The Science of the Earth: The Secrets of Our Planet Revealed (DK Secret World Encyclopedias)

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Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard penned our favorite book by a scientist this year with her deeply personal and engaging Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. Simard grew up in Canada in a logging family and, at age 20, worked as a seasonal employee for a logging company. But even early on, she had a sense that clear-cutting forests and poisoning the earth so monocultures could grow was the wrong approach. Simard suspected that forests were made up of interconnected entities that helped each other out, and so she pursued a career in science—studying silviculture for the Forest Service and eventually earning a PhD in forest sciences at Oregon State University. In experiments, she documented that birch and Douglas fir trees traded carbon underground. She established that the forest is a “ wood-wide web,” with plants exchanging nutrients and chemical signals via their roots and fungal networks, and found that large old trees, or “ Mother Trees,” were at the center of these networks, often helping their offspring.

A myth-busting voyage into sexual anatomy. Buy Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus by David Quammen Did you know that bubbles of ancient air trapped inside the Antarctic ice core can reveal how Earth’s climate has changed over time? Or that a piece of pumice thrown several miles into the air by a volcano helps to explain what happens when tectonic plates collide? Well, now you do! Learn all about our weird and wonderful planet with The Science of Earth. Tolkien was an acute observer of flora and fauna and mined the minds of his scientific friends about ocean currents and volcanoes. It is these layers science that give his imaginary universe—and the creatures and characters that inhabit it—such concreteness. Within this gorgeously illustrated edition, a range of scientists—from astrophysicists to physicians, botanists to volcanologists—explore Tolkien’s novels, poems, and letters to reveal their fascinating scientific roots. In the former camp was a man named Barnum Brown, who yearned to escape his humble origins in Kansas farm country. With sponsorship from curator Henry Fairfield Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History, Brown scoured the hills of Wyoming and Montana with, as Randall puts it, “a magical ability to unearth a specimen, like someone who can sit down and complete a jigsaw puzzle without first needing to find the edges.” Brown’s unassuming diligence contrasts with Osborn’s rigid—and skewed—vision of the natural world: Osborn saw the history of the Earth as a kind of morality tale, in which good prevails over evil, intelligence trumps brute strength (witness the extinction of the dinosaurs), and people of Anglo-Saxon descent inevitably rose to the top. The Monster’s Bones deftly weaves paleontology and adventure—and shows how “objective” science can be shaped by the personalities and ideologies of its practitioners.Perhaps no aspect of our anatomy is both more fascinating and misunderstood than the vagina—down to the very common usage of what that word means. A vagina isn’t the whole of a woman’s reproductive anatomy. Instead, the vagina is a muscular canal that’s part of many people’s reproductive systems, of varying genders, whether they were born with it or had it surgically constructed. Nuance exists in this territory that is so often overwhelmed by a tangle of science, myth and cultural perceptions, and journalist Rachel E. Gross has composed an enthralling, sensitive book that’s relevant to everyone no matter what your personal topography looks like. When Newton discovered the law of gravity, he unified the rules governing the heavens and the Earth. Since then, physicists have been placing new forces into ever-grander theories. Buy Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, by Mary Roach Michael Lewis’s taut and brilliant nonfiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19. Buy Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, by Suzanne Simard That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it’s said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Buy The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, by Michael Lewis

The core of the book features large, detailed photographs of single objects, many of them small enough to be held in the hand, that each speaks volumes about an aspect of Earth's environments and how they work. Structured around an imaginary journey that takes the reader from the inner core to Earth's surface (including both land and oceans) and up to the top of the atmosphere, whilst taking in environments such as grasslands, forests, and reefs, the coverage includes both living and inanimate realms! The world J.R.R. Tolkien created is one of the most beloved in all of literature, and continues to capture hearts and imaginations around the world. From Oxford to ComiCon, the Middle Earth is analyzed and interpreted through a multitude of perspectives. The core of the book features large, detailed photographs of single objects, many of them small enough to be held in the hand, that each speaks volumes about an aspect of Earth’s environments and how they work.Structured around an imaginary journey that takes the reader from the inner core to Earth’s surface (including both land and oceans) and up to the top of the atmosphere, whilst taking in environments such as grasslands, forests, and reefs, the coverage includes both living and inanimate realms! Deep time is the timescale of the geological events that have shaped our planet. Whilst so immense as to challenge human understanding, its evidence is nonetheless visible all around us. Buy Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive, by Carl Zimmer In An Immense World , science journalist Ed Yong dives into the vast variety of animal senses with a seemingly endless supply of awe-inspiring facts. As humans, we move through the world within our Umwelt—a term for subjective sensory experience Yong borrows from the Baltic German biologist Jakob von Uexküll. But every creature on Earth has its own Umwelt that we can scarcely imagine. Through interviews with scientists around the globe, Yong teases out the astonishing details of other animals’ perceptions, introducing us to their fantastic Umwelten. Scallops, for example, have up to 200 eyes with impressive resolution, but their brains are likely not complex enough to receive and process such crisp images. Some butterflies can perceive ultraviolet color patterns on their wings that distinguish them from other species. And hammerhead sharks have receptors that scan the seafloor for the electric fields emitted by hidden prey, “as one might use metal detectors,” Yong writes. But many creatures’ senses have been thrown off by human activity, he notes. For example, our visually centered society has erected artificial lights that disorient migrating birds and hatchling sea turtles.Note, some ebooks have restrictive access and usage terms, for example theycan only be read by one personat a time. The surprising and illuminating look at how Tolkien's love of science and natural history shaped the creation of his Middle Earth, from its flora and fauna to its landscapes. Native to Southeast Asia, banana trees were brought to the Americas by European colonists in the 1500s. The fruits adapted and flourished, nourishing Indigenous communities who have protected the plants and incorporated them into traditional dishes. To environmental scientist Jessica Hernandez, the transplanted fruits symbolize the resistance of Indigenous people, like her family; however their landscapes change, they find ways to adapt and nourish themselves. The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. Ed Yong brings us into the unique sensory worlds of the animals that detect such elements. Buy Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage by Rachel E. Gross