Penguin Books Australia

'Crossword addicts that we are, we were thrilled to learn that out habit is actually juicing our brainpower-or at least one particular brand of brainpower.  The Playful Brain . . . runs through everything from Sudoku to mazes to how pickpockets operate in order to explain the beneficial effects of puzzles on memory, perception, and cognition.'
- THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

You're building up your...

Reporting on in-depth research and interviews...

In this foundational book, Robert Trivers seeks to answer one of the most provocative and consequential questions to face humanity: why do we lie to ourselves? 

'I am thinking about something much more important than bombs. I am thinking about computers' John von Neumann

How did computers take over the world? In late 1945, a small group of brilliant engineers and mathematicians gathered at the newly created Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Their ostensible goal was to build a computer that would be instrumental in the US government's...

'It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.'
- Loren Eiseley

'A grand sweep from a master storyteller of the human race'
DAILY MAIL

'Riveting, superb, terrifying'
OBSERVER

From the ghostly stone heads of Easter Island to crumbling Mayan cities hidden deep in the jungle, the mysterious ruins of lost worlds and vanished civilizations continue to haunt us.  How could such mighty societies fall?  And could our skyscrapers one day stand derelict and overgrown...

'The history, science, art, literature and everyday applications of all the elements from aluminium to zinc'
The Times
 
Everything in the universe is made of them, including you.
 
Like you, the elements have personalities, attitudes, talents, shortcomings, stories rich with meaning.
 

'Jim Al-Khalili has a passion for bringing to a wider audience not just the facts of science but its history . . . Just as the legacy of Copernicus and Darwin belongs to all of us, so does that of Ibn Sina and Ibn al-Haytham' Independent 

Renaissance diplomat and part-time spy, William Hakluyt was also England's first serious geographer, gathering together a wealth of accounts about the wide-ranging travels and discoveries of the sixteenth-century English. One of the epics of this great period of expansion, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation describes, in the words of the explorers themselves...

From crime figures to health scares, election polls to stock market forecasts, numbers make the news all the time. But are they accurate?

Fascinating, plain-English answers to real science and health questions asked by real people

More Amazing Science Q&As from the Author of Curious Folks Ask

Why do lizards do pushups?
Does hot water really freeze faster than cold water?
Why does the moon look bigger at the horizon?
Why do some people float and others sink?
What's better, paper or plastic?
Why can't anything go faster than light?
How did oil get there?
How does carbon dating work, and why do scientists trust it?
How much...

You write an email. You hit send. It appears ten thousand miles away. How did that happen?

In April 2011, a seventy-five year old woman deprived Armenia of its internet access when she sliced through a buried cable with her garden spade. That January, Egyptian authorities simply switched off 70% of the country's internet connections in an attempt to quell a revolution. In 2009, a squirrel chewed through...

Creativity: It's singing the song that has never been sung and solving the problem that seems impossible. It's the free verse poem and the mathematical equation, the abstract painter and the patient inventor. It's the ability to see the world as it is, and then to imagine how it might be.

Jonah Lehrer is on a mission to unlock the mysteries of creativity and invention, starting at the source: inside...