An insider's look at the science of near-Earth comets and asteroids Of all the natural disasters that could befall us, only an Earth impact by a large comet or asteroid has the potential to end civilization in a single blow. Yet these near-Earth objects also offer tantalizing clues to our solar system's origins, and someday could even serve as stepping-stones for space exploration. In this book, Donald Yeomans introduces readers to the science of near-Earth objects—its history, applications, and ongoing quest to find near-Earth objects before they find us. In its course around the sun, the Earth passes through a veritable shooting gallery of millions of nearby comets and asteroids. One such asteroid is thought to have plunged into our planet sixty-five million years ago, triggering a global catastrophe that killed off the dinosaurs. Yeomans provides an up-to-date and accessible guide for understanding the threats posed by near-Earth objects, and also explains how early collisions with them delivered the ingredients that made life on Earth possible. He shows how later impacts spurred evolution, allowing only the most adaptable species to thrive—in fact, we humans may owe our very existence to objects that struck our planet. Yeomans takes readers behind the scenes of today’s efforts to find, track, and study near-Earth objects. He shows how the same comets and asteroids most likely to collide with us could also be mined for precious natural resources like water and oxygen, and used as watering holes and fueling stations for expeditions to Mars and the outermost reaches of our solar system.
Finding Them The Continuation to Finding Me, Lyndsy and Harlin, have to make an immediate trip to New York, for a family emergency, Aunt Faye has been hospitalized. While there waiting for word regarding Aunt Faye, Lyndsy takes Harlin for a tour of her home town, through her childhood memories. Letting him see her life before she moved to Texas. After several turn of events brings danger to the family, Brad Watson, a Police Officer that grew up with Lyndsy and Cyndi. Things really began to heat up, when he assigns himself to be Cyndi's personal protector, after she becomes hunted by the local Mafia. Will the Mafia be successful at finding her, or will Brad and the rest of the Police Force and Coast Guard be successful in Finding Them.
Summer is the time for road trips, beach days and bonding with friends. That’s exactly what Will has in store, but with friends like his, the experience will be anything but ordinary. Adam is back and he wants the life he walked away from. The others can do a lot but they’re going to need Will’s help this time. Join Will and the others as they fight to find their way back to themselves and each other in the sequel to “Knowing Them”. Lorna Stevenson is a psychology graduate from Dundee University, raised in Edinburgh, who finds happiness in her writing. In 2020 she published ‘Knowing Them’, and has now written its sequel. The characters in these books have travelled with Lorna to every cafe she writes in, every Scottish city she lives in and are a part of her. She is thrilled to share them with you again.
An entertaining companion to the Harry Potter books, written by J.K. Rowling. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is an extensive introduction to magical beasts familiar from the Harry Potter books and others we haven't yet met. Includes information about beasts which can be found in Australia and New Zealand and what they eat.
Alex Hills traveled Alaska by bush plane and snow machine, braving extreme weather and rough terrain to bring telephone service to small villages across the big state. Then he developed a new public radio station to serve the people of Alaska’s huge northwest region. In Finding Alaska’s Villages Alex tells the story of how he helped the state’s telecom pioneers bring about an innovation that would forever change rural Alaska. It took some innovative technical work — and some convincing of government officials and corporate executives — to make it happen. The innovation was the introduction of the small satellite earth stations that would eventually make needed telecommunication services — two-way medical communication, a phone in every house and business, and radio and live television programs — available in Alaska’s villages.
Detective Superintendent Roy Grace unearths a powerful criminal network in the sinister crime novel Find Them Dead, by award winning author Peter James. Ending his secondment to London’s Met Police, Roy Grace gets a tip-off about a drugs mastermind operating out of Brighton. On his first day back in his old job, he is called to a seemingly senseless murder. Gradually, Grace’s investigation draws him into the evil sphere of an utterly ruthless drug dealer on trial. A man prepared to order the death of anyone it takes to enable him to walk free from court. Sitting in the jury is Meg Magellan, whose daughter's life is being threatened by a stranger who tells her that if she ever wants to see her alive again, it is very simple. At the end of the trial, all she has to do is make sure the jury says just two words . . . Not guilty. Although the Roy Grace novels can be read in any order, Find Them Dead is the sixteenth title in the bestselling series. Discover more of the Brighton detective’s investigations with Left You Dead. Now a major ITV series, Grace, starring John Simm.
