This story of a child prodigy and his unique upbringing is “an engrossing journey to the outer realms of science and parenting” (Paul Greenberg, author of Four Fish).A PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award FinalistLike many young children, Taylor Wilson dreamed of becoming an astronaut. Only Wilson mastered the science of rocket propulsion by the age of nine. When he was eleven, he tried to cure his grandmother’s cancer—a...

This is the story of how an American teenager became the youngest person ever to build a working nuclear fusion reactor.By the age of nine, Taylor Wilson had mastered the science of rocket propulsion. At eleven, his grandmother’s cancer diagnosis drove him to investigate new ways to produce medical isotopes. And by fourteen, Wilson had built a 500-million-degree reactor and become the youngest person in history to achieve nuclear fusion. How could someone so young achieve so much, ...

The untold story of an eccentric Wall Street tycoon and the circle of scientific geniuses he assembled before World War II to develop the science for radar and the atomic bomb. Together they changed the course of history.Legendary financier, philanthropist, and society figure Alfred Lee Loomis gathered the most visionary scientific minds of the twentieth century—Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and others—at his state-of-the-art laboratory in Tuxedo Par...

Brilliant, reminiscent of Lewis Hyde's The Gift in its reach and of Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time in its haunting evocation of human lives, offers a sweeping view of a surprisingly revealing aspect of human history—from the stone lamps of the Pleistocene to the LEDs embedded in fabrics of the future.Brox plumbs the class implications of light—who had it, who didn't—through the many centuries when crude lamps and tallow candles constricted waking hour...

In One Wild Bird at a Time, Heinrich returns to his great love: close, day-to-day observations of individual wild birds. Heinrich's observations lead to fascinating questions - and sometimes startling discoveries. A great crested flycatcher bringing food to the young acts surreptitiously and is attacked by the mate. Why? A pair of Northern flickers hammering their nest-hole into the side of Heinrich's cabin delivers the opportunity to observe the feeding competition between siblings, and t...

As Commander of the International Space Station, Chris Hadfield captivated the world with stunning photos and commentary from space. Now, in his first book, Chris offers readers extraordinary stories from his life as an astronaut, and shows how to make the impossible a reality.Chris Hadfield decided to become an astronaut after watching the Apollo moon landing with his family on Stag Island, Ontario, when he was nine years old, and it was impossible for Canadians t...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTUREA mission to Mars. A freak accident. One man’s struggle to survive. From the author of Project Hail Mary comes “a hugely entertaining novel that reads like a rocket ship afire” (Chicago Tribune).“Brilliant . . . a celebration of human ingenuity [and] the purest example of real-science sci-fi for many years . . . utterly compelling.”—The Wall Stre...

*NOW A NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES—from producer and director Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti*Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World ...

Does your imaginative, computer-proficient daughter tune out in the classroom? Does your spirited son become headstrong and aggressive when faced with the simplest decisions? Does your bold, energetic child have trouble focusing on basic tasks?Millions of children--one in five--have what psychologist Lucy Jo Palladino, Ph.D., calls the Edison trait: dazzling intelligence, an active imagination, a free-spirited approach to life, and the ability to drive everyone around them crazy. N...

The Large Hadron Collider is the biggest, and by far the most powerful, machine ever built. A project of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, its audacious purpose is to re-create, in a 16.5-mile-long circular tunnel under the French-Swiss countryside, the immensely hot and dense conditions that existed some 13.7 billion years ago within the first trillionth of a second after the fiery birth of our universe. The collider is now crashing protons at record energy levels neve...

Churchill's Bomb - from the author of the Costa award-winning biography The Strangest Man - reveals a new aspect of Winston Churchill's life, so far completely neglected by historians: his relations with his nuclear scientists, and his management of Britain's policy on atomic weapons.Churchill was the only prominent politician to foresee the nuclear age and he played a leading role in the development of the Bomb during World War II. He became the first British Pri...

One of Booklist's Top 10 Science Books of the Year: "A superb biography . . . A definite study of Fermi's life and work." — The Wall Street JournalA Bloomberg Best Book of the YearA Finalist for Physics World 's Book of the YearA New York Times Book Review Editor's ChoiceNobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi is unquestionably among the world's greatest physicists, the most famous Italian s...