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A Sunday Times bestsellerHow long is ''now''? The short answer is ''somewhere between 2 and 3 seconds''. The long answer involves an incredible journey through neuroscience, our subconscious and the time-bending power of meditation. Living in the present may never feel the same. Ready for some more? Okay. Why isn''t Pluto a planet? Why are dogs'' noses wet? Why do hens cluck more loudly after laying an egg? What happens when one black hole swallows another? Do our fingerprints change as we get older? How young can you die of old age? And what is at the very edge of the Universe?Life is full of mind-bending questions. And, as books like What If? and Why Don''t Penguins'' Feet Freeze? have shown, the route to find each answer can take us on the weirdest and most wonderful journeys. How Long is Now? is a fascinating new collection of questions you never thought to ask, along with answers that will change the way you see everything.

It''s lucky you''re here. But for a series of choices, accidents and coincidences - any of which could have gone otherwise - your life would have been very different. The same goes for reality. We live in just one of many possible worlds - but we can imagine parallel universes in which dinosaurs still rule the Earth, the Russians got to the moon first, everyone''s a vegetarian or time itself flows backwards. And that''s just for starters. What if the laws of physics were different? What if robots become smarter than us? Or, if every human on the planet simply vanished tomorrow? The answers to these questions aren''t just fun to consider, but reveal deep truths about our own universe.Join New Scientist on a thrilling journey through dozens of incredible but perfectly possible alternative realities, thought experiments and counterfactual histories - each shining a surprising and unexpected spotlight on life as we know it.

What''s the nature of reality? Does the universe ever end? What is time and does it even exist? These are the biggest imagination-stretching, brain-staggering questions in the universe - and here are their fascinating answers.From quantum weirdness to freaky cosmology (like white holes - which spew out matter instead of sucking it in), This Book Will Blow Your Mind takes you on an epic journey to the furthest extremes of science, to the things you never thought possible. This book will explain: Why part of the universe missing (and how scientists finally found it)How time might also flow backwardsHow human head transplants might be possible (in the very near future)Whether the universe is a hologramAnd why we are all zombiesFilled with counterintuitive stories and factoids you can''t wait to share, as well as lots of did-you-knows and plenty of how-did-we-ever-not-knows, this new book from the bestselling New Scientist series will blow your mind - and then put it back together again. You don''t need a spaceship to travel to the extremes of science. You just need this book.

If you thought you knew who you were, THINK AGAIN.Did you know that half your DNA isn''t human? That somebody, somewhere has exactly the same face? Or that most of your memories are fiction?What about the fact that you are as hairy as a chimpanzee, various parts of your body don''t belong to you, or that you can read other people''s minds? Do you really know why you blush, yawn and cry? Why 90 per cent of laughter has nothing to do with humour? Or what will happen to your mind after you die?You belong to a unique, fascinating and often misunderstood species. How to be Human is your guide to making the most of it.

Congratulations! You''re the proud owner of the most complex information processing device in the known universe. The human brain comes equipped with all sorts of useful design features, but also many bugs and weaknesses. Problem is you don''t get an owner''s manual. You have to just plug and play. As a result, most of us never properly understand how our brains work and what they''re truly capable of. We fail get the best out of them, ignore some of their most useful features and struggle to overcome their design faults. Featuring witty essays and fascinating ''try this at home'' experiments, New Scientist take you on a journey through intelligence, memory, creativity, the unconscious and beyond. From the strange ways to distort what we think of as ''reality'' to the brain hacks that can improve memory, The Brain: A User''s Guide will help you understand your brain and show you how to use it to its full potential.

Forget everything you thought you knew about reality.The world is a seriously bizarre place. Things can exist in two places at once and travel backwards and forwards in time. Waves and particles are one and the same, and objects change their behaviour according to whether they are being watched. This is not some alternative universe but the realm of the very small, where quantum mechanics rules. In this weird world of atoms and their constituents, our common sense understanding of reality breaks down - yet quantum mechanics has never failed an experimental test. What does it all mean?

For all its weirdness, quantum mechanics has given us many practical technologies including lasers and the transistors that underlie computers and all digital technology. In the future, it promises computers more powerful than any built before, the ability to communicate with absolute privacy, and even quantum teleportation.

The Quantum World explores the past, present and future of quantum science, its applications and mind-bending implications. Discover how ideas from quantum mechanics are percolating out into the vast scale of the cosmos - perhaps, in the future, to reveal a new understanding of the big bang and the nature of space and time.

ABOUT THE SERIESNew Scientist Instant Expert books are definitive and accessible entry points to the most important subjects in science; subjects that challenge, attract debate, invite controversy and engage the most enquiring minds. Designed for curious readers who want to know how things work and why, the Instant Expert series explores the topics that really matter and their impact on individuals, society, and the planet, translating the scientific complexities around us into language that''s open to everyone, and putting new ideas and discoveries into perspective and context.

