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    Dr. George Smoot, a distinguished cosmologist and adventurer whose quest for cosmic knowledge had taken him from the Brazilian rain forest to the South Pole, unveiled his momentous discovery, bringing to light the very nature of the universe. For anyone who has ever looked up at the night sky and wondered, for anyone who has ever longed to pull aside the fabric of the universe for a glimpse of what lies behind it. Wrinkles in Time is the story of Smoot's search to uncover the cosmic seeds of the universe.Wrinkles in Time is the Double Helix of cosmology, an intimate look at the inner world of men and women who ask. "Why are we here?" It tells the story of George Smoot's dogged pursuit of the cosmic wrinkles in the frozen wastes of Antarctica, on mountaintops, in experiments borne aloft aboard high-altitude balloons, U-2 spy planes, and finally a space satellite. Wrinkles in Time presents the hard science behind the structured violence of the big bang theory through breathtakingly clear, lucid images and meaningful comparisons. Scientists and nonscientists alike can follow with rapt attention the story of how, in a fiery creation, wrinkles formed in space ultimately to become stars, galaxies, and even greater delicate structures. Anyone can appreciate the implications of a universe whose end is written in its beginnings - whose course developed according to a kind of cosmic DNA, which guided the universe from simplicity and symmetry to ever-greater complexity and structure. As controversial as it may seem today, Wrinkles in Time reveals truths that, in an earlier century, would have doomed its proclaimers to the fiery stake. For four thousand years some people have accepted the Genesis account of cosmic origin; for most of this century, scientists debated two rival scientific explanations known as the steady state and big bang theories. And now, Wrinkles in Time tells what really happened. The personal story behind astrophysicist George Smoot's incredible discovery of the origin of the cosmos, hailed by Stephen Hawking as "The scientific discovery of the century, if not of all time."

    For centuries, the power of zero savored of the demonic; once harnessed, it became the most important tool in mathematics. Zero follows this number from its birth as an Eastern philosophical concept to its struggle for acceptance in Europe and its apotheosis as the mystery of the black hole. Today, zero lies at the heart of one of the biggest scientific controversies of all time, the quest for the theory of everything. Elegant, witty, and enlightening, Zero is a compelling look at the strangest number in the universe and one of the greatest paradoxes of human thought.

    Nir Barzilai’s life’s work is tackling the challenges of aging to delay and prevent the onset of all age-related diseases including “the big four”: diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s.One of Dr. Barzilai’s most fascinating studies features volunteers that include 750 SuperAgers—individuals who maintain active lives well into their nineties and even beyond—and, more importantly, who reached that ripe old age never having experienced cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, or cognitive decline.In Age Later, Dr. Barzilai reveals the secrets his team has unlocked about SuperAgers and the scientific discoveries that show we can mimic some of their natural resistance to the aging process. This eye-opening and inspirational book will help you think of aging not as a certainty, but as a phenomenon—like many other diseases and misfortunes—that can be targeted, improved, and even cured.

    And as we discover countless exoplanets orbiting other stars—among them, rocky super-Earths and gaseous Hot Jupiters—we become ever more hopeful that we may come across extraterrestrial life. Yet even as we become aware of the vast numbers of planets outside our solar system, it has also become clear that Earth is exceptional. The question is: why?In Lucky Planet, astrobiologist David Waltham argues that Earth’s climate stability is one of the primary factors that makes it able to support life, and that nothing short of luck made such conditions possible. The four-billion-year stretch of good weather that our planet has experienced is statistically so unlikely, he shows, that chances are slim that we will ever encounter intelligent extraterrestrial others.Describing the three factors that typically control a planet’s average temperature—the heat received from its star, how much heat the planet absorbs, and the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—Waltham paints a complex picture of how special Earth’s climate really is. He untangles the mystery of why, although these factors have shifted by such massive measures over the history of life on Earth, surface temperatures have never fluctuated so much as to make conditions hostile to life. Citing factors such as the size of our Moon and the effect of an ever-warming Sun, Waltham challenges the prevailing scientific consensus that other Earth-like planets have natural stabilizing mechanisms that allow life to flourish.A lively exploration of the stars above and the ground beneath our feet, Lucky Planet seamlessly weaves the story of Earth and the worlds orbiting other stars to give us a new perspective of the surprising role chance plays in our place in the universe.

