Under a minute to spare? Why not spend it learning the essence of a subject you either feel you should know about or have been meaning to learn about. Whether it’s the Theory of Relativity or Fermat’s Last Theorem, the Golden Ratio or the Garden of Eden, Anarchism or Monetarism, Pavlov’s Dog or Schrodinger’s Cat, a Know It All theory is the quickest way to get an idea into your head. Each title in the series selects a popular subject area and dissects it into the 50 most significant or thought-provoking ideas at its heart. Each of these, no matter how complex, is explained without any waffle by a specialist or scholar using just 300 words and one picture—making it digestible in a mere 30 seconds. Complete with unique graphics that illuminate as well as entertain, and featuring essential glossaries plus biographies of the key players.

As a phenomenon that resides everywhere and in everything, energy is best understood by example. Exploring energy shows how it cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed—and how plankton and other ancient ocean-dwelling organisms can be used to power your car. Reducing the subject to its essential areas, Know-It-All Energy charts fascinating and fundamental topics, from the nuclear fusion reactor at the heart of the sun and civilization’s discovery of our first hands-on energy source in fire almost 400,000 years ago, to the elusive dark energy which makes up most of the content of the universe.

In a provocative series of essays, more than one hundred of the world's leading thinkers--including Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, Freeman Dyson, Martin Rees, and others both in and outside the world of science--reveal what they believe despite a current lack of supporting evidence about such topics as the future of humankind, the fate of the universe, extraterrestrial life, and more. Original. 25,000 first printing.

A critically acclaimed study documents the outbreaks of newly discovered diseases around the globe, such as HIV, Lassa, and Ebola, and explores the social and environmental deterioration that helps to keep such viruses alive. Reprint. Tour.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist and author of Woman draws on interviews with hundreds of the world's top scientists to offer an entertaining guide to scientific literacy, exploring the fundamental principles of the major scientific disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy and their link to the world around us. Reprint.

The physicist-author of the best-selling Hyperspace explores how three scientific advances of the twentieth-century--quantum mechanics, biogenetics, and artificial intelligence--will permanently change humankind's relationship to nature. Reprint. K.

The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning expert on sociobiology and biodiversity argues for the fundamental unity of all knowledge in the face of the increasing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge over the past two centuries. Reprint. 75,000 first printing. NYT.

From the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, hilarious and informative answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe’s iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have an enormous, dedicated following, as do his deeply researched answers to his fans’ strangest questions. The queries he receives range from merely odd to downright diabolical: • What if I took a swim in a spent-nuclear-fuel pool? • Could you build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns? • What if a Richter 15 earthquake hit New York City? • Are fire tornadoes possible? His responses are masterpieces of clarity and wit, gleefully and accurately explaining everything from the relativistic effects of a baseball pitched at near the speed of light to the many horrible ways you could die while building a periodic table out of all the actual elements. The book features new and never-before-answered questions, along with the most popular answers from the xkcd website. What If? is an informative feast for xkcd fans and anyone who loves to ponder the hypothetical.

"Simon Flynn's cornucopia of curious facts, anecdotes, and quotations . . . is sure to entertain and surprise."?New Scientist From the Large Hadron Collider rap to the sins of Isaac Newton, The Science Magpie is a compelling collection of scientific curiosities. Expand your knowledge as you view the history of the Earth on the face of a clock, tremble at the power of the Richter scale, and learn how to measure the speed of light. Simon Flynn was the publisher at icon Books for many years and is now a qualified science teacher. He has degrees in chemistry and philosophy.

More than nine hundred vivid photographs, full-color illustrations, and clear diagrams accompany more than one hundred experiments, projects, and activities that help readers of all ages discover how the organs and systems of the human body work. 75,000 first printing.