Opening the beautiful and accessible pages of this book is like turning over a series of stones under which you'll find a fascinating array of the world's coolest creepy-crawlies. This fully photographic book profiles bugs, beetles, wasps, bees, ants, caterpillars, butterflies, dragonflies, spiders, flies, crickets and grasshoppers, and centipedes and millipedes. These profiles are accompanied by Did You Know? facts and fast facts including scientific name, size, diet, and habitat. Front matter includes a How to Use spread and thematic spreads covering topics from prehistoric insects to bugs around the world. In short, this book includes everything a young fact-hound needs to discover the weird, wacky, diverse, and fascinating world of bugs.

    Like you, the elements have lives: personalities and attitudes, talents and shortcomings, stories rich with meaning. You may think of them as the inscrutable letters of the periodic table but you know them much better than you realise. Welcome to a dazzling tour through history and literature, science and art. Here you'll meet iron that rains from the heavens and noble gases that light the way to vice. You'll learn how lead can tell your future while zinc may one day line your coffin. You'll discover what connects the bones in your body with the Whitehouse in Washington, the glow of a streetlamp with the salt on your dinner table. From ancient civilisations to contemporary culture, from the oxygen of publicity to the phosphorus in your pee, the elements are near and far and all around us. Unlocking their astonishing secrets and colourful pasts, Periodic Tales will take you on a voyage of wonder and discovery, excitement and novelty, beauty and truth. Along the way, you'll find that their stories are our stories, and their lives are inextricable from our own.

    The 2012 edition landed at #3 on the New York Times best seller list! In true National Geographic style, this book excites young people about their world and everything in it. Amazing animals, cool inventions, dinosaurs, funny roadside attractions, robots, outer space, green tips, natural disasters, maps, games, activities, and more are all here in one volume. The 2013 Almanac is packed with fun information, browsable features, and helpful reference on subjects including animals, technology, countries, presidents, animals, and weather, just for starters. Chapters include Amazing Animals, Going Green, Geography Rocks, Super Science, Wonders of Nature, Awesome Adventure, Culture Connection, History Happens, and now a brand-new mini joke book inside. Exciting changes for 2013 include:· Forty percent of the photos and articles will be new· A special joke section features 20 pages of hilarious jokes and funny animal photos that kids will love to share with their friends and family.· A fully updated "Your World" section, which opens the Almanac, will include all-new, up-to-the-moment content for 2013;· All-new fun facts, activities, games, and crafts· More than 500 photographs, including incredible gorgeous new photo spreads featuring animals, adventure, nature, and more· 8 Homework Help sections· All facts, figures, and reference material will be updated;· And much more...

    Beginning at Stonehenge and ending with the current crisis in String Theory, the story of this eternal question to uncover the mysteries of the universe describes a narrative that includes some of the greatest discoveries of all time and leading personalities, including Aristotle, Copernicus, and Isaac Newton, and the rise to the modern era of Einstein, Eddington, and Hawking.

    41 illustrations.

    Phineas, a railroad construction foreman, was blasting rock near Cavendish, Vermont, in 1848 when a thirteen-pound iron rod was shot through his brain. Miraculously, he survived to live another eleven years and become a textbook case in brain science.At the time, Phineas Gage seemed to completely recover from his accident. He could walk, talk, work, and travel, but he was changed. Gage "was no longer Gage," said his Vermont doctor, meaning that the old Phineas was dependable and well liked, and the new Phineas was crude and unpredictable.His case astonished doctors in his day and still fascinates doctors today. What happened and what didn’t happen inside the brain of Phineas Gage will tell you a lot about how your brain works and how you act human.

    But there remains a critical gap in our knowledge: we still know very little about what happened in the first seconds after the Big Bang. At the Edge of Time focuses on what we have recently learned and are still striving to understand about this most essential and mysterious period of time at the beginning of cosmic history.Delving into the remarkable science of cosmology, Dan Hooper describes many of the extraordinary and perplexing questions that scientists are asking about the origin and nature of our world. Hooper examines how we are using the Large Hadron Collider and other experiments to re-create the conditions of the Big Bang and test promising theories for how and why our universe came to contain so much matter and so little antimatter. We may be poised to finally discover how dark matter was formed during our universe's first moments, and, with new telescopes, we are also lifting the veil on the era of cosmic inflation, which led to the creation of our world as we know it.Wrestling with the mysteries surrounding the initial moments that followed the Big Bang, At the Edge of Time presents an accessible investigation of our universe and its origin.

