The past decade has been characterized by remarkable advances in meteorological observation, computing techniques, and data-visualization technology. However, the benefit of these advances can only be fully realized with the introduction of a systema...

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...

A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason A. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppr...

From a small island in the Baltic Sea to the large tropical islands of Borneo and Madagascar, "Messages from Islands" is a global tour of these natural, water-bound laboratories. In this career-spanning work, Ilkka Hanski draws upon the many islands...

Monkey see, monkey do – or does she? Can the behavior of non-human primates – their sociality, their intelligence, their communication – really be chalked up to simple mimicry? Emphatically, absolutely: no. And as famed primatologist Julia Fischer re...

In many ways, Marie Curie represents modern science. Her considerable lifetime achievements – the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize, the only woman to be awarded the Prize in two fields, and the only person to be awarded Nobel Prizes in multipl...

Our stories of industrial innovation tend to focus on individual initiative and breakthroughs. With "Making Jet Engines in World War II", Hermione Giffard uses the case of the development of jet engines to offer a different way of understanding techn...

At the close of the 1970s, the two-domain classification scheme long used by most biologists – prokaryotes versus eukaryotes – was upended by the discovery of an entirely new group of organisms: archaea. Initially thought to be bacteria, these single...

Not for sale in Estonia! NASA's Apollo program landed the first humans on the moon in 1969. In the next three years, Apollo sent 10 more men to the moon in five subsequent missions. The first moon landing in particular is a legendarily well-documen...

Hundreds of exceptional cartographic images are scattered throughout medieval and early modern Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscript collections. The plethora of copies created around the Islamic world over the course of eight centuries testifies t...