Science & Engineering

As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science....

From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity's creation and evolution that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us....

There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: Take air in, let it out, repeat 25,000 times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly. Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it....

Professor Matthew Walker reveals his groundbreaking exploration of sleep, explaining how we can harness its transformative power to change our lives for the better....

Bill Bryson has been an enormously popular author both for his travel books and for his books on the English language. Now, this beloved comic genius turns his attention to science...

In Your Dog Is Your Mirror, dog trainer Kevin Behan proposes a radical new model for understanding canine behavior: a dog’s behavior and emotion, indeed its very cognition, are driven by our emotion....

Welcome to the Universe is a personal guided tour of the cosmos by three of today's leading astrophysicists....

From the leading theorist of the Metaverse comes the definitive account of the next internet: what the Metaverse is, what it will take to build it, and what it means for all of us....

Pulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink’s landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina - and her suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice....

A former rocket scientist reveals the habits, ideas, and strategies that will empower you to turn the seemingly impossible into the possible....

A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution - from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state", political violence, and social inequality - revealing new possibilities for human emancipation....

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs and Steel examines the rise of civilization and the issues its development has raised throughout history....

From number one New York Times best-selling author Michael Pollan, a radical challenge to how we think about drugs, and an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants - and the equally powerful taboos....

How do we fit within the universe? How does the universe fit within us? There's no better guide through these questions than astrophysicist and best-selling author Neil deGrasse Tyson....

Tell a stranger that you talk to yourself, and you’re likely to get written off as eccentric. But the truth is that we all have a voice in our head. When we talk to ourselves, we often hope to tap into our inner coach but find our inner critic instead....

This paradigm-shifting audiobook shows how almost everything we think we know about aging is wrong, offers a front-row seat to the amazing global effort to slow, stop, and reverse aging, and calls listeners to consider a future where aging can be treated....

Use your head. That’s what we tell ourselves when facing a tricky problem or a difficult project. But a growing body of research indicates that we’ve got it exactly backwards. What we need to do is think outside the brain....

Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley's most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs....

The Real Anthony Fauci details how Fauci, Gates, and their cohorts use their control of media outlets, scientific journals, key government agencies, global intelligence agencies, and influential scientists and physicians to flood the public with fearful propaganda about COVID-19....

Brain researcher and best-selling author Dean Buonomano draws on evolutionary biology, physics, and philosophy to present his theory of how we tell and perceive time....

An illuminating dive into the latest science on our brain's remarkable learning abilities and the potential of the machines we program to imitate them....

In this scientifically informed account of the changes occurring in the world over the last century, award-winning broadcaster and natural historian Sir David Attenborough shares a lifetime of wisdom and a hopeful vision for the future....

From finding a spouse to finding a parking spot, from organizing one's inbox to understanding the workings of human memory, Algorithms to Live By transforms the wisdom of computer science into strategies for human living....

Can urban farms reduce neighborhood crime? These may not sound like typical questions for a family physician to consider, but in Farmacology, Daphne Miller, MD, ventures out of her medical office and travels to seven innovative family farms around the country....

An essential analysis of the modern science and technology that makes our twenty-first century lives possible—a scientist's investigation into what science really does, and does not, accomplish....

After a few billion years of bearing witness to life on Earth, of watching 100 billion humans go about their day-to-day lives, of feeling unbelievably lonely, and of hearing its own story told by others, the Milky Way would like a chance to speak for itself. All 100 billion stars and 50 undecillion tons of gas of it. It all began some 13 billion years ago, when clouds of gas scattered through the universe's primordial plasma just could not keep their metaphorical hands off each other. They succumbed to their gravitational attraction, and the galaxy we know as the Milky Way was born.

The puzzling lack of evidence for the peculiar but widespread belief that birds have no sense of smell irked evolutionary biologist Danielle Whittaker. Exploring the science behind the myth led her on an unexpected quest investigating mysteries from how juncos win a fight to why cowbirds smell like cookies. In The Secret Perfume of Birds―part science, part intellectual history, and part memoir―Whittaker blends humor, clear writing, and a compelling narrative to describe how scent is important not just for birds but for all animals, including humans.

This book chronicles the creation of Everglades National Park, the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States. Prior to the park's creation, the Everglades was seen as a reviled and useless swamp, unfit for typical recreational or development projects. Park advocates drew on new ideas concerning the value of biota and ecology, the importance of wilderness, and the need to protect habitats, marine ecosystems, and plant life to redefine the Everglades. Using these ideas, the Everglades began to be recognized as an ecologically valuable and fragile wetland.

