The Brainiac's Book of the Climate and Weather


Book Description

A fresh approach to science for young brainiacs, this book on climate and weather includes incredible but true stories, interactive activities, and quirky infographics. What’s the difference between climate and weather? How do we know the climate is changing? The need-to-know answers to these and many other pressing questions are explained in this volume through incredible stories, infographics—including how many farts animals add to the atmosphere each year—and fun activities like engineering a solar oven from a pizza box. Budding brainiacs will love reading “Need- to- Know” stories, diving into interactive “Try This” activities, and building a trove of fascinating facts from a series of infographic “Data Dumps.” Featuring the artwork of Harriet Russell, the illustrator of the bestselling This Book Thinks You’re a . . . series, The Brainiac’s Book of Climate and Weather demonstrates how fun and relevant science is to our everyday lives. This brainiac’s book makes the subject interactive, interesting, and easy to relate to for young readers.




Teaching the Sustainable Development Goals to Young Citizens (10-16 years)


Book Description

With the current climate and economic crises, education for sustainability has never been more critical. This timely and essential book encourages readers to rethink our current values systems and to interrogate common assumptions about our world. Written for all educators with an interest in sustainability, chapters address several possible future scenarios for our planet, allowing readers to make more educated choices about sustainability and to transfer this knowledge to students within the classroom. Each chapter focuses on a specific Sustainable Development Goal. Beginning with a brief historical and theoretical introduction to contextualise the goal, chapters then showcase the practical activities, case studies and exemplars that teachers can adopt when teaching. Topics explored include, but are not limited to: Poverty Renewable energy Climate change Peace and justice Human rights Access to education This book is an essential classroom resource for any teacher or student teacher wishing to promote the Sustainable Development Goals and to teach for a better and brighter future.




Brainiac


Book Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A witty, charming, and engaging dive into trivia’s colorful history, from America’s highest-earning game show contestant of all time and host of Jeopardy! “Insightful, informative, and written with a strong dose of humor and humility. . . . I loved this book.”—Will Shortz, crossword editor, The New York Times Ken Jennings is trivia’s undisputed king—and as he traces his rise from anonymous computer programmer to nerd folk icon, he explores his newly conquered kingdom: the world of trivia itself. Trivia, he has found, is centuries older than his childhood obsession with it. Whisking us from the coffeehouses of seventeenth-century London to the Internet age, Jennings chronicles the ups and downs of the trivia fad: the quiz book explosion of the Jazz Age; the rise, fall, and rise again of TV quiz shows; the nostalgic campus trivia of the 1960s; and the 1980s, when Trivial Pursuit® again made it fashionable to be a know-it-all. Jennings also investigates the shadowy demimonde of today’s trivia subculture, guiding us on a tour of trivia across America. He goes head-to-head with the blowhards and diehards of the college quiz-bowl circuit, the slightly soused faithful of the Boston pub trivia scene, and the raucous participants in the annual Q&A marathon in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, “The World’s Largest Trivia Contest.” And, of course, he takes us behind the scenes of his improbable 75-game run on Jeopardy! But above all, Brainiac is a love letter to the useless fact. (Who knew that there’s a crater on Venus named after Laura Ingalls Wilder? Ken Jennings, that’s who.) Engaging and erudite, Brainiac is an irresistible celebration of nostalgia, curiosity, and geeky obsession—in a word, trivia.




The Ugly Fight


Book Description

It is not recycling! It is not green rooftops! It is not even energy efficient buildings that can help us fight global warming; they only kick the can further down the road. They helped us put off solving the problem until later and that later is now. We can't slowdown global warming with green initiatives anymore. We have crossed that tipping point. Global warming is now feeding on itself! Every natural disaster, be it earthquake, landslide, forest fire, hurricane or a flood, adds gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere. More carbon means more warming and more destruction. This vicious cycle is now spinning on its own! It is Artificial Intelligence alone that can comprehend global warming in its entirety and offer amazing solutions to fight it. 'The Ugly Fight' a unique book puts together a comprehensive approach to accelerating the fight against global warming through the power of Artificial Intelligence, which can be our partner in this epic battle to reverse our carbon footprint. Is AI a double-edged sword? You bet! When we nurture AI to fight global warming, undoubtedly it will threaten our jobs. Now the challenge is not just to combat climate change but to survive the collateral damage. It is an ugly fight indeed. This book illustrates with real-world examples the possible ways to unleash AI on global warming and at the same time shelter the unemployed.




