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Having escaped domestic servitude in Germany by teaching herself to sing, and established a career in England, Caroline Herschel learned astronomy while helping her brother William, then Astronomer Royal.Soon making scientific discoveries in her own right, she swept to international scientific and popular fame. She was awarded a salary by George III in 1787 - the first woman in Britain to make her living from science.But, as a woman in a male-dominated world, Herschel's great success was achieved despite constant frustration of her ambitions. Drawing on original sources - including Herschel's diaries and her fiery letters - Claire Brock tells the story of a woman determined to win independence and satisfy her astronomical ambition.

Long before the European Enlightenment, scholars and researchers working from Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan to Cordoba in Spain advanced our knowledge of astronomy, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, medicine and philosophy.From Musa al-Khwarizmi who developed algebra in 9th century Baghdad to al-Jazari, a 13th-century Turkish engineer whose achievements include the crank, the camshaft and the reciprocating piston.Ehsan Masood tells the amazing story of one of history's most misunderstood yet rich and fertile periods in science, via the scholars, research, and science of the Islamic empires of the middle ages.

The history of the computer is entwinedwith that of the modern world and with the life of one man, the brilliant buttroubled Alan Turing.How did the computer come to structureand dominate our lives so totally? In Jon Agar's enlightening story of the'universal machine', we discover how Turing's groundbreaking work not onlyhelped break German codes during the Second World War but also founded the beginningsof the modern computer.Persecuted by the authorities for hishomosexuality, and ultimately hounded to suicide, Turing's personaltribulations are as relevant to the modern world as his work on computing, asindicated by his posthumous royal pardon of 2013 and the recent film The Imitation Game, which focuses onTuring's turbulent life.

The only scientist to ever appear on the British twenty pound note, Michael Faraday is one of the most recognisable names in the history of science.Faraday's forte was electricity, a revolutionary force in nineteenth-century society. The electric telegraph had made mass-communication possible and inventors looked forward to the day when electricity would control all aspects of life. By the end of the century, this dream was well on its way to being realised. But what was Faraday's role in all this? How did his science come to have such an impact on the lives of the Victorians (and ultimately on us)?Iwan Morus tells the story of Faraday's upbringing in London and his apprenticeship at the Royal Institution under the supervision of the flamboyant chemist, Sir Humphry Davy, all set against the backdrop of a vibrant scientific culture and an empire near the peak of its power.