Riveting and timely, a look at the research that is transforming our understanding of the cosmos in the quest to discover whether we are alone.

The James Webb Space Telescope is transforming the universe right before our eyes—and here, for the first time, is the inside account of how the mission originated, how it performs its miracles of science, and what its revolutionary images are revealing. Pillars of Creation tells the story of one of the greatest scientific achievements in the history of civilization, a $10 billion instrument with a staggeringly ambitious goal: unlocking the secrets of the cosmos.

What is life? This is among the most difficult open problems in science, right up there with the nature of consciousness and the existence of matter. All the definitions we have fall short. None help us understand how life originates or the full range of possibilities for what life on other planets might look like. In Life as No One Knows It, physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker argues that solving the origin of life requires radical new thinking and an experimentally testable theory for what life is.

In the developed world, we’ve reaped the benefits of refrigeration for more than a century, but the costs are catching up with us. We’ve eroded our connection to our food and redefined what “fresh” means. More important, refrigeration is one of the leading contributors to climate change. As the developing world races to build a US-style cold chain, Twilley asks: Can we reduce our dependence on refrigeration? Should we?

When he was six years old, Roger Penrose discovered a sundial in a clearing near his house. Through that machine made of light, shadow, and time, Roger glimpsed a “world behind the world” of transcendently beautiful geometry. It spurred him on a journey to become one of the world’s most influential mathematicians, philosophers, and physicists. Penrose would prove the limitations of general relativity, set a new agenda for theoretical physics, and astound colleagues and admirers with the elegance and beauty of his discoveries.

A gripping journey of discovery, The Catalyst moves from the early experiments that first hinted at RNA's spectacular powers, to Cech's own paradigm-shifting finding that it can catalyze cellular reactions, to the cutting-edge biotechnologies poised to reshape our health.

If the history of the Earth were compressed down to a year, our species would arise in the last thirty minutes or so of the final hour. But life itself is not such a late arrival: It has existed on Earth for something like 3.7 billion years—most of our planet’s history and over a quarter of the age of the universe (as far as we can tell). What have these organisms—bacteria, animals, plants, and the rest—done in all this time? In Living on Earth, the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith proposes a new way of understanding how the actions of living beings have shaped our planet.

When Gareth Harney was first handed a Roman coin by his father as a child, he became entranced by its beauty, and its unique ability to connect us with the distant past. He soon learned that the Romans saw coins as far more than just currency—these were metal canvases on which they immortalized their sacred gods, mighty emperors, towering monuments, and brutal battles of conquest. Revealed in those intricate designs struck in gold, silver, and bronze was the epic story of the Roman Empire.

We’ve all heard the phrase “it’s not brain surgery.” But what exactly is brain surgery? It’s a profession that is barely a hundred years old and profoundly connects two human beings, but few know how it works, or its history. In this warm, rigorous, and deeply insightful book, Dr. Theodore H. Schwartz explores what it’s like to hold the scalpel, wield the drill, extract a tumor, fix a bullet hole, and remove a blood clot—when every second can mean life or death.

We play games to learn about the world, to understand our minds and the minds of others, and to make predictions about the future. Games are an essential aspect of humanity and a powerful tool for modeling reality. They’re also a lot of fun. But games can be dangerous, especially when we mistake the model worlds of games for reality itself and let gamification co-opt human decision making. Playing with Reality explores the riveting history of games since the Enlightenment.

In the summer of 1982, eight science fiction films were released within six weeks of one another. E.T., Tron, Star Trek: Wrath of Khan, Conan the Barbarian, Blade Runner, Poltergeist, The Thing, and Mad Max: The Road Warrior changed the careers of some of Hollywood's now biggest names―altering the art of movie-making to this day.

In Bite, zoologist Bill Schutt makes a surprising case: it is teeth that are responsible for the long-term success of vertebrates. The appearance of teeth, roughly half a billion years ago, was an adaptation that allowed animals with backbones, such as fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, dinosaurs and mammals—including us—to chow down in pretty much every conceivable environment.

Henry V reigned over England for only nine years and four months and died at the age of just thirty-five, but he looms over the landscape of the late Middle Ages and beyond. The victor of Agincourt, he is remembered as the acme of kingship, a model to be closely imitated by his successors. William Shakespeare deployed Henry V as a study in youthful folly redirected to sober statesmanship. For one modern medievalist, Henry was, quite simply, “the greatest man who ever ruled England.”

