Natural Science

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to Bully for Brontosaurus and learn about natural history.

There are redwoods in California that were ancient by the time Columbus first landed and pines still alive that germinated around the time humans invented writing. There are Douglas firs as tall as skyscrapers and a banyan tree in Calcutta as big as a football field. From the tallest to the smallest, trees inspire wonder in all of us, and in The Tree, Colin Tudge travels around the world - throughout the United States, the Costa Rican rain forest, Panama and Brazil, India, New Zealand, China, and most of Europe - bringing to life stories and facts about the trees around us.

For all the thousands of books that have been written about religion, few until this one have attempted to examine it scientifically: to ask why - and how - it has shaped so many lives so strongly. Is religion a product of blind evolutionary instinct or rational choice? Is it truly the best way to live a moral life? Ranging through biology, history, and psychology, Daniel C. Dennett charts religion’s evolution from “wild” folk belief to “domesticated” dogma.

I’m a worrier on my best days, but with a psycho tracking my every move because he’s obsessed with killing me, I’ve graduated to the level of paranoid lunatic. Even if I could forget about the tracker—not happening since he’s figured out the fastest way to get to me is to attack my adopted family—my regular life is also anxiety-inducing as the city of Magiford is brewing with trouble.

This audiobook explores the deep past and examines the latest knowledge on bison anatomy and physiology, how bison responded to climate change (especially drought), and early bison hunters and pre-contact trade. It also focuses on the era of European contact, in particular the arrival of the horse, and some of the first known instances of over-hunting. By the 19th century, bison reached a "tipping point" as a result of new tanning practices, an early attempt at protective legislation, and ventures to introducing cattle as a replacement stock.

When the well water on Louis Meeks’ ranch turned brown and oily, he suspected that the thousands of natural gas wells dotting the once-empty Wyoming landscape were somehow to blame. The hard part was proving it. Meeks’ struggle to get the energy companies to take responsibility, meticulously documented through three years of investigative reporting by ProPublica’s Abrahm Lustgarten, coincide with a national uproar over the oil and gas drilling process called hydraulic fracturing – a technology that promises to open large new energy supplies, perhaps at the expense of the nation’s water.

Inside this brilliant three-in-one book collection, you’ll uncover a wealth of philosophical insights about truth, faith, and the universe around us. Drawing on the arguments and musings of the famed philosopher, David Hume, this book reveals his ideas on the questions that define our very existence. Brought to life in this collection for a modern audience David Hume’s work has stood the test of time to resonate with people across the ages.

Blatantly relentless and twice as deadly, Greyson rules the pack and expands its territory, even though it’s already the largest in the region. I just wish he’d stop interfering with my life. He’s got enough trouble of his own with his incomplete mate bond, but he’s made it his hobby to tease and test me at every opportunity.

For centuries, we have known that getting outside is good for us. Yet we have become increasingly disconnected from the earth that nourishes us, with most of us spending 87% of our days indoors. In response, writer and environmentalist Emma Loewe demonstrates the power of nature’s healing properties in a guidebook organized by eight landscapes. In each chapter, you'll find research-backed ways to explore that landscape right now and protect it in the future, so that it can be healthy and nurturing for generations to come.

A real-life thriller in the vein of The Devil in the White City, Kate Winkler Dawson's debut, Death in the Air, is a gripping, historical narrative of a serial killer, an environmental disaster, and an iconic city struggling to regain its footing. In winter 1952, London automobiles and thousands of coal-burning hearths belched particulate matter into the air. But the smog that descended on December fifth of 1952 was different; it was a type that held the city hostage for five long days.

What’s in a cloud? Did you know that water vapor is invisible and actually lighter than dry air? What separates a tropical storm from a winter blizzard? And what exactly is El Niño? Elliot Rappaport, a professional captain of traditional sailing ships, has spent three decades at sea, where understanding weather is crucial to the safety of vessels and their crews. In Reading the Glass, he offers a sailor’s-eye view of the moving parts of our atmosphere and unveils the larger patterns it holds: global winds, storms, air masses, jet streams, and the longer arc of our climate.

The Galapagos were once known to the sailors and pirates who encountered them as Las Encantadas: the enchanted islands, home to exotic creatures and dramatic volcanic scenery. In The Galapagos, science writer Henry Nicholls offers a lively natural and human history of the archipelago, charting its evolution from deserted wilderness to scientific resource (made famous by Charles Darwin) and global ecotourism hot spot.

Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey J. Kripal team up on this unprecedented and intellectually vibrant new framing of inexplicable events and experiences. Rather than merely document the anomalous, these authors - one the man who popularized alien abduction and the other a renowned scholar - deliver a fast-paced and exhilarating study of why the supernatural is neither fantasy nor fiction but a vital and authentic aspect of life.

Despite their cultural influence, the grand narrative of the dinosaur story is rarely told. Most of us have heard of Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus, but these two dinosaurs lived more than eighty million years apart—a greater span of time than the entire post-T. rex history of the planet. Furthermore, we often know even less about the environments these animals lived in. The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs tells the full story, a 230-million-year epic of small beginnings, spectacular golden periods, and eventual global domination.

On a 90-degree day in Los Angeles, bus riders across the city line up behind the shadows cast by street signs and telephone poles, looking for a little relief from the sun’s glaring heat. Every summer such scenes play out in cities across the United States, and as Sam Bloch argues, we ignore the benefits of shade at our own peril. Heatwaves are now the country’s deadliest natural disasters with victims concentrated in poorer, less shady areas. Public health, mental health, and crime statistics are worse in neighborhoods without it. For some, finding shade is a matter of life and death.

World-renowned paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara reveals how understanding dinosaurs can help us better understand our own biology - and our future. Dinosaurs captivate people. Men and women, young and old, have a deep fascination with the species that roamed Earth before us. In this audiobook, paleontologist Dr. Kenneth Lacovara takes listeners on a journey - back to when dinosaurs roamed the Earth - to reveal how dinosaurs achieved feats unparalleled by any other group of animals.

Botany was the darling and the powerhouse of the 18th century. As European ships ventured across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, discovery bloomed. Bounties of new plants were brought back, and their arrival meant much more than improved flowerbeds - it offered a new scientific frontier that would transform Europe’s industry, medicine, eating and drinking habits, and even fashion.

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.

After water and air, sand is the natural resource that we consume more than any other - even more than oil. Every concrete building and paved road on Earth, every computer screen and silicon chip, is made from sand. And, incredibly, we're running out of it. The World in a Grain is the compelling true story of the hugely important and diminishing natural resource that grows more essential every day, and of the people who mine it, sell it, build with it - and sometimes, even kill for it.

When twenty-two-year-old aspiring geologist Charles Darwin boarded HMS Beagle in 1831 with his microscopes and specimen bottles—invited by ship’s captain Robert FitzRoy who wanted a travel companion at least as much as a ship’s naturalist—he hardly thought he was embarking on what would become perhaps the most important and epoch-changing voyage in scientific history.