Murder for hire. Drug trafficking. Embezzlement. Money laundering... These might sound like plot lines of a thriller, but they are true stories from the short history of cryptocurrencies - digital currencies conceived by computer hackers and cryptographers that represent a completely new sort of financial transaction that could soon become mainstream. The most famous - or infamous - cryptocurrency is bitcoin. But look beyond its tarnished reputation and something much shinier emerges. The technology that underlies bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies - the blockchain - is hailed as the greatest advancement since the invention of the internet. It is now moving away from being the backbone for a digital currency and making inroads into other core concepts of society: identity, ownership and even the rule of law.The End of Money is your essential introduction to this transformative new technology that has governments, entrepreneurs and forward-thinking people from all walks of life sitting up and taking notice.ABOUT THE SERIESNew Scientist Instant Expert books are definitive and accessible entry points to the most important subjects in science; subjects that challenge, attract debate, invite controversy and engage the most enquiring minds. Designed for curious readers who want to know how things work and why, the Instant Expert series explores the topics that really matter and their impact on individuals, society, and the planet, translating the scientific complexities around us into language that''s open to everyone, and putting new ideas and discoveries into perspective and context.

Ever wondered what''s going on inside your head?You are your brain. Everything that makes you you, and all your experiences of the world, are somehow conjured up by 1.4 kilograms of grey matter inside your skull. That might seem impossible, but science has advanced so much that we now understand not just its structures and inner workings but also how it can give rise to perception, consciousness, emotions, memories, intelligence, sleep and more. HOW YOUR BRAIN WORKS explores the amazing world inside your head. Discover the evolution and anatomy of the brain. Learn how we can peer inside it and watch it at work, and how the latest technology can allow us to control our minds and those of others. ABOUT THE SERIESNew Scientist Instant Expert books are definitive and accessible entry points to the most important subjects in science; subjects that challenge, attract debate, invite controversy and engage the most enquiring minds. Designed for curious readers who want to know how things work and why, the Instant Expert series explores the topics that really matter and their impact on individuals, society, and the planet, translating the scientific complexities around us into language that''s open to everyone, and putting new ideas and discoveries into perspective and context.

How did it all begin? Where is it all going?A little over a century ago, a young Albert Einstein presented his general theory of relativity to the world and utterly transformed our understanding of the universe. His theory changed the way we think about space and time, revealed how our universe has been expanding from a hot dense state called the big bang and predicted black holes. WHERE THE UNIVERSE CAME FROM is a 13.8-billiion-year journey through the cosmos. Discover how Einstein''s work explains why the cosmos is the way it is, why 95% of the universe is missing, how physicists go to extraordinary lengths to unlock gravity''s secrets and how black holes could hold the key to a theory of everything.ABOUT THE SERIESNew Scientist Instant Expert books are definitive and accessible entry points to the most important subjects in science; subjects that challenge, attract debate, invite controversy and engage the most enquiring minds. Designed for curious readers who want to know how things work and why, the Instant Expert series explores the topics that really matter and their impact on individuals, society, and the planet, translating the scientific complexities around us into language that''s open to everyone, and putting new ideas and discoveries into perspective and context.

What is this strange mental world that seems so essential to being human? The conscious mind brings together sensations, perceptions, thoughts and memories to generate the seamless movie of a person''s life. It makes us aware of the world around us and our own self. How all this emerges from a kilogram of brain cells is one of the greatest unanswered questions. In Your Conscious Mind leading brain scientists and New Scientist take you on a journey through the mind to discover what consciousness really is, and what we can learn when it goes awry. Find out if we will ever build conscious machines, what animal consciousness can tell us about being human and explore the enigma of free will. ABOUT THE SERIESNew Scientist Instant Expert books are definitive and accessible entry points to the most important subjects in science; subjects that challenge, attract debate, invite controversy and engage the most enquiring minds. Designed for curious readers who want to know how things work and why, the Instant Expert series explores the topics that really matter and their impact on individuals, society, and the planet, translating the scientific complexities around us into language that''s open to everyone, and putting new ideas and discoveries into perspective and context.

