On July 20, 1969, Americans had their eyes and ears glued to their TVs and radios. NASA’s successful moon landing left the nation in awe. This moment inspired inventors and engineers across the nation. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 1969 moon landing, we share with you 20 patents that were inspired by the space race and how they reshaped the...

An eye-opening examination of the stupid things smart people do—and how to cultivate skills to protect ourselves from error.

Smart people are not only just as prone to making mistakes as everyone else, they may be even more susceptible to them. This is the "intelligence trap," the subject of David Robson’s fascinating and provocative book.

The Intelligence...

Between the years 2030 and 2050, a quarter of a million people per year will lose their lives to climate change. Blazing temperatures and catastrophic weather are well-known climate change effects, but these simply do not compare with health-related effects: the transmission of water-borne and vector-borne disease. Seventeen-year-old high schooler Arjun...

The debate over the ultimate source of truth in our world often pits science against faith. In fact, many high-profile scientists today say that science has made belief in God unnecessary. In this book, two professional astronomers push back against this notion, arguing that true science doesn't disprove the existence of God and that our notion of truth...

Sarah and Caleb, heirs to royalty in ancient Israel, are captured and sold into slavery. When their slave ship is struck by a hurricane and the crew is killed, the crippled boat drifts north into icy waters. After saving the lives of those on board, the siblings freeze to death. In 2016, while camping with his friends, Davy Carrington is surprised by a...

Mary Roach meets Michael Pollan in this ambitious, dynamic and thought-provoking foray into the future of food.

We need to produce more food. With water and food shortages already being felt in some parts of the world, this might sound like an insurmountable challenge, but all is far from lost. You may not have heard about it, but the sustainable food...

Welcome to the biggest, fastest, deadliest science book you'll ever read.

The world's largest land mammal could help us end cancer. The fastest bird is showing us how to solve a century-old engineering mystery. The oldest tree is giving us insights into climate change. The loudest whale is offering clues about the impact of solar storms.

For a long time...

Why is humanity by far the most successful animal in the animal kingdom, but when it comes to survival of the fittest, we pull against the impulse toward natural selection? Unique among vertebrates, humans develop and practice varied forms of dysfunctional or maladaptive behavior, the graver of which are categorized as mental disorders, which doesn’t...

In this remarkable groundbreaking book, a documentarian and conservationist, determined to dispel misplaced fear and correct common misconceptions, explores in-depth the secret lives of sharks—magnificent creatures who play an integral part in maintaining the health of the world’s oceans and ultimately the planet.

From the Jaws blockbusters to Shark Week, we...

The future is ours and it’s up for grabs

Immerse yourself in the future of biohacking and implants, genetic modification, blockchain micro-transactions and futuristic dating-apps with author of Eating Robots, Stephen Oram.

Prodding and poking the possible in volume 2 of Nudge the Future, Oram starts with another flash fiction foray into the world of Unified...

Mounting Ecosystem Disruption

A Notorious Murder

A Rogue Diplomatic Scheme

June 2020. An outspoken climate scientist is murdered. Investigators believe she was assassinated to end her forceful advocacy for untested geoengineering techniques that might slow global warming.

Frequent extreme storms and rising sea levels are undermining the viability of coastal...

This book tells the tale of two large earthquakes, one that took place in 2011, another imminent, both located in Japan. They will have a major impact on future use of nuclear energy, and also on over-indebted and increasingly fragile world economies.

Using Japanese sources, the book depicts the cultural patterns and assumptions, as well as absence of...

The environmental crisis creates an unprecedented moral predicament: how to be a good person when our collective and individual actions contribute to immeasurable devastation and suffering.

Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources from philosophy, political theory, global religion, ecology, and contemporary spirituality, Roger S. Gottlieb explores the...

The Only Way Out is Through tells the story of a mother’s sudden loss of a child and the impact on the family as a whole. It offers a comprehensive approach to healing for the bereaved and helps them reenter life on new terms. The Only Way Out is Through is not only a book about grieving, but a guide to successfully navigating transitions—the endings and...

Serendipity placed David Johnston on Mount St. Helens when the volcano rumbled to life in March 1980. Throughout that ominous spring, Johnston was part of a team that conducted scientific research that underpinned warnings about the mountain. Those warnings saved thousands of lives when the most devastating eruption in U.S. history blew apart Mount St...

As climate change and development pressures overwhelm the environment, our emotional relationships with Earth are also in crisis. Pessimism and distress are overwhelming people the world over. In this maelstrom of emotion, solastalgia, the homesickness you have when you are still at home, has become, writes Glenn A. Albrecht, one of the defining emotions of...

In the warped world of prescription drug pricing, generic drugs can cost more than branded ones, old drugs can be relaunched at astronomical prices, and low-cost options are shut out of the market.

In Drugs, Money and Secret Handshakes, Robin Feldman shines a light into the dark corners of the pharmaceutical industry to expose a web of shadowy deals in...

On Earth, they scan your thoughts and program your brain.

You’re safe. On the Moon, there is one law: contract is king.

You’re free. When telepath terrorists hack Detroit’s Neuronet with a suicide-virus, thought-scanner Sky Marion’s mom is among the infected. With no known remedy on Earth, and less than a week before the virus destroys victims’...

