Other books that might interest you

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  Amazing Stories of the Space Age...

  Rod Pyle

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  Award-winning science writer and documentarian Rod Pyle presents an insider's perspective on the most unusual and bizarre space missions ever devised inside and outside of NASA. The incredible projects described here were not merely flights of fancy dreamed up by space enthusiasts, but actual missions planned by leading aeronautical engineers. Some were designed but not built; others were built but not flown; and a few were flown to failure but little reported: 
  A giant rocket that would use atomic bombs as propulsion (never mind the fallout), military bases on the moon that could target enemies on earth with nuclear weapons, a scheme to spray-paint the lenses of Soviet spy satellites in space, the rushed Soyuz 1 spacecraft that ended with the death of its pilot, the near-disaster of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the mysterious Russian space shuttle that flew only once and was then scrapped—these are just some of the unbelievable tales that Pyle has found in once top-secret documents as well as accounts that were simply lost for many decades. 
  These stories tell of a time when nothing was too off-the-wall to be taken seriously, and the race to the moon and the threat from the Soviet Union trumped all other considerations.

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  Fifty Places to Go Birding...

  Chris Santella

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  It’s estimated that 50 to 60 million Americans count birding among their hobbies. Some hang feeders in their backyards and accumulate yard lists; others participate in annual “Christmas Counts”; a select few travel to the ends of the earth in an effort to see every bird in the world. With Fifty Places to Go Birding Before You Die, Chris Santella takes the best-selling “Fifty Places” recipe and applies it to this most popular pastime. Santella presents some of the greatest bird-watching venues in the United States and abroad through interviews with prominent birders, from tour leaders and conservationists to ornithologists and academics. Interviewees include ornithologist Kenn Kaufman; David Allen Sibley, author and illustrator of The Sibley Guide to Birds; Rose Ann Rowlett, the “mother of modern birding”; John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology; and Steve McCormick, president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy. The places vary from the urban (New York City’s Central Park) to the mystical (the cloud forests of Triunfo in Chiapas, Mexico) to the extremely remote (the sub-Arctic islands of New Zealand). The book includes 40 gorgeous photographs that capture the vibrancy of our feathered friends, and the beautiful places they call home.

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  Web sites that work - Secrets...

  Infnite Ideas

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  The brilliant tips and practical advice in Web sites that work will uplift and transform any website, from the simplest to the most complicated. It deals with everything from fundamentals such as how to assess the effectiveness of a website and how to get a site listed on the most popular search engines to more sophisticated challenges like creating a community and dealing with legal requirements. Straight-talking, practical and humorous, this is the ideal book to get you started on a web site revamp. No experience necessary!

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  Under the Sea - A World Like No...

  Seeker

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  There are more than 200,000 known species in the ocean, but there is thought to be more than 2 million more that remain undiscovered. Humans have only explored 5 percent of Earth’s oceans, so what else could be lurking deep beneath the surface? In this bite-sized curated collection, Seeker dives in to explore the deepest parts of the oceans, how they get polluted and how scientists discovered a hidden ocean in the most unusual place.

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  The Culture of Cities

  Lewis Mumford

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  A classic work advocating ecological urban planning—from a civic visionary and former architecture critic for the New Yorker. Considered among the greatest works of Lewis Mumford—a prolific historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and longtime architecture critic for the New Yorker—The Culture of Cities is a call for communal action to “rebuild the urban world on a sounder human foundation.” First published in 1938, this radical investigation into the human environment is based on firsthand surveys of North American and European locales, as well as extensive historical and technological research. Mumford takes readers from the compact, worker-friendly streets of medieval hamlets to the symmetrical neoclassical avenues of Renaissance cities. He studies the squalor of nineteenth-century factory towns and speculates on the fate of the booming twentieth-century Megalopolis—whose impossible scale, Mumford believes, can only lead to its collapse into a “Nekropolis,” a monstrosity of living death.   A civic visionary, Mumford is credited with some of the earliest proposals for ecological urban planning and the appropriate use of technology to create balanced living environments. In the final chapters of The Culture of Cities, he outlines possible paths toward utopian future cities that could be free of the stressors of the Megalopolis, in sync with the rhythms of daily life, powered by clean energy, integrated with agricultural regions, and full of honest and comfortable housing for the working class. The principles set forth by these visions, once applied to Nazi-occupied Europe’s razed cities, are still relevant today as technological advances and overpopulation change the nature of urban life.  

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  Ancestors in Our Genome - The...

  Eugene E. Harris

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  In Ancestors in Our Genome, molecular anthropologist Eugene E. Harris presents us with a complete and up-to-date account of the evolution of the human genome and our species. Written from the perspective of population genetics, and in simple terms, the book traces human origins back to their source among our earliest human ancestors, and explains many of the most intriguing questions that genome scientists are currently working to answer. For example, what does the high level of discordance among the gene trees of humans and the African great apes tell us about our respective separations from our common ancestor? Was our separation from the apes fast or slow, and when and why did it occur? Where, when, and how did our modern species evolve? How do we search across genomes to find the genomic underpinnings of our large and complex brains and language abilities? How can we find the genomic bases for life at high altitudes, for lactose tolerance, resistance to disease, and for our different skin pigmentations? How and when did we interbreed with Neandertals and the recently discovered ancient Denisovans of Asia? Harris draws upon extensive experience researching primate evolution in order to deliver a lively and thorough history of human evolution.

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