Covering 13.8 billion years in some 100 pages, a concise, wryly intelligent history of everything, from the Big Bang to the advent of human civilization.With wonder, wit, and flair—and in record time and space—geophysicist David Bercovici explains how everything came to be everywhere, from the creation of stars and galaxies to the formation of Earth's atmosphere and oceans, to the origin of life and human civilization. Bercovici marries humor and legitimate scienti...

Covering 13.8 billion years, a calculatedly concise, wryly intelligent history of everything, from the Big Bang to the advent of human civilizationWith wonder, wit, and flair—and in record time and space—geophysicist David Bercovici explains how everything came to be everywhere, from the creation of stars and galaxies to the formation of Earth’s atmosphere and oceans to the origin of life and human civilization. Bercovici marries humor and legitimate scientific intrigue, rocketing ...

A brilliant amalgam of remembrance and reportage, by turns satiric, celebratory, nostalgic, and melancholy, Life on the Mississippi evokes the great river that Mark Twain knew as a boy and young man and the one he revisited as a mature and successful author. Written between the publication of his two greatest novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain's rich portrait of the Mississippi marks a distinctive transition in the...

Intrepid voyager, writer and comedian Michael Palin follows the trail of two expeditions made by the Royal Navy's HMS Erebus to opposite ends of the globe, reliving the voyages and investigating the ship itself, lost on the final Franklin expedition and discovered with the help of Inuit knowledge in 2014.The story of a ship begins after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, when Great Britain had more bomb ships than it had enemies. The solid, reinforced hul...

"Takes readers on illuminating scientific adventure, beginning sixty-six million years ago, that connects dinosaurs, comets, DNA, and the future of the planet." — Huffington PostIn this brilliant exploration of our cosmic environment, the renowned particle physicist and New York Times–bestselling author of Warped Passages and Knocking on Heaven's Door uses her research into dark matter to illuminate the startling connections betwe...

Hailed by The New York Times for writing “with wonderful clarity about science . . . that effortlessly teaches as it zips along,” nationally bestselling author Robert M. Hazen offers a radical new approach to Earth history in this intertwined tale of the planet’s living and nonliving spheres.With an astrobiologist’s imagination, a historian’s perspective, and a naturalist’s eye, Hazen calls upon twenty-first-century discoveries that have revolutionized geo...

The story of matter and the history of the cosmos from the perspective of a single oxygen atom, told with the insight and wit of one of the most dynamic physicists and writers working today.Through this astonishing work, he manages to stoke wonder at the powers and unlikely events that conspired to create our solar system, our ecosystem, and us.

A science book for the general reader that is informative enough to be a popular textbook and yet well-written enough to appeal to general readers. “Hazen and Trefil [are] unpretentious—good, down-to-earth, we-can-explain-anything science teachers, the kind you wish you had but never did.”—The New York Times Book ReviewKnowledge of the basic ideas and principles of science is fundamental to cultural literacy. But most books on science are ...

“Weird indeed, and not a little wonderful.”—NatureIn the 1980s and 1990s, in places where no one thought it possible, scientists found organisms they called extremophiles: lovers of extremes. There were bacteria in volcanic hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, single-celled algae in Antarctic ice floes, and fungi in the cooling pools of nuclear reactors.But might there be life stranger than the most extreme extremophile? Might there be, somewhere...

A classic introduction to the story of Earth's origin and evolution—revised and expanded for the twenty-first centurySince its first publication more than twenty-five years ago, How to Build a Habitable Planet has established a legendary reputation as an accessible yet scientifically impeccable introduction to the origin and evolution of Earth, from the Big Bang through the rise of human civilization. This classic account of how our habitable planet was as...

The Precambrian is the oldest era of Earth's history, and, of its origins (4 billion and 500 million years ago), the appearance of the first invertebrates with exoskeletons (542 million years ago). In this long period of time, the planet, newly formed, was affected by cosmic events and geological shocking that border on the limits of imagination.

Astrobiology is the study of the origin and development of life on this and other planets. What fascinates people about astrobiology is that it seeks answers to long-standing unsolved questions: How quickly did life evolve on Earth and why did life persist here? Is there life elsewhere in the Solar System or beyond? The research of astrobiology has become more crucial than ever in recent decades, as biologists have discovered microbes that live in ever more extreme settings, such as bubbli...