Did you know that:

- Every atom in your body has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to being you?

- If you are an average-sized kid, you have enough potential energy inside you to explode with the force of several hydrogen bombs?

And--What happened to dinosaurs? How big is the universe? Why are oceans salty? Is a meteor going to hit us?

Tackling everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bill Bryson's inimitable...

In the Middle Ages, people believed that insects were evil, born from mud in a process called spontaneous generation. Maria Merian was only a child, but she disagreed. She watched carefully as caterpillars spun themselves cocoons, which opened to reveal summer birds, or butterflies and moths. Maria studied the whole life cycle of the summer birds, and documented what she learned in vibrant paintings.

This is the story of one young girl who took the time to observe and learn, and in so doing disproved a theory that went all the way back to ancient Greece.

For centuries, people have been poisoning one another--changing personal lives and the course of empires alike.

From spurned spouses and rivals, to condemned prisoners like Socrates, to endangered emperors like Alexander the Great, to modern-day leaders like Joseph Stalin and Yasser Arafat, poison has played a starring role in the demise of countless individuals. And those are just the deliberate poisonings....

For centuries, people have been poisoning one another--changing personal lives and the course of empires alike.

From spurned spouses and rivals, to condemned prisoners like Socrates, to endangered emperors like Alexander the Great, to modern-day leaders like Joseph Stalin and Yasser Arafat, poison has played a starring role in the demise of countless individuals. And those are just the deliberate poisonings....

In the 1500s and 1600s, men like Nicolaus Copernicus, Johanned Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton began to ask questions. What if Earth actually orbited the sun, instead of the other way around? What if the universe was much bigger than anyone imagined?

These scientists risked...

Red oozes from the patient's gums. He has a rushing headache and the whites of his eyes look like lemons. He will likely die within days.

Here is the true story of how four Americans and one Cuban tracked down a killer, one of the world's most vicious plagues: yellow fever. Set in fever-stricken Cuba, this book allows the reader to feel the heavy air, smell the stench of disease, hears the whine of mosquitoes biting human volunteers during the surreal experiments. Exploring themes of courage, cooperation, and the ethics of human experimentation, this gripping account is ultimately a...

Bruce Koscielniak, in this Common Core text exemplar, tells the intriguing story of the many years spent tinkering and inventing to perfect the art of telling time. When time itself was undefined, no one knew the difference between a minute, an hour, and a day. Then people started creating tools to measure time. First they used the sun, the moon, and the water, but soon after people began using their knowledge about the natural world to build clocks and to create calendars made up of months and years. Centuries later, we...