so partial to hippocras, sugared almonds and pastilles that her teeth turned completely black.Bittersweet i...

Poisons permeate our world. They are in the environment, the workplace, the home. They are in food, our favorite whiskey, medicine, and well water. They have been used to cure diseases as well as incapacitate and kill. They smooth wrinkles, block pain, stimulate and enhance athletic ability. In this entertaining and fact-filled book, science writer Peter Macinnis considers poisons in all their aspects. He recounts stories of the celebrated poisoners in history and literature, from Nero to ...

A triumphantly toxic tome. As a dedicated Macinnis fan, I relish this latest display of erudition, story-telling and fun. One of his very best.'Robyn Williams, Head, ABC Science UnitWas Abraham Lincoln really as mad as a hatter?Who poisoned Phar Lap?Can wallpaper really kill?Was Jack the Ripper an arsenic eater?Painting a broad canvas, from the early Egyptians to the arsenical tube wells in Bangladesh and the Sarin gas attacks in a Tokyo subw...

Our story starts around 700 BC when the Chinese used a form of gunpowder to fumigate their houses. The first real rockets were gunpowder filled sections of bamboo thrown under horses to scare them; the next development was to tie these to arrows.The Mongols took rockets from China to Europe where only some, including Admiral Nelson and the Crown Prince of Sweden, were impressed. The Royal Navy used them in all sorts of odd actions against restless natives in Tierra Del Fuego, Austr...

Psst! It's true! This is the best book on POISONS you'll ever read!There's poison in pips, harm in herbs and definitely death in dyes. Poison is everywhere!Read about toxic wallpaper that killed even bedbugs. Find out why buns were bad for bun-buyers and how a poison might cure cancer. Bone up on murder mysteries, including the one about glow-in-the-dark soup. But don't tell anyone how much you know, or they might lock you up.WARNINGcontains toxic tales and ...

Acclaimed travel writer Rick Antonson (Full Moon Over Noah’s Ark) tackles his most challenging adventure yet: a formidable trail through the remote jungles of Papua New Guinea.Rick Antonson has traveled to parts of the world that are not simply exotic but sometimes damned near inaccessible. He has climbed to the summit of Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey, traveling beyond to Iraq and Iran and Armenia. He has undertaken an improbable overland journey to the a...

A revealing look at the history and production of spices, with modern, no-nonsense advice on using them at home.Every home cook has thoughts on the right and wrong ways to use spices. These beliefs are passed down in family recipes and pronounced by television chefs, but where do such ideas come from? Many are little better than superstition, and most serve only to reinforce a cook’s sense of superiority or cover for their insecurities. It doesn’t have to be this w...

A light-hearted book about books and the people who write them for all lovers of literature.Do you know:Which famous author died of caffeine poisoning?Why Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was banned in China?Who was the first British writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature?What superstitions Truman Capote kept whenever he wrote?Who the other Winston Churchill was?A treasure trove of compelling facts, riveting anecd...

Government and politics might seem twisted today, but they’ve always been strange.There’s something about public office that, throughout time, has transcended normalcy. Politics Weird-o-Pedia presents some of the oddest and most interesting political absurdities and tidbits from around the world, from Peter the Great’s tax on beards to a lawmaker’s mistress whom he kept on the congressional payroll despite her admission that “I can't type, I can't file, I ...

Let Mark Brake open your eyes to how science fiction helped us dream of things to come and building the future we inhabit—from Star Trek to The Martian, from Back to the Future to Guardians of the Galaxy from 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Avengers.Media headlines declare this the age of automation. The TV talks about the coming revolution of the robot, tweets tell tales of jets that will ferry travelers to the ed...

The Barbary corsairs first appeared to terrorize shipping at the end of the fifteenth century. These Muslim pirates sailed out of the ports of North Africa, primarily Sal?, Rabat, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. This area was known in Europe as the Barbary Coast, a term derived from the name of its Berber inhabitants. Acting as officers of the sprawling Ottoman Empire, these pirates plundered the trading routes of the Mediterranean and sowed horror in the hearts of Christians everywhere.