Imagine how it would feel to one day wake up and find your vision descending swiftly into darkness. Your fingertips are turning numb, and, as the world closes in around you, you realise there is nothing you can do to stop it. This is what happened to Vanessa Potter. In the space of 72 hours, Vanessa went from juggling a high-flying career as a producer and caring for her two small children to being completely blind, unable to walk, and with her sense of touch completely gone. Over the course of the next six months, Vanessa slowly began to recover. Opening her eyes onto a black-and-white world with mutating shapes and colours that crackled and fizzled, she encountered a visual landscape that was completely unrecognisable. As colour reappeared, Vanessa experienced a range of bizarre phenomena as her confused brain tried to make sense of the world around her, and she found herself touching and talking to inanimate objects in order to stimulate her vision – all part of her brain's mechanism for coping with the trauma of sensory loss. Going blind led Vanessa to turn science sleuth, reinventing herself as Patient H69 to uncover the reality behind her unique condition. With the help of a team of psychologists and neuroscientists, we follow her story as she learns the science of herself, making discoveries that will positively change the course of her life. Vanessa's account is raw and candid, but ultimately upbeat. It shows how this remarkable woman opened doors by transforming her terrifying experience into an inspirational and scientifically fascinating endeavour.

"The Power of Rare is equal parts science and inspiration. In her urgent drive to help her daughter, Victoria Jackson not only transformed the competitive world of biomedical research, but also created a new medical model for generations to come." —Arianna Huffington Victoria Jackson revolutionized the beauty industry in the 1980s and '90s with her "no make-up" approach to make-up and ultimately made Victoria Jackson Cosmetics into a billion-dollar global brand. But her greatest test of the power of rare didn't come until her daughter, Ali, was diagnosed with neuromyelitis optica, or NMO—a rare, life-threatening autoimmune disease—and Victoria, driven by a mother's love, set out to find a cure for her daughter. Within days of hearing Ali's diagnosis in 2008, Victoria began the Guthy-Jackson Charitable Foundation to fund medical research into this often misdiagnosed orphan disease. Her "blueprint" called for breaking down the so-called silos of traditional medical research and bringing together some of the greatest minds to collaborate and share their findings. She hadn't expected to galvanize how medical research works, but within only a few years, that's just what she did. By focusing on the "rare" in each of us, the foundation has catalyzed breakthroughs in NMO in record time. These advances are also opening new doors to solving MS, lupus, and other autoimmune diseases—plus diseases that are not so rare, including cancer, infection, aging, and more. It has been Victoria's guiding philosophy that if she can do it, anyone can. With The Power of Rare, she shares how the foundation harnessed the power of rare to speed discoveries that help patients. Through her business savvy, wit, and heart, she offers real-world advice and inspiration for others to tap into "rare" to empower their own breakthroughs.

Sleep plays a crucial role in our waking lives, and we need to start paying it more attention. The latest research tells us that it's essential for learning and memory, for mental health and physical well-being, and yet we tend to only think about it when it's proving a struggle. Nodding Off leads you on a fascinating journey through the science of sleep as it evolves throughout our lives; from babies to teenagers, from middle age to the later years of our life, there are constantly new challenges to our sleep. Based on knowledge accumulated over almost two decades as a sleep researcher, Professor Alice Gregory shares real-life stories and interviews with other sleep experts to find the answers to questions, such as: - Why do so many adolescents enjoy lying in at the weekends? - Why do children experiencing anxiety, behavioural problems or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder so often have co-occurring sleep problems? - Why are scientists turning to sleep disorders such as sleep paralysis to try to understand paranormal experiences? With important tips on improving your sleep, Nodding Off is an essential read for anyone who sleeps, and more important still for those who don't get enough. Fans of Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep will love this book!