**The New York Times Bestseller**

'Space elevators, gold asteroids, and fusion-powered toasters - who knew science could be so much fun? Soonish is hilarious, provocative, and shamelessly informative' Tim Harford, author of Messy and The Undercover Economist

From a top scientist and the creator of the hugely popular web comic Saturday Morning Breakfast...

"Read this book and join the effort to terminate air pollution."--Arnold Schwarzenegger, 38th Governor of California

The story of what's happened to the air we breathe, the impact it has had on our health and what we can do to fight back.

Clearing the Air tells the full story of what's happened to the air we breathe. Sustainability journalist Tim Smedley...

The fascinating story behind the mission, music, and message of NASA's Voyager Golden Record--humanity's message to the stars.

In 1977, a team led by the great Carl Sagan was put together to create a record that would travel to the stars on the back of NASA's Voyager probe. They were responsible for creating a playlist of music, sounds and pictures that...

THE TOP TEN SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

TLS, OBSERVER, SUNDAY TIMES, FT, GUARDIAN, DAILY MAIL AND EVENING STANDARD BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017

'Vital ... a life-raft' Guardian '

A top sleep scientist argues that sleep is more important for our health than diet or exercise' The Times

'It had a powerful effect on me' Observer

'I urge you all to read this book'...

The future of food depends on tiny seeds in orchards and fields the world over. In 1943, one of the first to recognize this fact, the great botanist Nikolay Vavilov, lay dying of starvation in a Soviet prison. In the years before Stalin jailed him as a scapegoat for the country's famines, Vavilov had traveled across five continents, collecting hundreds of...

"If you care about science-or a scientist- this will be the most important book you'll ever read," says Randy Olson of his Don't Be Such a Scientist. He's only half joking.

In the United States we have a clear communication gap between the world of science and the general public. For starters, the vast majority of scientists say evolution is a...

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Conventional management approaches cannot meet the challenges faced by ocean and coastal ecosystems today. Consequently, national and international bodies have called for a shift toward more comprehensive ecosystem-based marine management. Synthesizing a vast amount of current knowledge, Ecosystem-Based Management for the Oceans is a...

“The Web’s most influential climate-change blogger” and “Hero of the Environment 2009” --Time Magazine

“I trust Joe Romm on climate.” -- Paul Krugman, New York Times

“America’s fiercest climate-change activist-blogger” and one of “The 100 People Who Are Changing America” -- Rolling Stone

“One of the most influential energy and environmental policy...

The central concept guiding the management of parks and wilderness has been "naturalness" - to a large extent the explicit purpose in establishing these special areas was to keep them in their "natural" state. But what does that mean, particularly as the effects of stressors such as habitat fragmentation, altered disturbance regimes, invasive species, and...

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Most scientists and researchers aren’t prepared to talk to the press or to policymakers—or deal with backlash. Many have the horror stories to prove it. What’s clear, according to Nancy Baron, is that scientists, journalists and public policymakers come from different cultures. They follow different sets of rules, pursue different goals...

For more than three decades, David Orr has been one of the leading voices of the environmental movement, championing the cause of ecological literacy in higher education, helping to establish and shape the field of ecological design, and working tirelessly to raise awareness of the threats to future generations posed by humanity's current unsustainable...

First developed in the 1880s as a way to monitor glaciers in Europe, repeat photography -the practice of taking photographs at different points in times from the same physical vantage point-remains an essential and cost-effective technique for scientists and researchers working to track and study landscape change.

This volume explores the technical...

Seasonally Dry Tropical Forests brings together a range of experts in diverse fields including biology, ecology, biogeography, and biogeochemistry, to review, synthesize, and explain the current state of our collective knowledge on the ecology and conservation of this endangered ecosystem.

The book offers a synthetic and cross-disciplinary review of...

Robert J. Cabin uses the restoration of tropical dry forestland in Hawaii as an in-depth case study to investigate the scientific, practical, and philosophical issues associated with performing ecological restoration in the messy real world.
Interweaving entertaining narratives of his own on-the-ground experiences as a practicing restorationist with...

Restoration ecology is a young field that integrates theory and knowledge from a range of disciplines, including the biological, physical, and social sciences as well as the humanities. This new textbook, written for upper-division undergraduates and first-year graduate students, offers a real-life introduction to the field and an interdisciplinary...

It's a tough time to be a scientist: universities are shuttering science departments, federal funding agencies are facing flat budgets, and many newspapers have dropped their science sections altogether. But according to Marc Kuchner, this antiscience climate doesn't have to equal a career death knell-it just means scientists have to be savvier about...

Just as people schedule regular check-ups with physicians, our planet needs regular check-ups to catch issues as early as possible, before they become more serious and harder to heal. That is the much-needed service provided on a global scale by the Worldwatch Institute in this new book, Vital Signs 2012.
By taking stock of global consumption, Vital...

In 2006, Resilience Thinking addressed an essential question: As the natural systems that sustain us are subjected to shock after shock, how much can they take and still deliver the services we need from them? This idea caught the attention of both the scientific community and the general public.
In Resilience Practice, authors Brian Walker and David...