Few animals have a worse reputation than the vulture. But is it deserved? With Vulture, Katie Fallon offers an irresistible argument to the contrary, tracing a year in the life of a typical North American turkey vulture. Turkey vultures, also known a...

As the space age got underway in the wake of Sputnik, one of the earliest areas of science to take advantage of the new observational opportunities it afforded was the study of climate and weather. This book tells the story of Finnish-American educat...

The rising star author of The Physics of Wall Street explores why "nothing" may hold the key to the next era of theoretical physics James Owen Weatherall's previous book, "The Physics of Wall Street", was a New York Times best-seller and named one of...

While the influence of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) looms large over the natural sciences, his legacy reaches far beyond the field notebooks of naturalists. Von Humboldt's 1799-1804 research expedition to Central and South America with botanist...

For centuries, volcanic eruptions have captured our imaginations. Whether as signposts to an underworld, beacons to ancient mariners, or as an extraordinary manifestation of the natural world, volcanoes have intrigued many people, who have left recor...

The National Institute of Health recently announced its plan to retire the fifty remaining chimpanzees held in national research facilities and place them in sanctuaries. This significant decision comes after a lengthy process of examination and deba...

In 1492 Columbus set out across the Atlantic; in 1776 American colonists declared their independence. Between these two events old authorities collapsed – Luther's Reformation divided churches, and various discoveries revealed the ignorance of the an...

"Victorian Scientific Naturalism" examines the secular creeds of the generation of intellectuals who, in the wake of "The Origin of Species", wrested cultural authority from the old Anglican establishment while installing themselves as a new professi...

Between 1777 and 1816, botanical expeditions crisscrossed the vast Spanish empire in an ambitious project to survey the flora of much of the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. While these voyages produced written texts and compiled collect...

"Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty" traces the vital and varied roles of science through the story of three generations of the eminent Exner family, whose members included Nobel Prize-winning biologist Karl Frisch, the teachers of Freud and of physici...