    Divided into 365 concise, illustrated essays, it focuses on the aesthetic as well as the scientific aspects of stargazing. It offers the most up-to-date information available, with hundreds of charts, drawings, and maps-that take you beyond the visible canopy of stars and constellations into the unseen realm of nebulae and galaxies.This simple yet substantial text is full of critical information and helpful hints on how to observe the stars; describe their position; calculate their age, brightness, and distance; and much more. Whether you observe the sky with a telescope or the naked eye, 365 Starry Nights makes the infinite intimate and brings the heavens within your grasp. Keep this invaluable, informative guide close at hand, and you'll find that the sky is the limit 365 nights a year.

    “A riveting tale of derring-do” (Nature), this book reads like James Gleick’s Chaos combined with an Indiana Jones adventure.When leading Princeton physicist Paul Steinhardt began working in the 1980s, scientists thought they knew all the conceivable forms of matter. The Second Kind of Impossible is the story of Steinhardt’s thirty-five-year-long quest to challenge conventional wisdom. It begins with a curious geometric pattern that inspires two theoretical physicists to propose a radically new type of matter—one that raises the possibility of new materials with never before seen properties, but that violates laws set in stone for centuries. Steinhardt dubs this new form of matter “quasicrystal.” The rest of the scientific community calls it simply impossible. The Second Kind of Impossible captures Steinhardt’s scientific odyssey as it unfolds over decades, first to prove viability, and then to pursue his wildest conjecture—that nature made quasicrystals long before humans discovered them. Along the way, his team encounters clandestine collectors, corrupt scientists, secret diaries, international smugglers, and KGB agents. Their quest culminates in a daring expedition to a distant corner of the Earth, in pursuit of tiny fragments of a meteorite forged at the birth of the solar system. Steinhardt’s discoveries chart a new direction in science. They not only change our ideas about patterns and matter, but also reveal new truths about the processes that shaped our solar system. The underlying science is important, simple, and beautiful—and Steinhardt’s firsthand account is “packed with discovery, disappointment, exhilaration, and persistence...This book is a front-row seat to history as it is made” (Nature).

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    For a shorter trip on a tight budget, the Moon is quite majestic and very quiet if you can make it during the off-season. With four-color illustrations and packed with real-world science, The Vacation Guide to the Solar System is the must-have planning guide for the curious space adventurer, covering all of the essentials for your next voyage, how to get there, and what to do when you arrive. Written by an astronomer from The American Museum of Natural History and one of the creators of the Guerilla Science collective, this tongue-in-cheek reference guide is an imaginative exploration into the What if of space travel, sharing fascinating facts about space, the planets in our solar system, and even some moons!"

    In the first, accompanied by a scientist who resembles Francis Crick, he learns why certain parts of the brain are important and not others, and why consciousness fades with sleep. In the second part, when his companion seems to be named Alturi (Galileo is hard of hearing; his companion’s name is actually Alan Turing), he sees how the facts assembled in the first part can be unified and understood through a scientific theory—a theory that links consciousness to the notion of integrated information (also known as phi). In the third part, accompanied by a bearded man who can only be Charles Darwin, he meditates on how consciousness is an evolving, developing, ever-deepening awareness of ourselves in history and culture—that it is everything we have and everything we are. Not since Gödel, Escher, Bach has there been a book that interweaves science, art, and the imagination with such originality. This beautiful and arresting narrative will transform the way we think of ourselves and the world.

    By studying the physical astronomy of all the planets in the Solar System, we can attempt to understand their true nature. Ultimately, these lectures will bring us to a greater understanding of the Solar System's creation, which brings us again back to the beginning and what it means to us as we look outward from our rotating Earth.

