Harvard's acclaimed geologist "charts Earth's history in accessible style" (AP) "A sublime chronicle of our planet." -Booklist, STARRED review How well do you know the ground beneath your feet Odds are, where you're standing was once cooking under a...

In praise of the hand: A philosopher considers the crucial role of the hand in human evolution, particularly with respect to language. “McGinn is an ingenious philosopher who thinks like a laser and writes like a dream.”—Steven PinkerThis book is a hymn...

From the TED stage to the page, Juan Enriquez, author of As the Future Catches You and Evolving Ourselves, presents a lively and engaging guide to ethics in a technological age.Most people have a strong sense of right and wrong, and many of us are not...

Provocative, hopeful essays imagine a future that is not reduced to algorithms.When Joi Ito published an essay, "Resisting Reduction: A Manifesto," about human flourishing in an age of machine intelligence, his argument against industrial optimizations...

From the very start, at the age of twenty-one, Herbert York was swept into the century's most daring and dangerous technical achievement, the making of the atomic bomb. In Arms and the Physicist, York takes us backstage to witness key events of our time:...

A fresh look at electricity and its powerful role in life on EarthWhen we think of electricity, we likely imagine the energy humming inside our home appliances or lighting up our electronic devices—or perhaps we envision the lightning-streaked clouds of...

An entertaining and enlightening history of irrational numbers, from ancient Greece to the twenty-first centuryThe ancient Greeks discovered them, but it wasn't until the nineteenth century that irrational numbers were properly understood and rigorously...

An engrossing look at the history and importance of a centuries-old but still unanswered math problemFor centuries, mathematicians the world over have tried, and failed, to solve the zeta-3 problem. Math genius Leonhard Euler attempted it in the 1700s...

A major biography of the brilliant naturalist, traveler, humanitarian, and codiscoverer of natural selectionAlfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) was perhaps the most famed naturalist of the Victorian age. His expeditions to remote Amazonia and southeast...

A concise and accessible introduction to exoplanets that explains the cutting-edge science behind recent discoveriesFor centuries, people have speculated about the possibility of planets orbiting distant stars, but only since the 1990s has technology...

The ubiquity of computer-generated imagery around us, in movies, advertising or on the Internet is already being taken for granted and what impresses most people is the photorealistic quality of the images. Pictures, as we have often been told, are worth...

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the biggest, and by far the most powerful, machine ever built. A project of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, its audacious purpose is to re-create, in a 16.5-mile-long circular tunnel under the...

A revealing look at how user behavior is powering deep social divisions online—and how we might yet defeat political tribalism on social mediaIn an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools...

In Measure for Measure, Thomas Levenson offers a compelling account of how scientific thinking development from the day 2,500 years ago when Pythagoras discovered the musical scale to the present day.The story unfolds through the tales of instruments...

A NEW YORK TIMES AND NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explored the greatest enigmas in the universe—the nature of free will, the strange fabric of the cosmos, the true limits of the mind—and each in their own way...

Under what conditions are expressions of a language the same; when are they different? Indices and Identity focuses on this question in the context of the theory of anaphora and on the role of indices in characterizing syntactic and semantic identity of...

For some time it has been generally accepted by students of English grammar that a rule of Raising exists and that it functions to produce derived main clause subjects. Following Rosenbaum's work, it has also been widely accepted that this rule functions...

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!From celebrated anthropologist Jennifer Raff comes the untold story—and fascinating mystery—of how humans migrated to the Americas.ORIGIN is the story of who the first peoples in the Americas were, how and why they...

This study investigates the types of movement and movement-like relations that link positions in syntactic structure. David Pesetsky argues that there are three such relations. Besides overt phasal movement, there are two distinct types of movement...

The essays in this collection celebrate Ken Hale's lifelong study of underdocumented languages and their implications for universal grammar. The authors report their latest research in syntax, morphology, semantics, phonology, and phonetics. Contributors...