Sometime in the future the intelligence of machines will exceed that of human brain power. So are we on the edge of an AI-pocalypse, with superintelligent devices superseding humanity, as predicted by Stephen Hawking? Or will this herald a kind of Utopia, with machines doing a far better job at complex tasks than us? You might not realise it, but you interact with AIs every day. They route your phone calls, approve your credit card transactions and help your doctor interpret results. Driverless cars will soon be on the roads with a decision-making computer in charge. But how do machines actually think and learn? In Machines That Think, AI experts and New Scientist explore how artificial intelligence helps us understand human intelligence, machines that compose music and write stories - and ask if AI is really a threat.ABOUT THE SERIESNew Scientist Instant Expert books are definitive and accessible entry points to the most important subjects in science; subjects that challenge, attract debate, invite controversy and engage the most enquiring minds. Designed for curious readers who want to know how things work and why, the Instant Expert series explores the topics that really matter and their impact on individuals, society, and the planet, translating the scientific complexities around us into language that''s open to everyone, and putting new ideas and discoveries into perspective and context.

As you read this, billions of neutrinos from the sun are passing through your body, antimatter is sprouting from your dinner and the core of your being is a chaotic mess of particles known only as quarks and gluons.If the recent discovery of the Higgs boson piqued your interest, then Why The Universe Exists will take you deeper into the world of particle physics, with leading physicists and New Scientist exploring how the universe functions at the smallest scales.

Find out about hunt for dark matter and why there is something rather than nothing. Discover how accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland are rewinding time to the first moments after the big bang, and how ghostly neutrino particles may hold the answers to the greatest mysteries of the universe.

ABOUT THE SERIESNew Scientist Instant Expert books are definitive and accessible entry points to the most important subjects in science; subjects that challenge, attract debate, invite controversy and engage the most enquiring minds. Designed for curious readers who want to know how things work and why, the Instant Expert series explores the topics that really matter and their impact on individuals, society, and the planet, translating the scientific complexities around us into language that''s open to everyone, and putting new ideas and discoveries into perspective and context.

How did we get here? All cultures have a creation story, but a little over 150 years ago Charles Darwin introduced a revolutionary new one. We, and all living things, exist because of the action of evolution on the first simple life form and its descendants.We now know that it has taken 3.8 billions of years of work by the forces of evolution to turn what was once a lump of barren rock into the rich diversity of into plants, animals and microbes that surround us. In the process, evolution has created all manner of useful adaptions, from biological computers (brains) to a system to capture energy from the sun (photosynthesis). But how does evolution actually work? In Evolution, leading biologists and New Scientist take you on a journey of a lifetime, exploring the question of whether life is inevitable or a one-off fluke, and how it got kick-started. Does evolution have a purpose or direction? Are selfish genes really the driving force of evolution? And is evolution itself evolving?ABOUT THE SERIESNew Scientist Instant Expert books are definitive and accessible entry points to the most important subjects in science; subjects that challenge, attract debate, invite controversy and engage the most enquiring minds. Designed for curious readers who want to know how things work and why, the Instant Expert series explores the topics that really matter and their impact on individuals, society, and the planet, translating the scientific complexities around us into language that''s open to everyone, and putting new ideas and discoveries into perspective and context.

Think of a number between one and ten. No, hang on, let''s make this interesting. Between zero and infinity. Even if you stick to the whole numbers, there are a lot to choose from - an infinite number in fact. Throw in decimal fractions and infinity suddenly gets an awful lot bigger (is that even possible?) And then there are the negative numbers, the imaginary numbers, the irrational numbers like pi which never end. It literally never ends.The world of numbers is indeed strange and beautiful. Among its inhabitants are some really notable characters - pi, e, the "imaginary" number i and the famous golden ratio to name just a few. Prime numbers occupy a special status. Zero is very odd indeed: is it a number, or isn''t it?How Numbers Work takes a tour of this mind-blowing but beautiful realm of numbers and the mathematical rules that connect them. Not only that, but take a crash course on the biggest unsolved problems that keep mathematicians up at night, find out about the strange and unexpected ways mathematics influences our everyday lives, and discover the incredible connection between numbers and reality itself. ABOUT THE SERIESNew Scientist Instant Expert books are definitive and accessible entry points to the most important subjects in science; subjects that challenge, attract debate, invite controversy and engage the most enquiring minds. Designed for curious readers who want to know how things work and why, the Instant Expert series explores the topics that really matter and their impact on individuals, society, and the planet, translating the scientific complexities around us into language that''s open to everyone, and putting new ideas and discoveries into perspective and context.

The ancient Greeks called it Gaia; the Romans Terra. We know it simply as Earth, the planet we call home. And what a planet it is.Formed around 4.6 billion years ago from the debris of the big bang and long-dead stars, at first it was nothing special, but somehow it evolved to become the most amazing place in the known Universe. The only living planet we know of, it also has a very unusual moon, a remarkably dynamic surface, a complex atmosphere and a deeply mysterious interior.This is Planet Earth is dedicated to the wonders of Planet Earth. Its past is long and dramatic and its future shrouded in mystery. Yet despite centuries of research, only now are we starting to understand Earth''s complexity.ABOUT THE SERIESNew Scientist Instant Expert books are definitive and accessible entry points to the most important subjects in science; subjects that challenge, attract debate, invite controversy and engage the most enquiring minds. Designed for curious readers who want to know how things work and why, the Instant Expert series explores the topics that really matter and their impact on individuals, society, and the planet, translating the scientific complexities around us into language that''s open to everyone, and putting new ideas and discoveries into perspective and context.