    These colorful pages will introduce young children to the wonders of space, with colorful illustrations by David Aguilar and simple text that is perfect for beginning readers or for reading aloud. The book will explain basic concepts of space, beginning with what is most familiar to kids and expanding out into universe.Chapters include: • Chapter 1 focuses on the Earth, moon, and sun.  • Chapter 2 introduces kids to the other planets in our solar system.  • Chapter 3 explains other objects in our solar system, such as dwarf planets, comets, and asteroid belts.  • Chapter 4 voyages even farther afield, touching on concepts such as the universe, the Milky Way, stars, galaxies, and black holes.  • The last chapter delves into space exploration: humans on the moon, spaceships, the International Space Station, etc.Releases simultaneously in Reinforced Library Binding: 978-1-4263-1015-7 , $23.90/$26.95 Can

    This level two reader, written in simple language that is easy for young readers to understand, introduces children to our solar system, including all of the planets and dwarf planets, and lots of fascinating fun facts. This reader helps cultivate the explorers of tomorrow!This high-interest, educationally vetted series of beginning readers features the magnificent images of National Geographic, accompanied by texts written by experienced, skilled children's book authors. The inside back cover of the paperback edition is an interactive feature based upon the book. Level 1 books reinforce the content of the book with a kinesthetic learning activity. In Level 2 books readers complete a Cloze letter, or fun fill-in, with vocabulary words.Releases simultaneously in Reinforced Library Binding: 978-1-4263-1037-9 , $13.90/$15.95 CanNational Geographic supports K-12 educators with ELA Common Core Resources.Visit www.natgeoed.org/commoncore for more information.

    Pretending to work? That’s fudgelling, which may lead to rizzling if you feel sleepy after lunch, though by dinner time you will have become a sparkling deipnosophist.From Mark Forsyth, author of the bestselling The Etymologicon, this is a book of weird words for familiar situations. From ante-jentacular to snudge by way of quafftide and wamblecropt, at last you can say, with utter accuracy, exactly what you mean.

    40 illustrations throughout.

    Meet Polygon and Plane, Reflection and Rotation, Odd Number and his buddy Even Number and the three amigos Sine, Cosine and Tangent. Discover the secrets of their world and how they like to throw their numbers about. Bringing his charming manga-style artwork and tongue-and-cheek approach to explaining the basics, Basher brings a whole new spin to the world of higher math.

    She draws on conversations with hundreds of the world's top scientists and on her own work as a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for the New York Times to create a thoroughly entertaining guide to scientific literacy. Angier's gifts are on full display in The Canon, an ebullient celebration of science that stands to become a classic. The Canon is vital reading for anyone who wants to understand the great issues of our time -- from stem cells and bird flu to evolution and global warming. And it's for every parent who has ever panicked when a child asked how the earth was formed or what electricity is. Angier's sparkling prose and memorable metaphors bring the science to life, reigniting our own childhood delight in discovering how the world works. "Of course you should know about science," writes Angier, "for the same reason Dr. Seuss counsels his readers to sing with a Ying or play Ring the Gack: These things are fun and fun is good." The Canon is a joyride through the major scientific disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy. Along the way, we learn what is actually happening when our ice cream melts or our coffee gets cold, what our liver cells do when we eat a caramel, why the horse is an example of evolution at work, and how we're all really made of stardust. It's Lewis Carroll meets Lewis Thomas -- a book that will enrapture, inspire, and enlighten.

    William Maples can deduce the age, gender, and ethnicity of a murder victim, the manner in which the person was dispatched, and, ultimately, the identity of the killer.  In Dead Men Do Tell Tales, Dr. Maples revisits his strangest, most interesting, and most horrific investigations, from the baffling cases of conquistador Francisco Pizarro and Vietnam MIAs to the mysterious deaths of President Zachary Taylor and the family of Czar Nicholas II.

    Step inside the pages of this beautiful book to discover galleries of galactic matter, expertly curated to bring you the experience of a fascinating exhibition from the comfort of your own home. Planetarium features all aspects of space, from the Sun and our Solar System, to the lives of stars, the Milky Way and the Universe beyond. With stunning artwork from Chris Wormell and informative text by Professor Raman Prinja, Planetarium is the perfect gift for anyone with an interest in this fascinating field.