Following the hugely successful Walking
with Dinosaurs and Walking with
Prehistoric Beasts, DK dives into the past
to swim with prehistoric reptiles and
mammals in Chased by Sea Monsters.
Exploring the underwater world where he
"encounters" amazing creatures, Nigel
Marven presents a unique record of a lost
world never revealed before now.
Germs:
Biological Weapons and America's Secret
War
Deadly germs sprayed in shopping malls,
bomb-lets spewing anthrax spores over
battlefields, tiny vials of plague
scattered in Times Square -- these are the
poor man's hydrogen bombs, hideous weapons
of mass destruction that can be made in a
simple laboratory.
In this groundbreaking work of
investigative journalism, Judith Miller,
Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad of
The New York Times uncover the
truth about biological weapons and show
why bio-warfare and bio-terrorism are fast
becoming our worst national nightmare.
Germs shows how a small group of
scientists and senior officials persuaded
President Bill Clinton to launch a
controversial multibillion-dollar program
to detect a germ attack on U.S. soil and
to aid its victims -- a program that, so
far, is struggling to provide real
protection.
Based on hundreds of interviews with
scientists and senior officials, as well
as on recently declassified documents and
on-site reporting from the former Soviet
Union's sinister bio-weapons labs, Germs
shows us bio-warriors past and present at
work at their trade.
A Fish
Caught in Time
The rediscovery of the coelacanth in
the 1930s is a terrific tale of scientific
adventure. In A Fish Caught in
Time, Samantha Weinberg follows the
trials and tribulations of the
ichthyologists who found this fossil fish
alive and well.
Tyrannosaurus
Sue: The Extraordinary Saga of the
Largest, Most Fought-Over T-Rex Ever
Found
When a near-perfect fossil dinosaur
skeleton was found in South Dakota in
1990, a war broke out over who owned
it.
The Sacred
Depths of Nature
Ursula Goodenough is an internationally
recognized cell biologist; she is also an
accomplished amateur theologian--an
unusual combination of interests in a time
when science and religion are widely
divided. In "The Sacred Depths of Nature,"
she proposes what she calls a "planetary
ethic" drawing on the lessons of both
science and metaphysics and celebrating
some of the mysteries that are central to
both: "the mystery of why there is
anything at all, rather than nothing," for
one, and "the mystery of why the universe
seems so strange," for another. Exploring
scientifically based narratives about the
creation of the universe and the origins
of life, Goodenough forges a kind of
religious naturalism that will not be
unfamiliar to readers of New Age
literature--save that her naturalism has
the hard-nosed rigor of a
laboratory-trained scholar behind it.
Goodenough offers a crash course in the
life sciences for her readers, for
instance, encompassing the basics of
biochemistry in just a few paragraphs (and
getting it right in the bargain), touching
on Darwinian biology and population
dynamics and even chaos theory to make "an
epic of evolution" that has all the
hallmarks of an origin myth. Faith and
reason, in her view, are not mutually
exclusive, and her well-written treatise
makes a good argument for bridging the gap
between the two.
Life: A
Natural History of the First Four Billion
Years of Life on Earth
Life probably began in "something
approximating the medieval idea of Hell,"
writes paleontologist Richard Fortey in
this book. Investigate the connections
between individual lives and the lives of
everything from bacteria to whales in this
personal, poetic chronicle.
