The first popular book to explain the dramatic theory behind the Moon's genesis. This lively science history relates one of the great recent breakthroughs in planetary astronomy-a successful theory of the birth of the Moon. Science journalist Dana Mackenzie traces the evolution of this theory, one little known outside the scientific community: a Mars-sized object collided with Earth some four billion years ago, and the remains of this colossal explosion-the...

"Sixty-six million years ago, an object the size of a city descended from space to crash into Earth, creating a devastating cataclysm that killed off the dinosaurs, along with three-quarters of the other species on the planet. What was its origin? In Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, Lisa Randall proposes it was a comet that was dislodged from its orbit as the Solar System passed through a disk of dark matter embedded in the Milky Way. In a sense, it...

Comets and asteroids are among the Solar System's very oldest inhabitants. This book tells the story of these enigmatic celestial objects, revealing how scientists are using them to help understand a crucial time in our history--the birth of the Solar System, and everything contained within it.

"In the tradition of E.H. Gombrich, Stephen Hawking, and Alan Weisman-an entertaining and uniquely informed narration of Life's life story. In the beginning, Earth was an inhospitably alien place-in constant chemical flux, covered with churning seas, crafting its landscape through incessant volcanic eruptions. Amid all this tumult and disaster, life began. The earliest living things were no more than membranes stretched across microscopic gaps in...

In this journey of scientific exploration, the authors consider some of the most fundamental questions about our Earth, Sun, and solar system--and the star-filled galaxies beyond. How big is our solar system? How quickly is space expanding? How big is the universe? What is it made of? Some of these questions can be answered on the basis of observations you can make in your own backyard. Other answers draw on the astonishing information now being gathered...

Discusses agricultural technology in various cultures from the Stone Age to 476 A.D., including China, Egypt, Mesoamerica, and Greece.

"Specialist scientific fields are developing at incredibly swift speeds, but what can they really tell us about how the universe began and how we humans evolved to play such a dominant role on Earth? John Hands's ... ambitious quest is to bring together this scientific knowledge and evaluate without bias or preconception all the theories and evidence about the origin and evolution of matter, life, consciousness, and humankind. This ... book provides...

"The author of the best-selling Your Inner Fish, now gives us a lively and accessible account of the great transformations in the history of life, that enable us to further understand whether our presence on this planet is an accident or inevitable. The great transformations in the history of life brought about whole scale shifts in how animals live and how their bodies are organized: the evolution of fish to land-living creature, the origin of birds,...

"After a four-century rupture between science and the questions of value and meaning, this groundbreaking book presents an explosive and potentially life-altering idea: if the world could agree on a shared creation story based on modern cosmology and biology -- a story that has just become available -- it would redefine our relationship with Planet Earth and benefit all of humanity, now and into the distant future. Written in eloquent, accessible...