Examines contemporary man's preoccupation with technology appraising mass production and automation and their by-products pollution, mass destruction, and waste.

"Are we more like termites than we ever imagined? In Underbug, the award-winning journalist Lisa Margonelli introduces us to the enigmatic creatures that collectively outweigh human beings ten to one and consume $40 billion worth of valuable stuff annually. Over the course of a decade-long obsession with one of nature's most influential but least understood bugs, Margonelli pokes around termite mounds and high-tech research facilities, closely watching...

James Burke presents science as a detective story, illustrating the connections between events of the past and inventions of the future. Burke tracks through twelve thousand years of history for the clues that lead to eight great life-changing inventions-- the atom bomb, telecommunications, the computer, the production line, jet aircraft, plastics, rocketry and television.

"The New York Times bestselling author of The Rational Optimist and Genome returns with a fascinating, brilliant argument for evolution that definitively dispels a dangerous, widespread myth: that we can command and control our world. The Evolution of Everything is about bottom-up order and its enemy, the top-down twitch--the endless fascination human beings have for design rather than evolution, for direction rather than emergence. Drawing on anecdotes...

"Vaclav Smil's mission is to make facts matter. An environmental scientist, policy analyst, and a hugely prolific author, he is Bill Gates' go-to guy for making sense of our world. In Numbers Don't Lie, Smil answers questions such as: What's worse for the environment -- your car or your phone? How much do the world's cows weigh (and what does it matter)? And what makes people happy?"--

Life for early humans wasn't easy. They may have been able to walk on two feet and create tools 4 million years ago, but they couldn't remember or communicate. Fortunately, people got smarter, and things got better. They remembered on-the-spot solutions and shared the valuable information of their experiences. Clubs became swords, caves became huts, and fires became ovens. Collectively these new tools became technology. As the 21st century unfolds,...

'Wonders of the Ancient World' describes the most extraordinary feats of human engineering and design from across the globe, created between the dawn of human civilization and the onset of the Dark Ages.

The lives and fates of three civilizations separated in time become intertwined as the forces behind an indestructible and massive canal 2,000 miles long and spanning the mid-continent of Earth react to a plot to overthrow the world government, and three teams of scientists find their lives changed beyond belief.