Nonfiction Science

This essay comes from the NPR series This I Believe, which features brief personal reflections from both famous and unknown Americans. The pieces that make up the series compel listeners to rethink not only what and how they have arrived at their beliefs, but also the extent to which they share them with others.

Have you ever wondered what makes a kite fly or a boat float? Have you ever thought about why snowflakes are symmetrical, or why golf balls have dimples? Have you ever tried to make a kaleidoscope or build a pair of stilts? In Calling All Minds, Temple Grandin explores the ideas behind all of those questions and more. She delves into the science behind inventions, the steps various people took to create and improve upon ideas as they evolved, and the ways in which young inventors can continue to think about and understand what it means to tinker, to fiddle, and to innovate.

The murder of Sarah Payne, Adam the Thames Torso, the London bombings, the Night Stalker and the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. The solving of all these cases can be linked to one man: Ray Fysh, a beer-swigging Charlton Athletic fan from Woolwich, a natural raconteur, and also one of the finest forensic detectives the country has ever seen. Ray began work for the Met Police in the 1970s when forensic investigation was seen as little more than a geeky side show, only in existence to confirm or eliminate evidence. But by the mid '90s Ray and his team had made huge progress in their field.

What exactly is a robot? How do they talk and move? And what does it take to build one? Ada Twist, Scientist: The Why Files is the perfect nonfiction resource for all these questions and more. Based on the bestselling Questioneers series and the Ada Twist, Scientist Netflix show, this nonfiction series is perfect for the youngest scientists of tomorrow as they learn along with Ada.

Amelia Earhart was a woman of many "firsts." In 1932, she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. In 1935, she also became the first woman to fly across the Pacific. From her early years to her mysterious 1937 disappearance while attempting a flight around the world, listeners will find Amelia Earhart's life a fascinating story.

Since 2012 the organization Girls Who Code has taught computing skills to and inspired over 10,000 girls across America. Now its founder, Reshma Saujani, wants to inspire you to be a girl who codes! Bursting with down-to-earth explanations of coding principles and real-life stories of girls and women working at places like Pixar and NASA, this audiobook shows what a huge role computer science plays in our lives and how much fun it can be.

London, 1857: Two teenage girls holding a sign that says "Fugitive Slaves" ask for money on the corner of Blackman Street. After a constable accosts them and charges them with begging, they end up in court, where newspapers pick up their story. Are the girls truly escaped slaves from Kentucky? Or will the city's dystopian Mendicity Society catch them in a lie, exposing them as born-and-raised Londoners and endangering their safety? With its many accounts of people like these who lived and made their living on the streets, Vagabonds forms a moving picture of London's most compelling period.

Featuring 18 trailblazing Black women in American history, Little Leaders educates and inspires as it relates true stories of breaking boundaries and achieving beyond expectations. Among these biographies, listeners will find heroes, role models, and everyday women who did extraordinary things - bold women whose actions and beliefs contributed to making the world better for generations of girls and women to come.

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they wore spacesuits made by Playtex: 21 layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles. This book is the story of that spacesuit. It is a story of the triumph over the military-industrial complex by the International Latex Corporation, best known by its consumer brand of "Playtex" - a victory of elegant softness over engineered hardness, of adaptation over cybernetics.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist: a pathbreaking examination of our huge crime and incarceration problem that looks at the influence of the family - specifically one Oregon family with a generations-long legacy of lawlessness. Examining the long history of the Bogles, a white family, Butterfield offers a revelatory look at criminality that forces us to disentangle race from our ideas about crime and, in doing so, strikes at the heart of our deepest stereotypes.

The ultimate Tor/Darknet guide for 2017-2018 just got better! Just three questions you need to ask yourself: Do you value privacy? Do you value freedom? Do you want to be anonymous? If you answered yes to any of the above, this is your audiobook. Instant anonymity, right now, can be yours for the taking. How do you erase every critical forum comment you ever made? How do you scrub your Facebook page? How do you make anonymous online comments so that your new employer doesn't fire you?

Is your child always asking questions about the world and wanting to learn more about it? Isn’t it amazing how quickly children learn when they’re younger? Their brains are like little sponges, absorbing all the information around them. Your heart swells with pride when they tell you something new and exciting that they’ve learned. Perhaps it’s the ability to recite the names of all the planets in our solar system, or maybe it’s being able to solve a complex math problem. Wherever their passions lie, our Trivia for Smart Kids will keep their curiosity growing.

This edition of Che Guevara's diary of the last year of his life describes Che's efforts to launch a guerrilla insurrection against the military government of Bolivia. It was found in his backpack when he was captured by the Bolivian Army in October 1967.

Tyrannosaurus was the fiercest meat-eating dinosaur. It was “king of the tyrant lizards,” with 50 sharp, jagged teeth!

Fall brings cooler weather and in autumn there are shorter days. The leaves change from green to orange, red, and purple, until they start falling to the ground.

Triceratops means “three-horned face.” This massive dinosaur had a parrot-like hard beak and a bony frill around its head. Triceratops had a horn above each eye and another horn on its nose. These horns were used to protect it from other meat-eating dinosaurs.

Scientists are not quite sure what colors the dinosaurs were. They can only guess that the dinosaurs may have been colored to match their surroundings, just as most animals are today.

Did you know that Pteranodon was not a dinosaur? Pteranodon belongs to a special group of flying reptiles called pterosaurs.

Wouldn’t it be fun to go on a dinosaur dig and find fossil remains of the famous Tyrannosaurus rex?

Did the Earth become too cold for the dinosaurs? Maybe prehistoric mammals took the dinosaur eggs from the nests.