In this vivid and alluring history, medievalist Anthony Bale invites listeners on an odyssey across the medieval world. Journeying alongside scholars, spies, and saints, from Western Europe to the Far East, the Antipodes and the ends of the earth, Bale provides indispensable information on the exchange rate between Bohemian ducats and Venetian groats, medieval cures for seasickness, and how to avoid extortionist tour guides and singing sirens.

Everyone is curious about life in the Universe, UFOs and whether ET is out there. Over the course of his thirty-year career as an astrophysicist, Adam Frank has consistently been asked about the possibility of intelligent life in the universe. Are aliens real? Where are they? Why haven’t we found them? What happens if we do?

My Big TOE: Awakening, written by a nuclear physicist in the language of contemporary culture, unifies science and philosophy, physics and metaphysics, mind and matter, purpose and meaning, the normal and the paranormal. The entirety of human experience (mind, body, and spirit) including both our objective and subjective worlds is brought together under one seamless scientific understanding.

Chemistry and Our Universe: How It All Works is your in-depth introduction to this vital field, taught through 60 engaging half-hour lectures that are suitable for any background or none at all. Covering a year’s worth of introductory general chemistry at the college level, plus intriguing topics that are rarely discussed in the classroom, this amazingly comprehensive course requires nothing more advanced than high-school math. Your guide is Professor Ron B. Davis, Jr., a research chemist and award-winning teacher at Georgetown University.

Richard Dawkins' brilliant reformulation of the theory of natural selection has the rare distinction of having provoked as much excitement and interest outside the scientific community as within it. His theories have helped change the whole nature of the study of social biology, and have forced thousands to rethink their beliefs about life.

How the Earth Works takes you on an astonishing journey through time and space. In 48 lectures, you will look at what went into making our planet - from the big bang, to the formation of the solar system, to the subsequent evolution of Earth.

We are in the midst of a global mental health crisis, and mental illnesses are on the rise. But what causes mental illness? And why are mental health problems so hard to treat? Drawing on decades of research, Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Chris Palmer outlines a revolutionary new understanding that for the first time unites our existing knowledge about mental illness within a single framework: mental disorders are metabolic disorders of the brain. Brain Energy will transform the field of mental health, and the lives of countless people around the world.

Welcome to the Universe is a personal guided tour of the cosmos by three of today's leading astrophysicists. Inspired by the enormously popular introductory astronomy course that Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss, and J. Richard Gott taught together at Princeton, this book covers it all - from planets, stars, and galaxies to black holes, wormholes, and time travel.

Hilarious, fascinating, and a roller coaster of dizzying, historical what-ifs, Napoleon's Hemorrhoids is a potpourri for serious historians and casual history buffs. In one of Phil Mason's many revelations, you'll learn that Communist jets were two minutes away from opening fire on American planes during the Cuban missile crisis, when they had to turn back as they were running out of fuel. You'll discover that before the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon's painful hemorrhoids prevented him from mounting his horse to survey the battlefield.

In this illuminating audiobook, Tyson and coauthor James Trefil, a renowned physicist and science popularizer, take on the big questions that humanity has been posing for millennia - How did life begin? What is our place in the universe? Are we alone? - and provide answers based on the most current data, observations, and theories.

From launchpad explosions to a pernicious cricket infestation to the demanding management style of Musk himself, the rise of SpaceX was beset with challenges and far from inevitable. Find out how the startup beat the odds and flew high enough to outpace their rivals... and where they're going next.

Dr. Catherine Kleier invites us to open our eyes to the phenomenal world of plant life and to the process she calls “Natura Revelata”, the joy of celebrating and learning from the secrets of nature. As Dr. Kleier shares her knowledge with contagious excitement for her subject, she emphasizes the middle ground: Instead of focusing on cell microbiology or the study of ecosystems and habitats, she stresses the basic biology, function, and the amazing adaptations of the plants we see all around us.

We play games to learn about the world, to understand our minds and the minds of others, and to make predictions about the future. Games are an essential aspect of humanity and a powerful tool for modeling reality. They’re also a lot of fun. But games can be dangerous, especially when we mistake the model worlds of games for reality itself and let gamification co-opt human decision making. Playing with Reality explores the riveting history of games since the Enlightenment.

Riveting and timely, a look at the research that is transforming our understanding of the cosmos in the quest to discover whether we are alone.

What is life? This is among the most difficult open problems in science, right up there with the nature of consciousness and the existence of matter. All the definitions we have fall short. None help us understand how life originates or the full range of possibilities for what life on other planets might look like. In Life as No One Knows It, physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker argues that solving the origin of life requires radical new thinking and an experimentally testable theory for what life is.

