Stars are dying. John Bandicut and his companions are summoned to a star-cloud called Starmaker, known to humans as the Orion Nebula, to discover what force threatens newborn stars-and possibly every world within a thousand light-years. Their journey takes them not just into the perils of a stellar nursery, but into confrontation with the Mindaru, a billion-year-old AI and adversary of life as they know it. The task is daunting. But with the aid...

Humankind has grappled for millennia with the fundamental questions of the origin and end of the universe-it was a focus of ancient religions and myths and of the inquiries of Aristotle, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton. Today we are on the verge of discoveries that should soon reveal the deepest secrets of the universe. Alpha and Omega is a dispatch from the front lines of the cosmological revolution that is being waged at observatories and...

Neil deGrasse Tyson has a talent for guiding audiences through the mysteries of outer space with stunning clarity and almost childlike enthusiasm. Here, Tyson compiles his favorite essays that he wrote for Natural History magazine across a myriad of cosmic topics, from astral life at the frontiers of astrobiology to the movie industry's feeble efforts to get its night skies right. Tyson introduces us to the physics of black holes by explaining the...

"After a few billion years of bearing witness to life on Earth, of watching one hundred billion humans go about their day-to-day lives, of feeling unbelievably lonely, and of hearing its own story told by others, the Milky Way would like a chance to speak for itself. All one hundred billion stars and fifty undecillion tons of gas of it. It all began some thirteen billion years ago, when clouds of gas scattered through the universe's primordial plasma...

"The first definitive collection of Igbo legends and traditions for kids, this book explores the mythological origins of the Igbo people, the ancient Nri Kingdom, and Igbo cosmology before delving into the Alusi, or the core Igbo deities. Following this introduction to the pantheon of gods and goddesses, a collection of the most popular Igbo myths, folktales, and legends will immerse kids in exciting stories of tricksters, shapeshifters, and heroes...

"A delightful intellectual feast from the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and The Order of Time One of the world's most prominent physicists and fearless free spirit, Carlo Rovelli is also a masterful storyteller. His bestselling books have introduced millions of readers to the wonders of modern physics and his singular perspective on the cosmos. This new collection of essays reveals a curious intellect always on the move. Rovelli...

There is more to the universe than meets the eye--a lot more. In recent years, scientists have discovered that 95 percent of the contents of the cosmos are invisible to our current methods of direct detection. Yet something is holding galaxies and galaxy clusters together, and something else is causing space to fly apart. Scientists call these invisible components dark matter and dark energy: "dark" because these phenomena do not emit light. Dark...

Lectures by Dr. David Christian, Professor of History at San Diego State University. Surveys the past at all possible scales, from conventional history, to the much larger scales of biology and geology, to the universal scales of cosmology.