Our rapidly industrializing world has an insatiable hunger for energy and conventional sources are struggling to meet demand. Oil is running out, coal is damaging our climate, many nations are abandoning nuclear, yet solar, wind, and water will never be a complete replacement. The solution, says Daniel Clery in this deeply researched and revelatory audiobook, is to be found in the original energy source: the Sun itself. There, at its center, the fusion of 620 million tons of hydrogen every...

The book that transforms our understanding of what we are and where we came from.Specialist scientific fields are developing at incredibly swift speeds, but what can they really tell us about how the universe began and how we humans evolved to play such a dominant role on Earth?John Hands’ extraordinarily ambitious quest is to bring together this scientific knowledge and evaluate without bias or preconception all the theories and evidence about the origin a...

Financial journalist Nicholas Shaxson first made his reputation studying the “resource curse,” seeing first-hand the disastrous economic and societal effects of the discovery of oil in Angola. He then gained prominence as an expert on tax havens, revealing the dark corners of that world long before the scandals of the Panama and Paradise Papers. Now, in The Finance Curse, he brings his knowledge to bear in an eye-opening investigation of how banks have overbalanced the economies o...

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, ...

‘Sarah Cruddas is a gifted writer and Look Up is an inspired book. I am hopeful that we will never stop looking up.’ Apollo 11 astronaut Michael CollinsMost of us have never been to space. To date, of the more than 100 billion humans that have ever existed, fewer than 600 humans have ever left Earth. But the exploration of space is the most significant thing we will ever do as a species.Sarah Cruddas has been looking to the skies h...

A foolproof guide both to lying and to detecting deception,Lying and Lie Detection: A CIA Insider's Guide will teach you how the pros can tell if and when somebody is lying.People lie all the time. Studies show that the average American lies between six and twenty times a day. Most lies are of the “little white” variety or are meant to spare a person’s feelings. But what about the big lies? What about the consequential ones? You have a right to know when somebody is lying to you.

Finally, a new kind of business startup book—packed full of practical advice plus essential legal information you really need but don’t get in business school or anywhere else!David J. Muchow is a thirty-year business expert, serial entrepreneur, corporate lawyer, and inventor who can help you build a successful startup business. This unique guide, which focuses on both the business and legal aspects of startups, is a must-have for every aspiring entrepreneur, small business owner,...

From cells in our bodies to measuring the universe, big numbers are everywhereWe all know that numbers go on forever, that you could spend your life counting and never reach the end of the line, so there can’t be such a thing as a ‘biggest number’. Or can there?To find out, David Darling and Agnijo Banerjee embark on an epic quest, revealing the answers to questions like: are there more grains of sand on Earth or stars in the universe? Is there enough paper on Earth to writ...

An urgent, historically-grounded take on the four major factors that undermine American democracy, and what we can do to address them.While many Americans despair of the current state of U.S. politics, most assume that our system of government and democracy itself are invulnerable to decay. Yet when we examine the past, we find that the United States has undergone repeated crises of democracy, from the earliest days of the republic to the present.In Fou...

Fifty years ago, neuroscientists thought that a mature brain was fixed like a fly in amber, unable to change. Today, we know that our brains and nervous systems change throughout our lifetimes. This concept of neuroplasticity has captured the imagination of a public eager for self-improvement -- and has inspired countless Internet entrepreneurs who peddle dubious "brain training" games and apps. In this book, Moheb Costandi offers a concise and engaging overview of neuroplasticity for the ...

In this bracing book, Michael Chertoff makes clear that our laws and policies surrounding the protection of personal information, written for an earlier time, need to be completely overhauled in the Internet era. On the one hand, the collection of data—more widespread by business than by government, and impossible to stop—should be facilitated as an ultimate protection for society. On the other, standards under which information can be inspected, analyzed, or used must be significantly tig...

Uranium, a nondescript element when found in nature, in the past century has become more sought after than gold. Its nucleus is so heavy that it is highly unstable and radioactive. If broken apart, it unleashes the tremendous power within the atom—the most controversial type of energy ever discovered.Set against the darkening shadow of World War II, Amir D. Aczel's suspenseful account tells the story of the fierce competition among the day's top scientists to harness nuclear power....