By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change—including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. Losing Earth is their story, and ours.
The...

In its  new pocket-size format with a rubber-band closure, Rubber Band Engineer: All-Ballistic Pocket Edition is a fun-filled book of backyard projects that's perfect for gifting.

Shooting far, flying high, and delivering way more exciting results than expected are the goals of the gadgets in Rubber Band Engineer: All-Ballistic Pocket Edition. Discover...

"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 theory of plate tectonics transformed earth science. The hypothesis that the earth’s outermost layers consist of mostly rigid plates that move over an inner surface helped describe the growth of new seafloor, confirm continental drift, and explain why earthquakes and volcanoes occur in some places and not others. Lynn R. Sykes played a key role in the...

We're on the cusp of new era in the great adventure of space exploration.

More than a half-century ago, humanity first hurled objects into space, and almost 50 years ago, astronauts first walked on the moon. Since then, we have explored Earth's orbit with shuttles, capsules, and space stations; sent robots to Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter...

There are few fields of science that carbon-14 has not touched. A radioactive isotope of carbon, it stands out for its unusually long half-life. Best known for its application to estimating the age of artifacts—carbon dating—carbon-14 helped reveal new chronologies of human civilization and geological time. Everything containing carbon, the basis of all...

If you want to understand how our world works, the periodic table holds the answers. When the seventh row of the periodic table of elements was completed in June 2016 with the addition of four final elements—nihonium, moscovium, tennessine, and oganesson—we at last could identify all the ingredients necessary to construct our world.In Elemental, chemist and...

There is a growing crisis in our oceans as rates of infectious disease outbreaks are on the rise. Marine epidemics have the potential to cause a mass die-off of wildlife from the bottom to the top of the food chain, impacting the health of ocean ecosystems as well as lives on land. Fueled by sewage dumping, unregulated aquaculture, and drifting plastic in...

Modern science, the Internet, big data, and AI are each saying the same thing to us: the world is--and always has been--far more complex and unpredictable than we've allowed ourselves to see. As a result we're undergoing a sea change in our understanding of how things happen, and in our deepest strategies for predicting, preparing for, and managing our...

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...

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...

TRANSITION POINT: REVOLUTION, EVOLUTION OR ENDGAME?

We live in disruptive times. The world is changing faster than ever before, leaving people dazed, businesses struggling, economies floundering and societies fracturing. But why? Transition Point is the result of over five years of research to establish the answer; a breathtaking tale of freedom...

Feeding the world, climate change, biodiversity, antibiotics, plastics – the list of concerns seems endless.

But what is most pressing, what are the knock-on effects of our actions, and what should we do first? Do we all need to become vegetarian? How can we fly in a low-carbon world? Should we frack? How can we take control of technology? Does it all come...

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’...

Will humans ever be able to live on other planets? Former NASA astronaut Dr. Dave Williams is the person to ask. 

It turns out that Earth is a pretty good place to live. Finding other habitable environments in space is no easy task: temperatures on Mercury are ten times hotter than on Earth; winter on Neptune lasts about forty years, and Uranus is ten...

One Nurse. Trillions of microbes. A deadly WWI battle ...

France, 1916. While treating a patient with dysentery, Sister Annie Barnaby encounters a strain of lethal bacteria. As the invaders journey deep into her gut, the resident microbes must fight to survive. Annie’s life hangs in the balance.

Enter the phage, deadly predators, ready to wage war to protect...

**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...

“Hilarious, and sometimes stomach-turning, vignettes.”

New Scientist

·         How was history changed by a single Soho water pump?

·         Which condition was treated by trapping a child inside a tree trunk?

·         Where is the soul found?

·         How long does it take to digest chewing gum?

·         What are hiccups for?

· Did the Gauls...

At once far flung and intimate, a fascinating look at how finding our way make us human.

In this compelling narrative, O'Connor seeks out neuroscientists, anthropologists and master navigators to understand how navigation ultimately gave us our humanity. Biologists have been trying to solve the mystery of how organisms have the ability to migrate and orient...

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...

Climate and Conservation presents case studies from around the world of leading-edge projects focused on climate change adaptation-regional-scale endeavors where scientists, managers, and practitioners are working to protect biodiversity by protecting landscapes and seascapes in response to threats posed by climate change.

The book begins with...