In the beginning, Earth was an inhospitably alien place -- in constant chemical flux, covered with churning seas, crafting its landscape through incessant volcanic eruptions. Amid all this tumult and disaster, life began. The earliest living things were no more than membranes stretched across microscopic gaps in rocks, where boiling hot jets of mineral-rich water gushed out from cracks in the ocean floor.Although these membranes were leaky, the environment within them became different from the raging maelstrom beyond. These havens of order slowly refined the generation of energy, using it to form membrane-bound bubbles that were mostly-faithful copies of their parents -- a foamy lather of soap-bubble cells standing as tiny clenched fists, defiant against the lifeless world.
St. Martin's Press
|
9781250276650
|
Book
The Magick of Physics
By Flicker, Felix
An award-winning Oxford physicist draws on classic sci-fi, fantasy fiction, and everyday phenomena to explain and celebrate the magical properties of the world around us.. If you were to present the feats of modern science to someone from the past, those feats would surely be considered magic. Theoretical physicist Felix Flicker proves that they are indeed magic - just familiar magic. The name for this magic is "condensed matter physics." Most people haven't heard of the field, yet more than a third of physicists identify as condensed matter researchers, making it the most active area in the subject - with good reason. Condensed matter is the solids, liquids, and gasses that surround us - and the more exotic matters - which dictate every aspect of our present existence, and hold the keys to a brighter future, from quantum computing to real-life invisibility cloaks.
Simon & Schuster
|
9781982170608
|
Hardcover
Survival of the Friendliest
By Hare, Brian
A powerful new theory of human nature suggests that our unique friendliness is the secret to our success as a species. For most of the approximately 300,000 years that Homo sapiens have existed, we have shared the planet with at least four other types of humans. All of these were smart, strong, and inventive. But around 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens made a cognitive leap that gave us an edge over other species. What happened? Since Charles Darwin wrote about "evolutionary fitness," the idea of fitness has been confused with physical strength, tactical brilliance, and aggression. In fact, what made us evolutionarily fit was a remarkable kind of friendliness, a virtuosic ability to coordinate and communicate with others that allowed us to achieve all the cultural and technical marvels in human history.
Random House
|
9780399590665
|
Hardcover
The Case of the Vanishing Blonde
By Bowden, Mark
Six captivating true-crime stories, spanning Mark Bowden's long and illustrious career, cover a variety of crimes complicated by extraordinary circumstances. Winner of a lifetime achievement award from International Thriller Writers, Bowden revisits in The Case of the Vanishing Blonde some of his most riveting stories and examines the effects of modern technology on the journalistic process. From a story of a campus rape at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 that unleashed a moral debate over the nature of consent when drinking and drugs are involved to three cold cases featuring the inimitable Long Island private detective Ken Brennan and a startling investigation that reveals a murderer within the LAPD's ranks, shielded for twenty six years by officers keen to protect one of their own, these stories are the work of a masterful narrative journalist at work.
Atlantic Monthly Press
|
9780802128447
|
Hardcover
The Astronomy Book
By Dk,
We invite you to take a journey through the wonders of the universe. Explore the cosmos, from planets to black holes, the Big Bang, and everything in-between! Get ready to discover the story of the universe one page at a time! This educational book for young adults will launch you on a wild trip through the cosmos and the incredible discoveries throughout history.Filled to the brim with beautifully illustrated flowcharts, graphics, and jargon-free language, The Astronomy Book breaks down hard-to-grasp concepts to guide you in understanding almost 100 big astronomical ideas.How do we measure the universe? Where is the event horizon? What is dark matter? Now you can find out all the answers to these questions and so much more in this inquisitive book about our universe!Using incredibly clever visual learning devices like step-by-step diagrams, you'll learn more about captivating topics from the Copernican Revolution.
DK; Illustrated edition
|
9780744028492
|
Paperback
A Poison Like No Other
By Simon, Matt
It's falling from the sky and in the air we breathe. It's in our food, our clothes, and our homes. It's microplastic and it's everywhere - including our own bodies. Scientists are just beginning to discover how these tiny particles threaten health, but the studies are alarming. In A Poison Like No Other, Matt Simon reveals a whole new dimension to the plastic crisis, one even more disturbing than plastic bottles washing up on shores and grocery bags dumped in landfills. Dealing with discarded plastic is bad enough, but when it starts to break down, the real trouble begins. The very thing that makes plastic so useful and ubiquitous - its toughness - means it never really goes away. It just gets smaller and smaller: eventually small enough to enter your lungs or be absorbed by crops or penetrate a fish's muscle tissue before it becomes dinner.