"A travel writer with a cult following."—The New York Times "There are very few westerners who could successfully cover so much territory in China, but Porter pulls it off. Finding Them Gone uniquely draws upon his parallel careers as a translator and a travel writer in ways that his previous books have not. A lifetime devoted to understanding Chinese culture and spirituality blossoms within its pages to create something truly rare."—The Los Angeles Book Review To pay homage to China's greatest poets, renowned translator Bill Porter—who is also known by his Chinese name "Red Pine"—traveled throughout China visiting dozens of poets' graves and performing idiosyncratic rituals that featured Kentucky bourbon and reading poems aloud to the spirits. Combining travelogue, translations, history, and personal stories, this intimate and fast-paced tour of modern China celebrates inspirational landscapes and presents translations of classical poems, many of which have never before been translated into English. Porter is a former radio commentator based in Hong Kong who specialized in travelogues. As such, he is an entertaining storyteller who is deeply knowledgeable about Chinese culture, both ancient and modern, who brings readers into the journey—from standing at the edge of the trash pit that used to be Tu Mu's grave to sitting in Han Shan's cave where the Buddhist hermit "Butterfly Woman" serves him tea. Illustrated with over one hundred photographs and two hundred poems, Finding Them Gone combines the love of travel with an irrepressible exuberance for poetry. As Porter writes: "The graves of the poets I'd been visiting were so different. Some were simple, some palatial, some had been plowed under by farmers, and others had been reduced to trash pits. Their poems, though, had survived... Poetry is transcendent. We carry it in our hearts and find it there when we have forgotten everything else." In praise of Bill Porter/Red Pine: "In the travel writing that has made him so popular in China, Porter's tone is not reverential but explanatory, and filled with luminous asides... His goal is to tell interested foreigners about revealing byways of Chinese culture."—New York Review of Books “Porter is an amiable and knowledgeable guide. The daily entries themselves fit squarely in the travelogue genre, seamlessly combining the details of his routes and encounters with the poets’ biographies, Chinese histories, and a generous helping of the poetry itself. Porter’s knowledge of the subject and his curation of the poems make this book well worth reading for travelers and poetry readers alike. It’s like a survey course in Chinese poetry—but one in which the readings are excellent, the professor doesn’t take himself too seriously, and the field trips involve sharing Stagg bourbon with the deceased.”—Publishers Weekly "Red Pine's out-of-the-mainstream work is canny and clearheaded, and it has immeasurably enhanced Zen/Taoist literature and practice."—Kyoto Journal "Bill Porter has been one of the most prolific translators of Chinese texts, while also developing into a travel writer with a cult following."—The New York Times "Red Pine's succinct and informative notes for each poem are core samples of the cultural, political, and literary history of China." —Asian Reporter Poets’ graves visited (partial list): Li Pai, Tu Fu, Wang Wei, Su Tung-p’o, Hsueh T’ao, Chia Tao, Wei Ying-wu, Shih-wu (Stonehouse), Han-shan (Cold Mountain). Bill Porter (a.k.a. "Red Pine") is widely recognized as one of the world's finest translators of Chinese religious and poetic texts. His best-selling books include Lao-tzu's Taoteching and The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain. He lives near Seattle.
A fun, dazzling exploration of the strange numbers that illuminate the ultimate nature of reality. For particularly brilliant theoretical physicists like James Clerk Maxwell, Paul Dirac, or Albert Einstein, the search for mathematical truths led to strange new understandings of the ultimate nature of reality. But what are these truths? What are the mysterious numbers that explain the universe? In Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them, the leading theoretical physicist and YouTube star Antonio Padilla takes us on an irreverent cosmic tour of nine of the most extraordinary numbers in physics, offering a startling picture of how the universe works. These strange numbers include Graham’s number, which is so large that if you thought about it in the wrong way, your head would collapse into a singularity; TREE(3), whose finite nature can never be definitively proved, because to do so would take so much time that the universe would experience a Poincaré Recurrence—resetting to precisely the state it currently holds, down to the arrangement of individual atoms; and 10^{-120}, measuring the desperately unlikely balance of energy needed to allow the universe to exist for more than just a moment, to extend beyond the size of a single atom—in other words, the mystery of our unexpected universe. Leading us down the rabbit hole to a deeper understanding of reality, Padilla explains how these unusual numbers are the key to understanding such mind-boggling phenomena as black holes, relativity, and the problem of the cosmological constant—that the two best and most rigorously tested ways of understanding the universe contradict one another. Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them is a combination of popular and cutting-edge science—and a lively, entertaining, and even funny exploration of the most fundamental truths about the universe.