Tuberculosis is an ancient disease, but it's not a disease of history. With more than a million victims every year – more than any other disease, including malaria – and antibiotic resistance now found in every country worldwide, tuberculosis is once again proving itself to be one of the smartest killers humanity has ever faced. But it's hardly surprising considering how long it's had to hone its skills. Forty-thousand years ago, our ancestors set off from the cradle of civilisation on their journey towards populating the planet. Tuberculosis hitched a lift and came with us, and it's been there ever since; waiting, watching, and learning. In The Robber of Youth, Kathryn Lougheed, a former TB research scientist, tells the story of how tuberculosis and humanity have grown up together, with each being shaped by the other in more ways than you could imagine. This relationship between man and microbe has spanned many millennia and has left its mark on both species. We can see evidence of its constant shadow in our genes; in the bones of the ancient dead; in art, music and literature. Tuberculosis has shaped societies - and it continues to do so today. The organism responsible for TB, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, has had plenty of time to adapt to its chosen habitat – human lungs – and has learnt through natural selection to be an almost perfect pathogen. Using our own immune cells as a Trojan Horse to aid its spread, it's come up with clever ways to avoid being killed by antibiotics. But patience has been its biggest lesson - the bacterium can enter into a latent state when times are tough, only to come back to life when a host's immune system can no longer put up a fight. Today, more than one million people die of the disease every year and around one-third of the world's population are believed to be infected. That's more than two billion people. Throw in the compounding problems of drug resistance, the HIV epidemic and poverty, and it's clear that tuberculosis remains one of the most serious problems in world medicine. The Robber of Youth follows the history of TB through the ages, from its time as an infection of hunter-gatherers to the first human villages, which set it up with everything it needed to become the monstrous disease it is today, through to the perils of industrialisation and urbanisation. It goes on to look at the latest research in fighting the disease, with stories of modern scientific research, interviews doctors on the frontline treating the disease, and the personal experiences of those affected by TB.

Forget about rockets to Mars – the future of space science lies with the search for exoplanets Twenty years ago, the search for planets outside the Solar System was the preserve of science-fiction writers. Now it's one of the fastest-growing fields in astronomy, with thousands of exoplanets discovered to date, and the number rising fast. These new-found worlds are more alien than anything in fiction. Planets larger than Jupiter with years lasting a week; others with two suns lighting their skies, or with no sun at all. Planets with diamond mantles supporting oceans of tar; possible Earth-sized worlds with split hemispheres of perpetual day and night; waterworlds drowning under global oceans and volcanic lava planets awash with seas of magma. The discovery of this diversity is just the beginning. There is a whole galaxy of possibilities. The Planet Factory tells the story of these exoplanets. What can we learn about these faraway surface environments and planetary atmospheres? And do the results hint at the tantalising possibility of alien life?

The human body is like an exceedingly well-fortified castle, defended by billions of soldiers – some live for less than a day, others remember battles for decades, but all are essential in protecting us from disease. This hidden army is our immune system, and without it we could not survive the eternal war between our microscopic enemies and ourselves. Immune explores the incredible arsenal that lives within us – how it knows what to attack and what to defend, and how it kills everything from the common cold virus to plague bacteria. We see what happens when the immune system turns on us, and how life is impossible without its protection. We learn how diseases try to evade the immune system and exploit its vulnerabilities, and we discover how scientists are designing new drugs to harness the power of the system to fight disease. Do transplants ever reject their new bodies? What is pus? How can your body make more antibodies than there are stars in our galaxy? Why is cancer so hard for our immune system to fight? Why do flu outbreaks cause a spike in sleep disorders? Can we smell someone else's immune system, and does that help us subconsciously decide who we fall in love with? In this book, Catherine Carver answers all of these compelling questions, and many more besides. Drawing on everything from ancient Egyptian medical texts to cutting-edge medical science, Immune will take you on an adventure packed with weird and wonderful revelations about your own internal defensive system.

The animal world is full of mysteries. Why do dogs slurp from their drinking bowls while cats lap up water with a delicate flick of the tongue? How does a tiny turtle hatchling from Florida circle the entire northern Atlantic before returning to the very beach where it hatched? And how can a Komodo dragon kill a water buffalo with a bite only as strong as a domestic cat's? These puzzles – and many more besides – are all explained by physics. From heat and light to electricity and magnetism, Furry Logic unveils the ways that more than 30 animals exploit physics to eat, drink, mate and dodge death in their daily battle for survival. Along the way, science journalists Matin Durrani and Liz Kalaugher introduce the great physicists whose discoveries helped us understand the animal world, as well as the animal experts of today who are scouring the planet to find and study the animals that seem to push the laws of physics to the limit. Presenting mind-bending physics principles in a simple and engaging way, Furry Logic will appeal both to animal lovers and to those curious to see how physics crops up in the natural world. It's more of a 'howdunit' than a whodunit, though you're unlikely to guess some of the answers.