Natural Science

It may be a wonderful world, but as Dan Riskin explains, it's also a dangerous, disturbing, and disgusting one. At every turn, it seems, living things are trying to eat us, poison us, use our bodies as their homes, or have us spread their eggs. In Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You, Riskin is our guide through the natural world at its most gloriously ruthless. Using the seven deadly sins as a road map, Riskin offers dozens of jaw-dropping examples that illuminate how brutal nature can truly be.

An astonishing transformation over the last 20,000 years has seen our planet changed from a frigid wasteland into the temperate world within which our civilization has grown and thrived. This dynamic episode in our planet's history, right at the close of the Ice Age, saw not only a huge temperature hike but also the Earth's crust bouncing and bending in response to the melting of the great ice sheets and the filling of the ocean basins - dramatic geophysical events that triggered earthquakes, spawned tsunamis, and provoked a series of eruptions from the world's volcanoes.

Bottled & Sold shows how water went from being a free natural resource to one of the most successful commercial products of the last 100 years - and why we are poorer for it. It's a big story and water is big business. Every second of every day in the United States, a thousand people buy a plastic bottle of water, and every second of every day a thousand more throw one of those bottles away. That adds up to more than 30 billion bottles a year and tens of billions of dollars of sales. Are there legitimate reasons to buy all those bottles?

Mary Roach meets Sam Kean and Bill Bryson in this uproarious tour of the basest instincts and biggest mysteries of the animal world. In The Truth About Animals, Lucy Cooke takes us on a worldwide journey to meet everyone from a Colombian hippo castrator to a Chinese panda porn peddler, all to lay bare the secret - and often hilarious - habits of the animal kingdom. Charming and at times downright weird, this modern bestiary is perfect for anyone who has ever suspected that virtue might be unnatural.

Evolutionary theory in the theme that binds together these essays on such seemingly disparate topics as the feeding habits of flamingos, flowers and snails that change from male to female and sometimes back again, and the extinction from baseball of the .400 hitter.

Meteorites, methane, mega-volcanoes and now human beings; the old forces of nature that transformed Earth many millions of years ago are joined by another: us. Our actions have driven Earth into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. For the first time in our home planet's 4.5-billion year history a single species is dictating Earth's future. To some the Anthropocene symbolises a future of superlative control of our environment. To others it is the height of hubris, the illusion of our mastery over nature.

I was always good at being bad, which is why I’m the last person you’d expect to save the world. Unfortunately, I wasn’t given a choice. I’ve learned my prophecy has something to do with the Elves, an incredible magical people that went extinct a century ago. At a paranormal prison where evil runs free, there’s more to discover about the Elves than I ever expected. As my investigation continues, I receive messages from the gods, who seem certain I’m the magical world’s only hope for survival.

In an age of unprecedented exploration and innovation, our oceans remain largely unknown, and endlessly fascinating: full of mystery, danger, beauty, and inspiration. Bill Streever - a longtime deep-sea diver himself - has masterfully woven together the science and history of Earth's last remaining frontier: the sea.

For many, the past few years have been defined by climate disaster. Stories about once-in-a-lifetime hurricanes, floods, fires, droughts, and even snowstorms are now commonplace. But dramatic weather events are not new and Northeaster, Cathie Pelletier's breathtaking account of the 1952 snowstorm that blanketed New England, offers a valuable reminder about nature's capacity for destruction as well as insight into the human instinct for preservation.

Imogene Hale is a lowly parlor maid with a soul-crushing secret. Seeking solace, she takes work at a local hive, only to fall desperately in love with the amazing lady inventor the vampires are keeping in the potting shed. Genevieve Lefoux is heartsick, lonely, and French. With culture, class, and the lady herself set against the match, can Imogene and her duster overcome all odds and win Genevieve's heart, or will the vampires suck both of them dry?

Let’s see, my hired hunter has decided I’m his mate, my twin sister is blaming me for her abduction, a crazy and dangerous supernatural is now after my magic, and I’m somehow supposed to keep running Practically Perfect despite the disaster that is my life. Sigh...I just can’t win, especially when the crazy supernatural comes looking for me and my hired hunter goes into full-blown territorial werewolf mode. Did I mention that I haven’t accepted his mating bond? Now, it’s getting real, especially when I learn that my hunter has kept a very dark secret from me....

When Arjan Dwarshuis first heard of the “Big Year”—the legendary record for birdwatching—he was twenty years old, it was midnight, and he was sitting on the roof of a truck in the Andean Mountains. In that moment he promised himself that, someday, somehow, he would become a world-record-holding birder. Ten years later, he embarked on an incredible, arduous, and perilous journey that took him around the globe; over uninhabited islands, through dense unforgiving rainforests, across snowy mountain peaks and unrelenting deserts—in just a single year.

On the run from my cruel captors, I stumble into Grayhaven. This secret supernatural settlement is packed with biker demons, fae royals, and witches dealing in death-magic. Their small town could be my salvation...or doom. But when the Grayhaven werewolf pack tracks me down, I feel the noose of impending capture tightening around my throat. I’m an omega, the least dominant werewolf in the supernatural world. If I’m given an order - any order - I’m powerless to refuse.

In Nature's Wild Ideas, Kristy Hamilton goes behind the scenes of some of our most unexpected innovations. She traverses frozen waterfalls, treks through cloudy forests, discovers nests in the Mojave desert, scours intertidal zones, and takes us to the deepest oceans and near volcanoes to introduce us to the animals and plants that have inspired everything from cargo routing systems to non-toxic glues, and the men and women who followed that first spark of "I wonder" all the way to its conclusion, sometimes against all odds.

Permaculture, a Portmanteau of "permanent" and "agriculture" is growing in popularity around the world and for a good reason too. First introduced to protect nature and humankind, permaculture is both a philosophy and a practical approach to sustainable development.

Deserts are environments that can be inhospitable even to seasoned explorers. Craig Childs has spent years in the deserts of the American West, and his treks through arid lands in search of water reveal the natural world at its most extreme.

On October 1, 2015, the SS El Faro, a cargo ship tall as a hundred-story building that made a regular run between Jacksonville, Florida, and Puerto Rico, delivering everything from razor blades to new Chevrolet cars, disappeared in Hurricane Joaquin, a category 4 storm. The ship, her hundreds of shipping containers, and her entire crew sank to the bottom of the ocean, three miles down. The sinking was the greatest seagoing US merchant marine shipping disaster since World War II.

Gay werewolves in Victorian London? Why yes, yes there are.

Biffy, newly minted Alpha of the London Pack, is not having a good Christmas. His Beta abandoned him, his werewolves object to his curtain choices, and someone keeps leaving babies on his doorstep.

Professor Randolph Lyall returns home to London after 20 years abroad, afraid of what he might find. With his pack in chaos and his Alpha in crisis, it will take all his Beta efficiency to set everything to rights. Perhaps, in the process, he may even determine how to mend his own heart.

When Alex Kaine discovered that he would be able to travel between worlds, to visit places beyond Earth, he thought his life couldn’t get any crazier. He thought navigating the quirks of Mystic Getaways would be all he would ever need to worry about.

30 años después, es una notable obra en la que, a través del testimonio de sobrevivientes, familiares de las víctimas y la voz de otras reconocidas personalidades, como Elena Poniatowska, Carlos Monsiváis y Humberto Mussachio, podemos acercarnos a los recuerdos de la que fuese una de las peores tragedias que la Ciudad de México ha sufrido: el terremoto del 19 de septiembre de 1985.