    Thank you, Jonathan Balcombe, for reminding us of the infinite marvels of everyday creatures. --Sy Montgomery, Author of How to Be a Good CreatureFrom an expert in animal consciousness, a book that will turn the fly on the wall into the elephant in the room.For most of us, the only thing we know about flies is that they're annoying, and our usual reaction is to try to kill them. In Super Fly, the myth-busting biologist Jonathan Balcombe shows the order Diptera in all of its diversity, illustrating the essential role that flies play in every ecosystem in the world as pollinators, waste-disposers, predators, and food source; and how flies continue to reshape our understanding of evolution. Along the way, he reintroduces us to familiar foes like the fruit fly and mosquito, and gives us the chance to meet their lesser-known cousins like the Petroleum Fly (the only animal in the world that breeds in crude oil) and the Chocolate Midge (the sole pollinator of the Cacao tree). No matter your outlook on our tiny buzzing neighbors, Super Fly will change the way you look at flies forever.Jonathan Balcombe is the author of four books on animal sentience, including the New York Times bestselling What A Fish Knows, which was nominated for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Award for Science Writing. He has worked for years as a researcher and educator with the Humane society to show us the consciousness of other creatures, and here he takes us to the farthest reaches of the animal kingdom.

    Nick Chater has blown my mind' Tim Harford'A total assault on all lingering psychiatric and psychoanalytic notions of mental depths ... Light the touchpaper and stand well back' New ScientistWe all like to think we have a hidden inner life. Most of us assume that our beliefs and desires arise from the murky depths of our minds, and, if only we could work out how to access this mysterious world, we could truly understand ourselves. For more than a century, psychologists and psychiatrists have struggled to discover what lies below our mental surface.In The Mind Is Flat, pre-eminent behavioural scientist Nick Chater reveals that this entire enterprise is utterly misguided. Drawing on startling new research in neuroscience, behavioural psychology and perception, he shows that we have no hidden depths to plumb, and unconscious thought is a myth. Instead, we generate our ideas, motives and thoughts in the moment. This revelation explains many of the quirks of human behaviour - for example why our supposedly firm political beliefs, personal preferences and even our romantic attractions are routinely proven to be inconsistent and changeable.As the reader discovers, through mind-bending visual examples and counterintuitive experiments, we are all characters of our own creation, constantly improvising our behaviour based on our past experiences. And, as Chater shows us, recognising this can be liberating.

    In The Dance of Life, developmental and stem-cell biologist Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz takes us to the front lines of efforts to understand the creation of a human life. She has spent two decades unraveling the mysteries of development, as a simple fertilized egg becomes a complex human being of forty trillion cells. Zernicka-Goetz's work is both incredibly practical and astonishingly vast: her groundbreaking experiments with mouse, human, and artificial embryo models give hope to how more women can sustain viable pregnancies. Set at the intersection of science's greatest powers and humanity's greatest concern, The Dance of Life is a revelatory account of the future of fertility -- and life itself.

    This is Nick's story of his world record-breaking adventure and the extraordinary people who joined him along the way. On January 6th 2018, Nick Butter tied his laces and stepped out on to an icy pavement in Toronto, where he began to take the first steps of an epic journey that would see him run 196 marathons in every one of the world's 196 countries. Spending almost two years on the road and relying on the kindness of strangers to keep him moving, Nick's odyssey allowed him to travel slowly, on foot, immersing himself in the diverse cultures and customs of his host nations. Running through capital cities and deserts, around islands and through spectacular landscapes, Nick dodges bullets in Guinea-Bissau, crosses battlefields in Syria, survives a wild dog attack in Tunisia and runs around an erupting volcano in Guatemala. Along the way, he is often joined by local supporters and fellow runners, curious children and bemused passers-by. Telling their stories alongside his own, Nick captures the unique spirit of each place he visits and forges a new relationship with the world around him. Running the World captures Nick's journey as he sets three world records and covers over five thousand miles. As he recounts his adventures, he shares his unique perspective on our glorious planet, celebrates the diversity of human experience, and reflects on the overwhelming power of running.