Books
Featurepics.com |
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Books on scientific subjects offer the world ... and other planets as well.
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Science books used to show dinosaurs exclusively in shades of scaly green and brown. Books about the solar system used to list just nine planets, and books about the subatomic world didn't go much farther than protons, neutrons and electrons.
As times have changed, so has the science - and so should science books. Just in time for holiday giving, here's a selection of books for kids (and grownups) that incorporate recent developments on the scientific frontiers.
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British biologist Richard Dawkins is the author of the new book "The
Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution."
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Biologist Richard Dawkins is turning down the atheist rhetoric as he promotes "The Greatest Show on Earth," his new book about the evidence for evolution. But don't you dare suggest that he's going soft on religion.
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CIA / Kryptos © 1988 James Sanborn |
The Kryptos sculpture at CIA Headquarters was featured during the buildup to publication of "The Lost Symbol," Dan Brown's latest thriller.
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Mystery sleuth Greg Taylor knew years ago what "Da Vinci Code" author Dan Brown would be talking about in the follow-up thriller now known as "The Lost Symbol," which is due for release on Tuesday. So he rounded up a whole book's worth of found symbols with puzzling histories, all having to do with Washington, the Founding Fathers and Freemasonry.
You don't have to read "The Lost Symbol" to get hooked on the historical puzzles lying in and around the nation's capital - including a puzzle that even super-symbologist Robert Langdon would be hard-pressed to solve.
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NASA |
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Astronaut Buzz Aldrin erects a solar wind experiment on the moon after Apollo 11's historic landing on July 20, 1969. Click on the image for a high-resolution view.
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That's one small step for a man ... and one giant stack of books for the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
The pile of new publications about NASA's moon effort, timed to anticipate the anniversary on July 20, has been rising so high that Robert Pearlman, editor of the CollectSpace Web site, had to clear out his bookshelves this week. "I now have stacks of older books sitting around my office," he told me today.
It's Pearlman's job to keep track of the memories and the memorabilia surrounding space missions, and even he is impressed by the breadth of offerings being released this year. "Each of them is slightly different - they're not just telling the same story over and over again," he said.
That sentiment is echoed by Andrew Chaikin, author of "A Man on the Moon," the classic chronicle of the Apollo missions. "Apollo was such an enormous undertaking that I'm continually reminded that you can never truly know everything about that program. There were so many people, and so much, and all of them have their stories to tell," he said.
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UW-Madison |
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Terry Devitt and David J. Tenenbaum, two of the brains behind "The Why Files,"
hang out in the Zoology Museum at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
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Can poker make you sick? How can a few herbs make your Memorial Day barbecue a little healthier? Why has the world community failed to stop genocide? "The Why Files" takes on scientific questions great and small, on the Web and in a new book. (Answers below.)
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Hulton Archive / Getty Images file |
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An engraving shows the HMS Beagle being greeted by Fuegian natives as it sails
through the Strait of Magellan in 1834 with naturalist Charles Darwin aboard.
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Evolutionary biology isn't just something you do in the lab or the library: Over the past two centuries, scientific pioneers have had to weather seasickness, survive shipwrecks and watch out for polar bears while they ferreted out the facts.
In his latest book, "Remarkable Creatures," molecular biologist Sean B. Carroll recounts the rip-roaring adventure tales behind the great advances in the theory of evolution.
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Donald Johanson |
It’s been 35 years since anthropologist Don Johanson found the fossilized skeleton of Lucy, the world’s best-known ancestor of modern humans, but Johanson says his 3.2 million-year-old “girlfriend” from Ethiopia still has lessons to teach.
"I never thought, when I found her on that November day, that she would turn out to be such an icon in human evolution," Johanson said last week during a visit to the "Lucy's Legacy" exhibit at Seattle's Pacific Science Center.
Lucy has become an icon, of course. In part, that's because Johanson and his colleagues recovered an incredible 40 percent of the complete skeleton, which is laid out in Seattle like a gem collection in a jewel case. The biggest reason, however, is that Lucy came from an era when our ancestors were just becoming human (as Johanson explains on this marvelous Web site).
"Lucy has gone a long way in introducing people not just to the idea of evolutionary change, but particularly to the fact that humans have evolved," he said.
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Young et al. / SwRI / NASA |
To be or not to be ... a planet? That's not really the big question anymore, no matter how you feel about Pluto's so-called demotion.
The truly big question, addressed in two books that look at Pluto's present position from completely different perspectives, has to do with what kinds of planets are out there. That applies to our own solar system as well as the hundreds of other worlds being detected in the universe beyond.
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Bat Conservation Int'l via AFP - Getty |
Vampire bats are the stars of Bill
Schutt's "Dark Banquet."
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Between the "Twilight" movie and book series and HBO's "True Blood" TV series, vampires are getting a lot of exposure these days. But in biologist Bill Schutt's book, those fictional fang-wearers don't even deserve to be called vampires.
Instead, in "Dark Banquet," Schutt focuses on the true bloodsuckers of the natural world - vampire bats, leeches, bed bugs, the dreaded candiru fish and other critters that inspire tales as macabre and mysterious as any Halloween thriller.
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Pat Rawlings / NASA |
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In the novel "Mars Life," explorers like the ones shown in this speculative artwork
find evidence of long-gone intelligent life in the Red Planet's Tithonium Chasma.
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Over the course of more than 45 years, and through more than 115 books, Ben Bova has been chronicling space exploration as fiction and fact. But in his latest novel, "Mars Life," Bova uses facts about the Red Planet - plus facts about the blue planet we live on - to weave a tale of interplanetary politics as well as scientific discovery.
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