An eye-opening exploration of blood, the life giving substance with the power of taboo, the value of diamonds and the promise of breakthrough science.

Blood carries life, yet the sight of it makes people faint. It is a waste product and a commodity pricier than oil. It can save lives and transmit deadly infections. Each one of us has roughly nine pints of it, yet many don't even know their own blood type. And for all its ubiquitousness, the few tablespoons of blood discharged by 800 million women are still regarded as taboo: menstruation is perhaps the single most demonized biological event.

Rose George, author of The Big Necessity, is renowned for her intrepid work on topics that are invisible but vitally important. In Nine Pints, she takes us from ancient practices of bloodletting to the breakthrough of the liquid biopsy, which promises to diagnose cancer and other diseases with a simple blood test. She introduces Janet Vaughan, who set up the world's first system of mass blood donation during the Blitz, and Arunachalam Muruganantham, known as Menstrual Man for his work on sanitary pads for developing countries. She probes the lucrative business of plasma transfusions, in which the US is known as the OPEC of plasma. And she looks to the future, as researchers seek to bring synthetic blood to a hospital near you.

Spanning science and politics, stories and global epidemics, Nine Pints reveals our life's blood in an entirely new light.

Nine Pints was named one of Bill Gates' recommended summer reading titles for 2019.

Eye-opening and compelling, the overlooked world of freight shipping, revealed as the foundation of our civilization

On ship-tracking Web sites, the waters are black with dots. Each dot is a ship; each ship is laden with boxes; each box is laden with goods. In postindustrial economies, we no longer produce but buy, and so we must ship. Without shipping there would be no clothes, food, paper, or fuel. Without all those dots, the world would not work. Yet freight shipping is all but invisible. Away from public scrutiny, it revels in suspect practices, dubious operators, and a shady system of flags of convenience. And then there are the pirates.

Rose George, acclaimed chronicler of what we would rather ignore, sails from Rotterdam to Suez to Singapore on ships the length of football fields and the height of Niagara Falls; she patrols the Indian Ocean with an anti-piracy task force; she joins seafaring chaplains, and investigates the harm that ships inflict on endangered whales. Sharply informative and entertaining, Ninety Percent of Everything reveals the workings and perils of an unseen world that holds the key to our economy, our environment, and our very civilization.

One smart book...delving deep into the history and implications of a daily act that dare not speak its name.--Newsweek

Bodily waste is common to all and as natural as breathing. We prefer not to talk about it, but we should--even those of us who take care of our business in pristine, sanitary conditions. Disease spread by bodily waste kills more people worldwide every year than any other single cause of death. Even in the United States, nearly two million people have no access to an indoor toilet, while the sewers of major cities worldwide are an infrastructure disaster waiting to happen. With razor-sharp wit and crusading urgency, mixing levity with gravity, Rose George's The Big Necessity breaks the silence, turning the taboo subject into a cause with the most serious of consequences.

Ever wondered what it's like to be hit by lightning or to lose your sense of smell? Heard about the woman saved by bee stings -- or the window cleaner who survived a 400ft fall?

Originally written for the Wellcome charity, 16 stories by leading science writers explore the mysteries of the human body. Learn about everything from diets to allergies, hair colour to rare blood, and from allergies to remote surgery.

Contents

- What's it like to be struck by lightning? - Charlotte Huff

- Why do we colour hair? - Rebecca Guenard

- The man with the golden blood - Penny Bailey

- Why dieters can't rely on calories - Cynthia Graber

- 3D printers can now make body parts - Ian Birrell

- How to fall from a skyscraper and live to tell the tale - Neil Steinberg

- The quest to explain miscarriages - Holly Cave

- Can the power of thought outwit ageing? - Jo Marchant

- Seeking a 'cure' for male baldness - Rhodri Marsden

- How bee stings saved a woman's life - Christie Wilcox

- The global trend for 'kangaroo' babies - Lena Corner

- What it means to lose your sense of smell - Emma Young

- The doctor aiming to end eye pain - Bryn Nelson

- Could allergies be a defence against noxious chemicals? - Carl Zimmer

- Why pharma may be going slow on the male pill - Andy Extance

- How virtual reality headsets aid remote surgery - Jo Marchant

- Shhh! What exactly is the menopause? - Rose George

Extract

What it's like to be struck by lightning?

Sometimes they'll keep the clothing, the strips of shirt or trousers that weren't cut away and discarded by the doctors and nurses. They'll tell and retell their story at family gatherings and online, sharing pictures and news reports of survivals like their own or far bigger tragedies. The video of a tourist hit on a Brazilian beach or the Texan struck dead while out running. The 65 people killed during four stormy days in Bangladesh.

Only by piecing together the bystander reports, the singed clothing and the burnt skin can survivors start to construct their own picture of the possible trajectory of the electrical current, one that can approach 200 million volts and travel at one-third of the speed of light.

In this way, Jaime Santana's family have stitched together some of what happened that Saturday afternoon in April 2016, through his injuries, burnt clothing and, most of all, his shredded broad-brimmed straw hat. It looks like somebody threw a cannonball through it, says Sydney Vail, a trauma surgeon in Phoenix, Arizona, who helped care for Jaime after he arrived by ambulance, his heart having been shocked several times along the way as paramedics struggled to stabilise its rhythm.

Jaime had been horse-riding with his brother-in-law and two others in the mountains behind his brother-in-law's home outside Phoenix, a frequent weekend pastime. Dark clouds had formed, heading in their direction, so the group had started back.

They had nearly reached the house when it happened, says Alejandro Torres, Jaime's brother-in-law. He paces out the area involved, the landscape dotted with small creosote bushes just behind his acre of property. In the distance, the desert mountains rise, rippled chocolate-brown peaks against the horizon.

The riders had witnessed quite a bit of lightning as they neared Alejandro's house, enough that they had commented on the dramatic zigzags across the sky. But scarcely a drop of rain had fallen as they approached the horse corrals, just several hundred feet from the back of the property.

Alejandro doesn't think he was knocked out for long. When he regained consciousness, he was lying face down on the ground, sore all over. His horse was gone.

The two other riders appeared shaken but unharmed. Alejandro went looking for Jaime, who he found on the other side of his fallen horse. Alejandro brushed against the horse's legs as he walked passed. They felt hard, like metal, he says, punctuating his English with some Spanish.

He reached Jaime: I see smoke coming up - that's when I got scared. Flames were coming off of Jaime's chest.

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Slippery, wet and strange: Fish can be hard to think of as fellow animals and easier to consider as food. But what do we know of these creatures on our plates--and how they got there?

In Every Last Fish, Rose George takes us inside the vast legal industries that support our appetite for fish sticks and salmon burgers, and the equally colossal illegal fishing trade whose practices and standards are unmonitored and often dangerous. From Alaska to Senegal, from Scotland and Norway to Massachusetts, and from the nets on the surface to the murky depths of the seabed, this book will transform the way you look at fish and change your understanding of what lies behind the inscrutable eye that looks back at you.