Narratives of Europe's sixteenth-century westward expansion often tell of how the Americas came to be known as a distinct land mass, a continent separate from Asia and uniquely positioned as new ground ripe for transatlantic colonialism. But this geo...

The bright yellow of a marigold and the cheerful red of a geranium, the evocative fragrance of a lotus or a saffron-infused paella – there is no end of reasons to love flowers. Ranging through the centuries and across the globe, Kasia Boddy looks at...

The northeastern United States is one of the most densely forested regions in the country, yet its history of growth, destruction, and renewal are for the most part poorly understood – even by specialists. In this engaging look at both the impermanen...

How did physicists combine talent and technology to discover the Higgs boson, the last piece in our inventory of the subatomic world? How did the Higgs change our understanding of the universe? And now, nearly a decade after its detection, what comes...

With predictions of a human population of more than nine billion by the middle of this century and eleven billion by 2100, we stand at a crossroads in our agricultural evolution. In this clear and engaging yet scientifically rigorous book, wildlife b...

As official botanist on James Cook's first circumnavigation, the longest-serving president of the Royal Society, advisor to King George III, the "father of Australia", and the man who established Kew as the world's leading botanical garden, Sir Josep...

Fruit flies, silverfish, dandelions, and crabgrass are the bane of many people and the target of numerous chemical and physical eradication efforts. In this compelling reassessment of the relationship between humans and the natural world, John Hainze...

The scientists affiliated with the early Royal Society of London have long been regarded as forerunners of modern empiricism, rejecting the symbolic and moral goals of Renaissance natural history in favor of plainly representing the world as it reall...

On our breakfast tables and in our bakeries, we take for granted a grain that has made human civilization possible, a cereal whose humble origins belie its world-shaping power: wheat. "Amber Waves" is a biography of a group of species that grew in sc...

The ideas at the root of quantum theory remain stubbornly, famously bizarre: a solid world reduced to puffs of probability; particles that tunnel through walls; cats suspended in zombielike states, neither alive nor dead; and twinned particles that s...