Thomas Hardy notes the thrush's "full-hearted evensong of joy illimited", Gilbert White observes how swallows sweep through the air but swifts "dash round in circles" and Rachel Carson watches sanderlings at the ocean's edge, scurrying "across the be...

The connection between mind and brain has been one of the most persistent problems in modern Western thought; even recent advances in neuroscience haven't been able to solve it satisfactorily. Historian Larry Sommer McGrath's "Making Spirit Matter" s...

With more than two hundred species distributed across most of mainland Mexico, Central and South America, and islands in the Caribbean Sea, the Phyllostomidae bat family (American leaf-nosed bats) is one of the world's most diverse mammalian families...

We live in an age in which we are repeatedly reminded – by scientists, by the media, by popular culture – of the looming threat of mass extinction. We're told that human activity is currently producing a sixth mass extinction, perhaps of even greater...

This is the latest title from the awarding-winning illustrator and author duo Eduard Altarriba and Sheddad Kaid-Salah Ferron. Cosmology is closely related to astronomy and studies the origin and evolution of the universe. As with Eduard and Sheddad's...

Ever since Carl Linnaeus's binomial system of scientific names was adopted in the eighteenth century, scientists have been eponymously naming organisms in ways that both honor and vilify their namesakes. This charming, informative, and accessible his...

For thousands of years, we've found ways to scorch, scour, and sterilize our surroundings to make them safer. Sometimes these methods are wonderfully effective. Often, however, they come with vast unintended consequences – typically not truly underst...

The Victorians, perhaps more than any Britons before them, were diggers and sifters of the past. Though they were not the first to be fascinated by history, the intensity and range of Victorian preoccupations with the past was unprecedented and of la...

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...