Nothing captivates the human imagination like the vast unknowns of space. Ancient petroglyphs present renderings of the heavens, proof that we have been gazing up at the stars with wonder for thousands of years. Since then, mankind has systematically expanded our cosmic possibilities. What were once flights of fancy and dreams of science fiction writers have become nearly routine. Space travel is a sometimes heroic, sometimes humorous, and always dangerous journey fraught with perils. Space Oddities brings unknown, offbeat, and obscure stories of space to life. 

We will depart Earth using a far different plan than ever imagined. The harsh realities of the space environment reveal the error-laden misunderstandings left by our limited experience. We have discovered the grave weaknesses of our fatally flawed current exploration model. Instead of empty darkness, we are facing a hostile environment that the antiquated Apollo model is incapable of confronting.

Estimating the cost of a project is critical to your business success. Done correctly, your company is profitable. Done wrong, you lose money. Michael Stone, a successful construction business consultant and trainer, shares his years of experience estimating residential projects in this manual. Estimating isn't difficult when you have a system. The purpose of this book is to help you create that system. It's an approach that helps you estimate without having to think about the process. An orderly approach makes estimating easier and more accurate.

In this groundbreaking book, John Morrison examines the theory of evolution currently being taught in high schools and colleges across the world. This planet was once nothing but liquid and gas, but somehow, over billions of years, the countless number of living organisms currently on Earth came into existence. This includes humans descending from apes. Once the currently taught theory is understood, John then proceeds to explain what the textbooks don't teach, which puts the theory of evolution in a new light.

Healthcare is evolving, and our smartphones are driving that disruption, better connecting us with the stakeholders who help keep us happy and healthy. The Digital Health Revolution is the first consumer look at how digital health technologies are helping us collect, analyze, and take action on our personal healthcare data. Whether you are managing a chronic condition or simply striving to stay healthy, plug in and catch up with the innovators driving disruption and delivering better value for us all.

Our world is infinitely richer than previously guessed, yet it is so ravaged by human activity that half its species could be gone by the end of the century. In this dazzlingly intelligent and ultimately hopeful work, biologist E.O. Wilson describes what treasures of the natural world we are about to lose forever—in many cases animals, insects, and plants we have only just discovered—and what we can do to save them. Wilson explores the ethical and religious bases of the conservation movement and deflates the myth that environmental policy is antithetical to economic growth.

The climate is the fundamental issue of our time, yet it seems we can barely agree on what is really going on, let alone what needs to be done. We urgently need facts. The Carbon Almanac is a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration between hundreds of writers, researchers, thinkers and leaders that focuses on what we know, what has come before and what might happen next. With thousands of data points, articles and charts explaining carbon's impact on everything in our society, it is the definitive source for facts and the basis for a global movement to fight climate change.

Not only can we not currently explain the origin of the universe, it is questionable we will ever be able to explain it. The notion that there are universes within particles, or that particles are conscious, is ascientific, as is the hypothesis that our universe is a computer simulation. On the other hand, the idea that the universe itself is conscious is difficult to rule out entirely. 

Human exceptionalism can be a double-edged sword. With our unique cognitive prowess comes severe consequences, including existential angst, violence, discrimination, and the creation of a world teetering toward climate catastrophe. Understood side-by-side, human exceptionalism begins to look more like a curse. As scientist Justin Gregg persuasively argues, there’s an evolutionary reason why human intelligence isn’t more prevalent in the animal kingdom. Simply put, non-human animals don’t need it to be successful.

Providing a post-COP26 perspective on the climate emergency, Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant's Guide acknowledges that it is now practically impossible to keep this side of the 1.5°C dangerous climate change guardrail. The upshot is that we can no longer dodge the arrival of a disastrous, all-pervasive climate breakdown that will come. Bill McGuire explains the science behind the climate crisis, painting a blunt but authentic picture of the sort of world our children will grow old in, and our grandchildren grow up in, a world that we catch only glimpses of today.

Since the dawn of human history, birds have stirred our imagination, inspiring and challenging our ideas about science, faith, art, and philosophy. We have worshipped birds as gods, hunted them for sustenance, adorned ourselves with their feathers, studied their wings to engineer flight, and, more recently, attempted to protect them. In Birds and Us, award-winning writer and ornithologist Tim Birkhead takes us on a dazzling epic journey through our mutual history with birds.

For centuries, people have been returning to the same tired nature-versus-nurture debate, trying to determine what we learn and what we inherit. In Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test, biologist Marlene Zuk goes beyond the binary and instead focuses on interaction, or the way that genes and environment work together. Driving her investigation is a simple but essential question: How does behavior evolve?