2 Degrees


Book Description

In the year 2092, climate change has transformed the face of Earth. Storms, disease, famine, thirst and war show no mercy on the living. Sharon Clausen, a self-reliant farmer, has a secret apple tree—a tree that keeps Sharon and her wife, Eve, fed. The only other people who know of her secret, or so she thinks, is Dr. Ryan, a long-time confidant, and his wife, Areva. Once a month, Sharon and Eve travel from Maine to Boston to trade apples with Dr. Ryan for Eve’s leukemia treatment. Everything suddenly changes when Eve is kidnapped and the Ryan’s are murdered. Sharon learns that her best kept secrets are known and coveted by a man known as the Strelitzia—a coldly practical villain. Sharon sets out on a harrowing journey across North America to rescue Eve. Along the way, she teams up with an Inuit refugee boy, a stray dog named Erik the Red, an eccentric former school teacher, a jujitsu master, an Argentinian opera star, and a brilliant scientist who leads an alliance of eclectic people known as the Qaunik. Together, this ragtag group battle horrific storms, an unrelenting desert, terrifying criminal gangs, feral humans, and the Strelitzia. In the end, Sharon must face her greatest challenge—risk all that she loves for something much greater than herself.




Second Helpings


Book Description

Second Helpings continues Megan McCafferty's New York Times bestselling series - now with a new foreword by New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Serle Jessica Darling is in her senior year of high school and things can’t seem to get worse: her best friend, Hope, still lives in another state, and the mysterious and oh-so-compelling Marcus Flutie continues to be a distraction she doesn’t need. Not to mention her parents won’t get off her back about choosing a college, and her older sister’s pregnancy is causing quite a bit of drama in the Darling household. The second book in Megan McCafferty’s critically acclaimed Jessica Darling series is fun, irreverent, and shows that being a teenager is never easy (or boring). Now with a foreword from New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Serle and a new author's note from Megan McCafferty!




In Defense of Flogging


Book Description

Presents philosophical and practical arguments in favor of the administration of judicial corporal punishment as a way of addressing problems in the American criminal justice system.




Braintrust


Book Description

A provocative new account of how morality evolved What is morality? Where does it come from? And why do most of us heed its call most of the time? In Braintrust, neurophilosophy pioneer Patricia Churchland argues that morality originates in the biology of the brain. She describes the "neurobiological platform of bonding" that, modified by evolutionary pressures and cultural values, has led to human styles of moral behavior. The result is a provocative genealogy of morals that asks us to reevaluate the priority given to religion, absolute rules, and pure reason in accounting for the basis of morality. Moral values, Churchland argues, are rooted in a behavior common to all mammals—the caring for offspring. The evolved structure, processes, and chemistry of the brain incline humans to strive not only for self-preservation but for the well-being of allied selves—first offspring, then mates, kin, and so on, in wider and wider "caring" circles. Separation and exclusion cause pain, and the company of loved ones causes pleasure; responding to feelings of social pain and pleasure, brains adjust their circuitry to local customs. In this way, caring is apportioned, conscience molded, and moral intuitions instilled. A key part of the story is oxytocin, an ancient body-and-brain molecule that, by decreasing the stress response, allows humans to develop the trust in one another necessary for the development of close-knit ties, social institutions, and morality. A major new account of what really makes us moral, Braintrust challenges us to reconsider the origins of some of our most cherished values.




Lenny Cyrus, School Virus


Book Description

In this fast-paced middle-grade novel, boy genius Lenny Cyrus finds out that the human body is basically just like middle school, only a lot ickier. Illustrations.




Figuring


Book Description

Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries—beginning with the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who catalyzed the environmental movement. Stretching between these figures is a cast of artists, writers, and scientists—mostly women, mostly queer—whose public contribution have risen out of their unclassifiable and often heartbreaking private relationships to change the way we understand, experience, and appreciate the universe. Among them are the astronomer Maria Mitchell, who paved the way for women in science; the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, who did the same in art; the journalist and literary critic Margaret Fuller, who sparked the feminist movement; and the poet Emily Dickinson. Emanating from these lives are larger questions about the measure of a good life and what it means to leave a lasting mark of betterment on an imperfect world: Are achievement and acclaim enough for happiness? Is genius? Is love? Weaving through the narrative is a set of peripheral figures—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman—and a tapestry of themes spanning music, feminism, the history of science, the rise and decline of religion, and how the intersection of astronomy, poetry, and Transcendentalist philosophy fomented the environmental movement.