Island Press
|
9781642832358
|
Hardcover
The Perfect Horse
By Letts, Elizabeth
In the chaotic last days of the war, a small troop of battle-weary American soldiers captures a German spy and makes an astonishing findhis briefcase is empty but for photos of beautiful white horses that have been stolen and kept on a secret farm behind enemy lines. Hitler has stockpiled the worlds finest purebreds in order to breed the perfect military machinean equine master race. But with the starving Russian army closing in, the animals are in imminent danger of being slaughtered for food.
Ballantine
|
9780345544803
|
Hardcover
Why Does the World Exist?
By Holt, Jim
2012 New York Times Top 10 Book of the YearSlate.com 2012 Staff Pick In this astonishing and profound work, an irreverent sleuth traces the riddle of existence from the ancient world to modern times. Whether framed philosophically as “Why is there a world rather than nothing at all?” or more colloquially as “But, Mommy, who made God?” the metaphysical mystery about how we came into existence remains the most fractious and fascinating question of all time. Following in the footsteps of Christopher Hitchens, Roger Penrose, and even Stephen Hawking, Jim Holt emerges with an engrossing narrative that traces our latest efforts to grasp the origins of the universe. As he takes on the role of cosmological detective, the brilliant yet slyly humorous Holt contends that we might have been too narrow in limiting our suspects to God vs.
Liveright; 1 edition
|
9780871404091
|
Hardcover
The Way of Coyote
By Horn, Gavin Van
A hiking trail through majestic mountains. A raw, unpeopled wilderness stretching as far as the eye can see. These are the settings we associate with our most famous books about nature. But Gavin Van Horn isn't most nature writers. He lives and works not in some perfectly remote cabin in the woods but in a city - a big city. And that city has offered him something even more valuable than solitude: a window onto the surprising attractiveness of cities to animals. What was once in his mind essentially a nature-free blank slate turns out to actually be a bustling place where millions of wild things roam. He came to realize that our own paths are crisscrossed by the tracks and flyways of endangered black-crowned night herons, Cooper's hawks, brown bats, coyotes, opossums, white-tailed deer, and many others who thread their lives ably through our own.
University of Chicago Press
|
9780226441580
|
Hardcover
Fifty Foods That Changed the Course of History
By Price, Bill
A beautifully presented guide to the foods that have had the greatest impact on human civilization. Though many of the foods in this book are taken for granted and one (the mammoth) is no longer consumed, these foods have kept humans alive for millennia and theirs is a fascinating story. Like the other titles in this highly-regarded series, this book organizes the fifty foods into short illustrated chapters of fascinating narratives: the "who, where, when, why and how" of each food's introduction and its impact on civilization in one or more cultural, social, commercial, political or military spheres. These stories span human history, from our hunter-gatherer ancestors to the transatlantic slave trade, from the introduction of frozen foods, prohibition and the rise of the Mafia, to the powdered milk scandal in China.
A short history of life on Earth
By Gee, Henry
In the beginning, Earth was an inhospitably alien place -- in constant chemical flux, covered with churning seas, crafting its landscape through incessant volcanic eruptions. Amid all this tumult and disaster, life began. The earliest living things were no more than membranes stretched across microscopic gaps in rocks, where boiling hot jets of mineral-rich water gushed out from cracks in the ocean floor.Although these membranes were leaky, the environment within them became different from the raging maelstrom beyond. These havens of order slowly refined the generation of energy, using it to form membrane-bound bubbles that were mostly-faithful copies of their parents -- a foamy lather of soap-bubble cells standing as tiny clenched fists, defiant against the lifeless world.
The Magick of Physics
By Flicker, Felix
An award-winning Oxford physicist draws on classic sci-fi, fantasy fiction, and everyday phenomena to explain and celebrate the magical properties of the world around us.. If you were to present the feats of modern science to someone from the past, those feats would surely be considered magic. Theoretical physicist Felix Flicker proves that they are indeed magic - just familiar magic. The name for this magic is "condensed matter physics." Most people haven't heard of the field, yet more than a third of physicists identify as condensed matter researchers, making it the most active area in the subject - with good reason. Condensed matter is the solids, liquids, and gasses that surround us - and the more exotic matters - which dictate every aspect of our present existence, and hold the keys to a brighter future, from quantum computing to real-life invisibility cloaks.
Survival of the Friendliest
By Hare, Brian
A powerful new theory of human nature suggests that our unique friendliness is the secret to our success as a species. For most of the approximately 300,000 years that Homo sapiens have existed, we have shared the planet with at least four other types of humans. All of these were smart, strong, and inventive. But around 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens made a cognitive leap that gave us an edge over other species. What happened? Since Charles Darwin wrote about "evolutionary fitness," the idea of fitness has been confused with physical strength, tactical brilliance, and aggression. In fact, what made us evolutionarily fit was a remarkable kind of friendliness, a virtuosic ability to coordinate and communicate with others that allowed us to achieve all the cultural and technical marvels in human history.
