Arriving in New Zealand in 1866 to seek his fortune in the goldfields, Walter Moody finds himself drawn into a series of unsolved crimes and complex mysteries.

In 1849, twelve-year-old California Morning Whipple, who renames herself Lucy, is distraught when her mother moves the family from Massachusetts to a rough California mining town.

The atom. The Big Bang. DNA. Natural selection. All are ideas that have revolutionized science-and all were dismissed out of hand when they first appeared. The surprises haven't stopped in recent years, and in At the Edge of Uncertainty, bestselling author Michael Brooks investigates the new wave of radical insights that are shaping the future of scientific discovery. Brooks takes us to the extreme frontiers of what we understand about the world....

"How many items can you think of that are made of plastic? Probably quite a few! It might be hard to imagine a world without plastic, but until about 100 years ago, plastic as we know it today didn't exist! The word "plastic" wasn't even used until the 1920s! In this volume, readers learn how many types of plastic were invented accidentally by scientists who were trying to make something else. In accessible, fun content, it describes how these discoveries...

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; all the members of the second expedition committed suicide; the third expedition died in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another; the members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within months...

One hundred years after her family was transformed by greed during the Klondike Gold Rush, Anna Bush grapples with moral conflict and questions of justice as she travels to the Klondike to bequeath her would-be inheritance to the First Nations peoples who paid the price for its creation.

The New York Times bestselling author of 1421 offers another stunning reappraisal of history, presenting compelling new evidence that traces the roots of the European Renaissance to Chinese exploration in the fifteenth century The brilliance of the Renaissance laid the foundation of the modern world. Textbooks tell us that it came about as a result of a rediscovery of the ideas and ideals of classical Greece and Rome. But now bestselling historian...

When news of the discovery of gold in Canada's Yukon Territory in 1897 reaches fifteen-year-old Jason, he embarks on a 10,000-mile journey to strike it rich.

One of the single greatest leaps forward in human healthcare happened because of an accident in a laboratory. This serendipitous event was the result of a summer vacation in Scotland and an unattended experiment. Dr. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, one of the first antibiotics, in 1928 when he noticed that mold had gotten into a petri dish and it had prevented bacteria from growing. This book explores Fleming's accidental discovery, the science...