How many toes does a fish have? How many arms on a snail? How many oceans in a seashell? How many castles on a beach? If you can't see it on the surface, You'd better look underneath!
An offbeat penguin shows his peers the power of individuality in this humorous tale from the author of Pookins Gets Her Way. Tacky is an odd bird. He likes to do splashy cannonballs and greet his companions with a loud "What's happening?" In fact, he's something of an eccentric, which wouldn't be a problem if all the other penguins weren't such…conformists. When intimidating visitors invade their peaceful, nice, icy land, it'll take a lot more than a bunch of perfect penguins to save the day. Thank goodness Tacky's such an odd bird! “This book is must reading for any kid—or grown-up—who refuses to follow the pack.”—Publishers Weekly
The paleontologist and professor of anatomy who co-discovered Tiktaalik, the “fish with hands,” tells a “compelling scientific adventure story that will change forever how you understand what it means to be human” (Oliver Sacks). By examining fossils and DNA, he shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our heads are organized like long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genomes look and function like those of worms and bacteria. Your Inner Fish makes us look at ourselves and our world in an illuminating new light. This is science writing at its finest—enlightening, accessible and told with irresistible enthusiasm.
Everybody Out of the Pond At the Water's Edge will change the way you think about your place in the world. The awesome journey of life's transformation from the first microbes 4 billion years ago to Homo sapiens today is an epic that we are only now beginning to grasp. Magnificent and bizarre, it is the story of how we got here, what we left behind, and what we brought with us. We all know about evolution, but it still seems absurd that our ancestors were fish. Darwin's idea of natural selection was the key to solving generation-to-generation evolution -- microevolution -- but it could only point us toward a complete explanation, still to come, of the engines of macroevolution, the transformation of body shapes across millions of years. Now, drawing on the latest fossil discoveries and breakthrough scientific analysis, Carl Zimmer reveals how macroevolution works. Escorting us along the trail of discovery up to the current dramatic research in paleontology, ecology, genetics, and embryology, Zimmer shows how scientists today are unveiling the secrets of life that biologists struggled with two centuries ago. In this book, you will find a dazzling, brash literary talent and a rigorous scientific sensibility gracefully brought together. Carl Zimmer provides a comprehensive, lucid, and authoritative answer to the mystery of how nature actually made itself.
A simple yet heartwarming story that demonstrates how to overcome communication barriers and better understand those who identify with different cultures When a child meets a fish and says hello, the fish does not respond. The child is shocked. What a rude fish! But soon the child learns that it's not up to the fish to speak the child's language. And if the child wants to communicate, he'll have to take the time to learn how to speak Fish.
Jimmy Fallon, host of NBC's The Tonight Show and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Your Baby's First Word Will Be DADA and Everything Is Mama, returns with a book that teaches new babies the words for the various parts of their body--This is Baby. Let’s meet... Baby! From Baby’s HEAD to Baby’s TOES, there are so many parts of Baby you should know. But what’s the most important part of Baby? Jimmy Fallon, one of the most popular entertainers in the world gives you the facts.
A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year People speak different languages, and always have. The Ancient Greeks took no notice of anything unless it was said in Greek; the Romans made everyone speak Latin; and in India, people learned their neighbors' languages—as did many ordinary Europeans in times past (Christopher Columbus knew Italian, Portuguese, and Castilian Spanish as well as the classical languages). But today, we all use translation to cope with the diversity of languages. Without translation there would be no world news, not much of a reading list in any subject at college, no repair manuals for cars or planes; we wouldn't even be able to put together flat-pack furniture. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ranges across the whole of human experience, from foreign films to philosophy, to show why translation is at the heart of what we do and who we are. Among many other things, David Bellos asks: What's the difference between translating unprepared natural speech and translating Madame Bovary? How do you translate a joke? What's the difference between a native tongue and a learned one? Can you translate between any pair of languages, or only between some? What really goes on when world leaders speak at the UN? Can machines ever replace human translators, and if not, why? But the biggest question Bellos asks is this: How do we ever really know that we've understood what anybody else says—in our own language or in another? Surprising, witty, and written with great joie de vivre, this book is all about how we comprehend other people and shows us how, ultimately, translation is another name for the human condition.