If the history of the Earth were compressed down to a year, our species would arise in the last thirty minutes or so of the final hour. But life itself is not such a late arrival: It has existed on Earth for something like 3.7 billion years—most of our planet’s history and over a quarter of the age of the universe (as far as we can tell). What have these organisms—bacteria, animals, plants, and the rest—done in all this time? In Living on Earth, the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith proposes a new way of understanding how the actions of living beings have shaped our planet.

Though you may not be able to see them with the naked eye, parasites inhabit our everyday lives. From headlice to bird droppings, litterboxes to unfiltered water, you have brushed up against the most common way of life on our planet. In this unique book, John Janovy Jr., one of the world's preeminent experts on parasites, reveals what can humans learn from the most reviled yet misunderstood animals on Earth: lice, tapeworms, flukes, and maggots that can eat a lizard from the inside, and how these lessons help us negotiate our own complicated world.

Why Animals Talk is an exhilarating journey through the untamed world of animal communication. Following his international bestseller, The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy, acclaimed zoologist Arik Kershenbaum draws on extensive original research to reveal how many of the animal kingdom’s most seemingly confusing or untranslatable signals are in fact logical and consistent—and not that different from our own.

Earth has been reinventing itself for more than four billion years, keeping a record of its experiments in the form of rocks. Yet most of us live our lives on the planet with no idea of its extraordinary history, unable to interpret the language of the rocks that surround us. Geologist Marcia Bjornerud believes that our lives can be enriched by understanding our heritage on this old and creative planet. Contrary to their reputation, rocks have eventful lives—and they intersect with our own in surprising ways.

Bea couldn't be more excited to trade the stifling Stockholm summer heat for vacation on Gotland Island. She’s looking forward to spending quality time with her beloved husband of thirty-two years, Niklas, and their two moody teenage daughters, and recuperating from the stress of daily life in the company of her beloved in-laws. One night shortly before their departure, Bea and Niklas have a seemingly mundane argument over a trivial issue, and Niklas goes out with a friend to blow off steam.

When Mary McLeod Bethune died, tributes in newspapers around the country said the same thing: she should be on the Mount Rushmore of Black American achievement. Indeed, Bethune is the only Black American whose statue stands in the rotunda of the US Capitol, and yet for most, she remains a marble figure from the dim past. Now, seventy years later, Noliwe Rooks turns Bethune from stone to flesh, showing her to have been a visionary leader with lessons to still teach us as we continue on our journey toward a freer and more just nation.

The charges of the proton and electron are opposite and equal, even though the proton is bigger. But why are they equal? This is one of the deepest unresolved puzzles of physics. Frank Close takes us on a journey into the quantum subatomic world of particles. He describes the strong and weak forces that operate alongside electromagnetism, the color and flavor charges, as well as the parallels between them, giving hints of a deeper unity.

A gripping journey of discovery, The Catalyst moves from the early experiments that first hinted at RNA's spectacular powers, to Cech's own paradigm-shifting finding that it can catalyze cellular reactions, to the cutting-edge biotechnologies poised to reshape our health.

In The Allure of the Multiverse, physicist Paul Halpern tells the epic story of how science became besotted with the multiverse, and the controversies that ensued. The questions that brought scientists to this point are big and deep: Is reality such that anything can happen, must happen? How does quantum mechanics "choose" the outcomes of its apparently random processes? And why is the universe habitable? Each question quickly leads to the multiverse.

In this vivid and alluring history, medievalist Anthony Bale invites listeners on an odyssey across the medieval world. Journeying alongside scholars, spies, and saints, from Western Europe to the Far East, the Antipodes and the ends of the earth, Bale provides indispensable information on the exchange rate between Bohemian ducats and Venetian groats, medieval cures for seasickness, and how to avoid extortionist tour guides and singing sirens.

Many of us know that the Moon pulls on our oceans, driving the tides, but did you know that it smells like gunpowder? Or that it was essential to the development of science and religion? Acclaimed journalist Rebecca Boyle takes listeners on a dazzling tour to reveal the intimate role that our 4.51-billion-year-old companion has played in our biological and cultural evolution.

The James Webb Space Telescope is transforming the universe right before our eyes—and here, for the first time, is the inside account of how the mission originated, how it performs its miracles of science, and what its revolutionary images are revealing. Pillars of Creation tells the story of one of the greatest scientific achievements in the history of civilization, a $10 billion instrument with a staggeringly ambitious goal: unlocking the secrets of the cosmos.