National Network for Equitable Library Service

Edison’s Concrete Piano highlights the careers of famous inventors — revealing the lesser-known and most fascinating facts about their careers, their wackier hobbies, and especially their big flops and great successes. Take Thomas Edison for example, who revolutionized our world with the light bulb, the phonograph, and the forerunner to the movie camera. He also created a concrete piano, a non-operational helicopter made from box kites and piano wire, and a machine to speak to the dead.

Linus Pauling, one of the most celebrated scientists of the twentieth century, once remarked that satisfying curiosity is one of the greatest sources of pleasure in life. Dr. Joe and What You Didn’t Know to act as both the source and satiation of such curiosity, providing pleasure through a series of 99 chemistry-related questions and answers designed to both inform and entertain. Ranging from the esoteric to the everyday, Dr. Joe Schwarcz tackles topics from Beethoven’s connection to plumbing to why rotten eggs smell like rotten eggs.

Could we create a real-life superhero by changing human biology itself?

We are complacent. We bask in the idea that Canada holds 20% of the world's fresh water--water crises face other countries, but not ours. We could not be more wrong. In Boiling Point, bestselling author and activist Maude Barlow lays bare the issues facing Canada's water reserves, including long-outdated water laws, unmapped and unprotected groundwater reserves, agricultural pollution, industrial-waste dumping, boil-water advisories, and the effects of deforestation and climate change.

A captivating memoir set during the pinnacle of West Coast fishing

How does our environment impact our health, and what can we do about it? 12,000 Canaries Can't Be Wrong is a culmination of Dr. Molot's 30 years of experience seeing more than 12,000 patients with environmentally linked illnesses. He explains how the environment contributes to the development and progression of many common conditions and illnesses, including chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and other pain disorders, chemical sensitivity, irritable bowel syndrome, allergies and asthma, diabetes, autistic spectrum disorder, and even obesity. Dr.

In 1939, Richard Feynman, a graduate of MIT, arrived in John Wheeler's Princeton office to report for duty as his teaching assistant. The soft-spoken Wheeler was a raging nonconformist full of wild ideas about the universe. The boisterous Feynman was a cautious physicist who believed only what could be tested. Yet a lifelong friendship and enormously productive collaboration was born that led to a complete rethinking of the nature of time and reality.

In these Messenger Lectures delivered at Cornell University, Richard Feynman offers an overview of selected physical laws and gathers their common features into one broad principle of invariance.

A collection of the best short works of Richard P. Feynman, from interviews and speeches to lectures and printed articles.

Mapping the Heavens provides a tour of the "greatest hits" of cosmological discoveries--the ideas that reshaped our universe over the past century. Priyamvada Natarajan, our guide, explains for a wide audience the science behind these essential ideas.