A fascinating exploration of lakes around the world, from Walden Pond to the Dead Sea.More than a century and a half have passed since Walden was first published, and the world is now a very different place. Lakes are changing rapidly, not because we are separate from nature but because we are so much a part of it. While many of our effects on the natural world today are new, from climate change to nuclear fallout, our connections to it are ancient, as cor...

"Delightful alchemy: Curt Stager transforms atomic science into lustrous, golden stories about the hidden connections that unite us all." —David George Haskell, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Forest UnseenWhat do atoms have to do with your life? In Your Atomic Self, scientist Curt Stager reveals how they connect you to some of the most amazing things in the universe.You will follow your oxygen atoms through fire and water...

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction of 2011 titleA bold, far-reaching look at how our actions will decide the planet's future for millennia to come.Imagine a planet where North American and Eurasian navies are squaring off over shipping lanes through an acidified, ice-free Arctic. Centuries later, their northern descendants retreat southward as the recovering sea freezes over again. And later still, future nations plan how to avert an approaching Ice Age... by burning w...

**Kirkus Best Books of the Year (2013)**From one of our finest and most popular science writers, and the best-selling author of Your Inner Fish, comes the answer to a scientific mystery as big as the world itself: How are the events that formed our solar system billions of years ago embedded inside each of us?In Your Inner Fish, Neil Shubin delved into the amazing connections between human bodies—our hands, heads, and jaws—and the...

• Is there really such a thing as a blue moon?• What time is it at the North Pole?• Why don’t woodpeckers get concussed?• Why don’t snorers wake themselves with the racket they make?• Do insects sleep?These are just a few of the intriguing questions asked and answered in The Quirks & Quarks Question Book, the first question and answer book to come out of CBC Radio’s enormously popular weekly science program. Quirks & Quarks producers ha...

The Universe and Me is his most ambitious work to date. A tour de force, this book represents a synthesis of at least a dozen separate scientific disciplines, including cosmology, physics, chemistry, microbiology, paleobiology, paleoclimatology, paleontology, botany, optics, mammology, primatology, anthropology and the history of science. All of these skillfully and woven together into a fabric of great charm. This is, literally, the greatest story ever told. It is our story. The story of ...

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.

The remarkable scientific story of how Earth became an oxygenated planetThe air we breathe is twenty-one percent oxygen, an amount higher than on any other known world. While we may take our air for granted, Earth was not always an oxygenated planet. How did it come to be this way? Donald Canfield covers this vast history, emphasizing its relationship to the evolution of life and the evolving chemistry of Earth. He guides readers through the various lines of scient...

Peterson's GED Basics: Science offers test-taking tips, subject review, exercises, and practice test questions to help a reader score high on the GED Science Test. Readers will benefit from the review and practice exercises of the following areas:Life scienceEarth and space scienceChemistryPhysicsThe Test Yourself section will help you see if you are prepared to take this test of the GED or if additional review is needed.In...

The Latest Scientific Discoveries Point to an Intentional CreatorMost of us remember the basics from science classes about how Earth came to be the only known planet that sustains complex life. But what most people don't know is that the more thoroughly researchers investigate the history of our planet, the more astonishing the story of our existence becomes. The number and complexity of the astronomical, geological, chemical, and biological features recognized as ...

You may be asking "why does a primary teacher like me need to know anything about science? Is there any chance of my enjoying this book if I am not a scientific nerd?" Fair questions. Here are the answers. Our general aim in writing this textbook material was to provide some basic knowledge about how science works. After all, we live in a very science-oriented and techno world, and it would be nice, surely, to understand a bit about how it all works. We are also wanting...

In this groundbreaking book, Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan present an answer to one of the enduring mysteries of evolution -- the source of inherited variation that gives rise to new species. Random genetic mutation, long believed to be the main source of variation, is only a marginal factor. As the authors demonstrate in this book, the more important source of speciation, by far, is the acquisition of new genomes by symbiotic merger. The result of thirty years of delving into a vast, mos...