A physicist explains daily phenomena from the mundane to the magisterial. Take a look up at the stars on a clear night and you get a sense that the universe is vast and untouchable, full of mysteries beyond comprehension. But did you know that the key to unveiling the secrets of the cosmos is as...

On a cold January morning in 1986, NASA launched the Space Shuttle Challenger, despite warnings against doing so by many individuals including Allan McDonald. The fiery destruction of Challenger on live television moments after launch remains an indelible image in the nation's collective memory...

Since the beginning of human history Mars has been an alluring dream - the stuff of legends, gods, and mystery. The planet most like ours, it has still been thought impossible to reach, let alone explore and inhabit. Now with the advent of a revolutionary new plan, all this has changed. ...

Bernd Heinrich involves us in his quest to get inside the mind of the raven. But as animals can be spied on only by getting quite close, Heinrich adopts ravens, thereby becoming a "raven father", as well as observing them in their natural habitat. He studies their daily routines and, in the...

Our affinity for birds is often said to be the result of shared senses....

In the final decades of the 19th century, three brilliant and visionary titans of America's Gilded Age - Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse - battled as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In Empires of Light, historian Jill Jonnes portrays this...

The author of the best seller The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch, explores the four most fundamental strands of human knowledge: quantum physics, and the theories of knowledge, computation, and evolution - and their unexpected connections....

"In this thought-provoking, handsomely illustrated book, Italian neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso considers the fundamental differences between plants and animals and challenges our assumptions about which is the ‘higher’ form of life.” —The Wall Street Journal “Fascinating…full of...

Prepare to learn everything we still don’t know about our strange and mysterious universe Humanity's understanding of the physical world is full of gaps. Not tiny little gaps you can safely ignore —there are huge yawning voids in our basic notions of how the world works. PHD Comics creator...

Bertrand Russell wrote that mathematics can exalt "as surely as poetry". This is especially true of one equation: ei(pi) + 1 = 0, the brainchild of Leonhard Euler, the Mozart of mathematics. More than two centuries after Euler's death, it is still regarded as a conceptual diamond of unsurpassed...

In Significant Figures, acclaimed mathematician Ian Stewart introduces the visionaries of mathematics throughout history. Delving into the lives of 25 great mathematicians, Stewart examines the roles they played in creating, inventing, and discovering the mathematics we use today. Through these...

One of The Barnes and Noble Review Editors' Picks: Best Nonfiction of 2012 Selected by The Christian Science Monitor as one of "21 smart nonfiction titles we think you'll enjoy this summer" Selected by The New Scientist as one of 10 books to look out for in 2012 We've long understood black holes...

The bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and The 37th Parallel tells the fascinating Jurassic Park­-like story of the genetic restoration of an extinct species—the woolly mammoth. “Paced like a thriller…Woolly reanimates history and breathes new life into the narrative of...

How does soap know what's dirt? How do magnets work? Why do ice cubes crackle in your glass? And how can you keep them quiet? These are questions that torment us all. Now Robert L. Wolke, professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, provides definitive - and amazingly simple...

An eye-opening, myth-busting exploration of how the human body can best recover and adapt to sports and fitness training In recent years "recovery" has become a sports and fitness buzzword. Anyone who works out or competes at any level is bombarded with the latest recovery products and services...

This program includes an introduction read by the author. No recent scientific enterprise has proved as alluring, terrifying, and filled with extravagant promise and frustrating setbacks as artificial intelligence. The award-winning author Melanie Mitchell, a leading computer scientist, now...

The X-15 Rocket Plane tells the enthralling yet little-known story of the hypersonic X-15, the winged rocket ship that met this challenge and opened the way into human-controlled spaceflight....

"If you want to understand the strange workings of the human body, and the future of medicine, you must read this illuminating, engaging book." —Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Gene In 2014, James Hamblin launched a series of videos for The Atlantic called "If Our Bodies Could Talk." ...

The story of the men and women who drove the Voyager spacecraft mission— told by a scientist who was there from the beginning. The Voyager spacecraft are our farthest-flung emissaries—11.3 billion miles away from the crew who built and still operate them, decades since their launch. Voyager...