How do scientists solve mysteries? With forensics! Every crime scene contains forensic evidence that helps investigators discover exactly what happened. Forensics is the science of gathering and examining information about a past event, usually to solve a crime or legal problem.In Forensics: Cool Women Who Investigate, children ages 9 through 12 learn about this fascinating field and meet three women who are succeeding in their chosen profession of forensics. Christine Gab...

What types of robots will the future bring? How do biomedical devices help patients? Have you ever wondered how your phone works? In Engineering: Cool Women Who Design, readers ages 9 to 12 meet three women who are working hard in the engineering field. Elsa Garmire has designed many devices that use lasers and light. Amy Kerdok designs medical and surgical devices. Anna Stork co-founded LuminAID Lab, a company that produces solar lighting products for the developing world and bey...

In Every Root an Anchor, writer and arborist R. Bruce Allison celebrates Wisconsin's most significant, unusual, and historic trees. More than one hundred tales introduce us to trees across the state, some remarkable for their size or age, others for their intriguing histories. From magnificent elms to beloved pines to Frank Lloyd Wright's oaks, these trees are woven into our history, contributing to our sense of place. They are anchors for time-honored customs, manifestations of o...

For readers of H is for Hawk and The Frozen Thames, The Ghost Orchard is award-winning author Helen Humphreys’ fascinating journey into the secret history of an iconic food. Delving deep into the storied past of the apple in North America, Humphreys explores the intricate link between agriculture, settlement, and human relationships. With her signature insight and exquisite prose, she brings light to such varied topics as how the apple first came across the Atlan...

IN 1902, WILLIAM HORNADAY handed a map to the famous paleontologist Barnum Brown. It was Hornaday’s hand-drawn directions to a remote area of the Montana Badlands, where he believed amazing dinosaur fossils lay buried. Following the map, Brown dug up a jawbone edged with six-inch long teeth, the remains of a monstrous creature no one had ever seen before. But one bone wasn’t enough, and Brown soon found himself in a desperate race to discover the skeleton of the mystery carnivore!

Classic Deer Camps is a trip through time, back to the core of America's deer-hunting heritage.In this unique book you will revisit 19th century deer camps through a spectacular collection of writings, historical biography of famous deer camps and nostalgic artwork, plus you'll rediscover the freedom, solitude and camaraderie of this shared rite of passage. Short of providing the faint smell of beans and backstraps cooking on the fire, this book brings you to the heart and...

TV and movies will have you believing that black holes are huge holes in space and anything that falls into them is lost for all time – possibly falling into another universe or another time, or even falling forever.You may think that black holes run around in space like huge vacuum cleaners sucking up everything in their path. This is not true.But what actually is a black hole and what do they do? This book will help you find out.LearningIsland.com believes in the v...

Start your engines and follow the backroads, the historical paths, and the scenic landscape that were fashioned by geologic Ice Ages and traveled by Big Thicket explorers as well as contemporary park advocatesall as diverse as the Big Thicket itself. From Spanish missionaries to Jayhawkers, and from timber barons to public officials, you will meet some unusual characters who inhabited an exceptional region. The Big Thicket and its National Preserve contain plants and animals from deserts a...

Open a copy of the Information Please Almanac and turn to the chapter on famous people. 4000 names and you won't know hardly any. But what about names everyone knows? Pillsbury, Kellogg, Gerber. Nowhere to be found. How many names are more famous than Howard Johnson or Oscar Mayer? But who were these folks? Let's take a look at the men behind the names we see keeping up the house.

We see stars in the night sky as pretty, twinkling objects, but what exactly are they?A lot of the information we find out about stars, helps us understand other objects; pulsars, quasars, galaxies – even the origin of our universe. Here are some fun facts about stars.Do stars twinkle?What are stars made of?Do we know more about the inside of stars or the inside of Earth?Do stars have a life cycle?Is a dead star still a star?How do we measu...

The Pine Barrens of New Jersey contain more ghost towns, some say, than the entire American west. In Ghost Towns and Other Quirky Places in the New Jersey Pine Barrens author Barbara Solem-Stull tells the story of the towns that rose up around the iron furnaces, glass factories, paper mills, cranberry farms, and brick making establishments of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. A popular Pinelands speaker and tour guide, Solem-Stull has written much more than an armchair guide to the...

The tragic saga of the Donner Party has inspired both legend and scholarship ever since the survivors were rescued from the High Sierra snows in the spring of 1847. When archaeologist Donald L. Hardesty and four colleagues—a historian and three other archaeologists—turned their collective attention to the ordeal of the Donner Party, the result was an original and sometimes surprising new study of this pioneer group and their place in the history of overland migration. Now available for the...