The Case of the Vanishing Blonde
By Bowden, Mark
Six captivating true-crime stories, spanning Mark Bowden's long and illustrious career, cover a variety of crimes complicated by extraordinary circumstances. Winner of a lifetime achievement award from International Thriller Writers, Bowden revisits in The Case of the Vanishing Blonde some of his most riveting stories and examines the effects of modern technology on the journalistic process. From a story of a campus rape at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 that unleashed a moral debate over the nature of consent when drinking and drugs are involved to three cold cases featuring the inimitable Long Island private detective Ken Brennan and a startling investigation that reveals a murderer within the LAPD's ranks, shielded for twenty six years by officers keen to protect one of their own, these stories are the work of a masterful narrative journalist at work.
The Astronomy Book
By Dk,
We invite you to take a journey through the wonders of the universe. Explore the cosmos, from planets to black holes, the Big Bang, and everything in-between! Get ready to discover the story of the universe one page at a time! This educational book for young adults will launch you on a wild trip through the cosmos and the incredible discoveries throughout history.Filled to the brim with beautifully illustrated flowcharts, graphics, and jargon-free language, The Astronomy Book breaks down hard-to-grasp concepts to guide you in understanding almost 100 big astronomical ideas.How do we measure the universe? Where is the event horizon? What is dark matter? Now you can find out all the answers to these questions and so much more in this inquisitive book about our universe!Using incredibly clever visual learning devices like step-by-step diagrams, you'll learn more about captivating topics from the Copernican Revolution.
A Poison Like No Other
By Simon, Matt
It's falling from the sky and in the air we breathe. It's in our food, our clothes, and our homes. It's microplastic and it's everywhere - including our own bodies. Scientists are just beginning to discover how these tiny particles threaten health, but the studies are alarming. In A Poison Like No Other, Matt Simon reveals a whole new dimension to the plastic crisis, one even more disturbing than plastic bottles washing up on shores and grocery bags dumped in landfills. Dealing with discarded plastic is bad enough, but when it starts to break down, the real trouble begins. The very thing that makes plastic so useful and ubiquitous - its toughness - means it never really goes away. It just gets smaller and smaller: eventually small enough to enter your lungs or be absorbed by crops or penetrate a fish's muscle tissue before it becomes dinner.
The Perfect Horse
By Letts, Elizabeth
In the chaotic last days of the war, a small troop of battle-weary American soldiers captures a German spy and makes an astonishing findhis briefcase is empty but for photos of beautiful white horses that have been stolen and kept on a secret farm behind enemy lines. Hitler has stockpiled the worlds finest purebreds in order to breed the perfect military machinean equine master race. But with the starving Russian army closing in, the animals are in imminent danger of being slaughtered for food.
Why Does the World Exist?
By Holt, Jim
2012 New York Times Top 10 Book of the YearSlate.com 2012 Staff Pick In this astonishing and profound work, an irreverent sleuth traces the riddle of existence from the ancient world to modern times. Whether framed philosophically as “Why is there a world rather than nothing at all?” or more colloquially as “But, Mommy, who made God?” the metaphysical mystery about how we came into existence remains the most fractious and fascinating question of all time. Following in the footsteps of Christopher Hitchens, Roger Penrose, and even Stephen Hawking, Jim Holt emerges with an engrossing narrative that traces our latest efforts to grasp the origins of the universe. As he takes on the role of cosmological detective, the brilliant yet slyly humorous Holt contends that we might have been too narrow in limiting our suspects to God vs.
The Way of Coyote
By Horn, Gavin Van
A hiking trail through majestic mountains. A raw, unpeopled wilderness stretching as far as the eye can see. These are the settings we associate with our most famous books about nature. But Gavin Van Horn isn't most nature writers. He lives and works not in some perfectly remote cabin in the woods but in a city - a big city. And that city has offered him something even more valuable than solitude: a window onto the surprising attractiveness of cities to animals. What was once in his mind essentially a nature-free blank slate turns out to actually be a bustling place where millions of wild things roam. He came to realize that our own paths are crisscrossed by the tracks and flyways of endangered black-crowned night herons, Cooper's hawks, brown bats, coyotes, opossums, white-tailed deer, and many others who thread their lives ably through our own.
Fifty Foods That Changed the Course of History
By Price, Bill
A beautifully presented guide to the foods that have had the greatest impact on human civilization. Though many of the foods in this book are taken for granted and one (the mammoth) is no longer consumed, these foods have kept humans alive for millennia and theirs is a fascinating story. Like the other titles in this highly-regarded series, this book organizes the fifty foods into short illustrated chapters of fascinating narratives: the "who, where, when, why and how" of each food's introduction and its impact on civilization in one or more cultural, social, commercial, political or military spheres. These stories span human history, from our hunter-gatherer ancestors to the transatlantic slave trade, from the introduction of frozen foods, prohibition and the rise of the Mafia, to the powdered milk scandal in China.