Where did we come from? Where are we going?Homo sapiens is the most successful, the most widespread and the most influential species ever to walk the Earth. In the blink of an evolutionary eye we have spread around the globe, taken control of Earth''s biological and mineral resources, transformed the environment, discovered the secrets of the universe and travelled into space.Yet just 7 million years ago, we were just another species of great ape making a quiet living in the forests of East Africa. We do not know exactly what this ancestor was like, but it was no more likely than a chimpanzee or gorilla to sail across the ocean, write a symphony, invent a steam engine or ponder the meaning of existence. How did we get from there to here?Human Origins recounts the most astonishing evolutionary tale ever told. Discover how our ancestors made the first tentative steps towards becoming human, how we lost our fur but gained language, fire and tools, how we strode out of Africa, invented farming and cities and ultimately created modern civilisation - perhaps the only one of its kind in the universe. Meet your long-lost ancestors, the other humans who once shared the planet with us, and learn where the story might end. ABOUT THE SERIESNew Scientist Instant Expert books are definitive and accessible entry points to the most important subjects in science; subjects that challenge, attract debate, invite controversy and engage the most enquiring minds. Designed for curious readers who want to know how things work and why, the Instant Expert series explores the topics that really matter and their impact on individuals, society, and the planet, translating the scientific complexities around us into language that''s open to everyone, and putting new ideas and discoveries into perspective and context.

There''s a whole universe out there...Imagine you had a spacecraft capable of travelling through interstellar space. You climb in, blast into orbit, fly out of the solar system and keep going. Where do you end up, and what do you see along the way?The answer is: mostly nothing. Space is astonishingly, mind-blowingly empty. As you travel through the void between galaxies your spaceship encounters nothing more exciting than the odd hydrogen molecule. But when it does come across something more exotic: wow!First and most obviously, stars and planets. Some are familiar from our own backyard: yellow suns, rocky planets like Mars, gas and ice giants like Jupiter and Neptune. But there are many more: giant stars, red and white dwarfs, super-earths and hot Jupiters. Elsewhere are swirling clouds of dust giving birth to stars, and infinitely dense regions of space-time called black holes. These clump together in the star clusters we call galaxies, and the clusters of galaxies we call... galaxy clusters.And that is just the start. As we travel further we encounter ever more weird, wonderful and dangerous entities: supernovas, supermassive black holes, quasars, pulsars, neutron stars, black dwarfs, quark stars, gamma ray bursts and cosmic strings. A Journey Through The Universe is a grand tour of the most amazing celestial objects and how they fit together to build the cosmos. As for the end of the journey - nobody knows. But getting there will be fun. ABOUT THE SERIESNew Scientist Instant Expert books are definitive and accessible entry points to the most important subjects in science; subjects that challenge, attract debate, invite controversy and engage the most enquiring minds. Designed for curious readers who want to know how things work and why, the Instant Expert series explores the topics that really matter and their impact on individuals, society, and the planet, translating the scientific complexities around us into language that''s open to everyone, and putting new ideas and discoveries into perspective and context.

For you to be here today reading this requires a mind-boggling series of lucky breaks, starting with the Big Bang and ending in your own conception. So it''s not surprising that we persist in thinking that we''re in with a chance, whether we''re playing the lottery or working out the likelihood of extra-terrestrial life. In Chance, a (not entirely) random selection of the New Scientist''s sharpest minds provide fascinating insights into luck, randomness, risk and probability. From the secrets of coincidence to placing the perfect bet, the science of random number generation to the surprisingly haphazard decisions of criminal juries, it explores these and many other tantalising questions.Following on from the bestselling Nothing and Question Everything, this book will open your eyes to the weird and wonderful world of chance - and help you see when some things, in fact, aren''t random at all.

All science begins with questions... - Why is the night sky black, even though it''s full of stars? - How do pebbles skim on water? - Why doesn''t your own snoring wake you up? - And why is the Large Hadron Collider so ... er ... large? And as these intriguing, imaginative and occasionally bonkers questions and answers drawn from New Scientist magazine''s archives show: question everything and you might find your way to amazing, unexpected insights into our minds, bodies and the universe, and the science behind the scenes that keeps them ticking.As you would expect from New Scientist, this is top-flight science at its most accessible, unpredictable and entertaining. This latest mind-bending addition to the No. 1 bestselling series will fascinate ''Last Word'' fans and new readers alike.