"From the acclaimed author of Tubes, a lively and surprising tour of the infrastructure behind the weather forecast, the people who built it, and what it reveals about our climate and our planet. The weather is the foundation of our daily lives. It's a staple of small talk, the app on our smartphones, and often the first thing we check each morning. Yet behind these quotidian interactions is one of the most expansive machines human beings have ever...

A portrait of the Edwardian era recounts two parallel stories--the case of Dr. Hawley Crippen, who murdered his wife and fled to America, and Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of wireless communication--as the new technology is used to capture a killer.

"The revered New York Times bestselling author traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement--precision--in a superb history that is both an homage and a warning for our future."--Amazon. The rise of manufacturing could not have happened without an attention to precision. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England, standards of measurement...

A renowned marine biologist presents this extraordinary firsthand account of the discovery of Ernest Shackleton's Endurance--a century to the day after Shackleton's death--that captures the intrepid spirit that joins two mariners across the centuries, both of whom accomplished the impossible.

Well-illustrated discussion of technological innovations of the Middle Ages.

"From Blaise Pascal in the 1600s to Charles Babbage in the first half of the nineteenth century, inventors struggled to create the first calculating machines. All failed--but that does not mean we cannot learn from the trail of ideas, correspondence, machines, and arguments they left behind. In Reckoning with Matter, Matthew L. Jones draws on the remarkably extensive and well-preserved records of the quest to explore the concrete processes involved...

"A science biography that examines the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci and offers kids the opportunity to make their own designs and inventions with hands-on activities"--Provided by publisher.