Our future hinges on a set of elements that few of us have even heard of. In this surprising and revealing book, David S. Abraham unveils what rare metals are and why our electronic gadgets, the most powerful armies, and indeed the fate of our planet...

An exploration of the changing conceptions of the iconic Space Shuttle and a call for a new vision of spaceflight. The thirty years of Space Shuttle flights saw contrary changes in American visions of space. Valerie Neal, who has spent much of her c...

Tracing the long pre-history of five twentieth-century inventions which have transformed our lives, Gavin Weightman reveals a fantastic cast of scientists and inspired amateurs whose ingenuity has given us the airplane, television, bar code, personal...

This book provides a tour of the "greatest hits" of cosmological discoveries-the ideas that reshaped our universe over the past century. The cosmos, once understood as a stagnant place, filled with the ordinary, is now a universe that is expanding at...

In anticipation of solar eclipses visible in 2017 and 2024, an exploration of the scientific and cultural significance of this mesmerizing cosmic display. Since the first humans looked up and saw the sun swallowed by darkness, our species has been c...

An international team of biologists, philosophers, and historians of science explores the critically important process of replication in biological and biomedical research. Without replication, the trustworthiness of scientific research remains in d...

This fascinating book tells the story of how one museum changed ideas about dinosaurs, dynasties, and even the story of life on earth. The Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, now celebrating its 150th anniversary, has remade the way we see the wo...

An economic historian argues that privately funded space exploration is not a new development, but a trend beginning with the astronomical observatories of the nineteenth century. Over the last half-century there has been a rapid expansion in commer...

From Thoreau's renowned Journal, a treasury of memorable, funny, and sharply observed accounts of his encounters with the wild and domestic animals of Concord Many of the most vivid writings in the renowned Journal of Henry David Thoreau concern cre...

Myth and media typically cast animals we consider predators or carnivores as unthinking killers – dangerous, unpredictable, and devoid of emotion. But is this portrait valid? By exploring their inner lives, this pioneering book refutes the many mispe...