Photographs and text explore such inventions as the wheel, gears, levers, clocks, telephones, and rocket engines.

Explores the intricate relationship between seeds and the plants which they produce.

Elon Musk, the entrepreneur and innovator behind SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity, sold one of his internet companies, PayPal, for $1.5 billion. Ashlee Vance captures the full spectacle and arc of the genius's life and work, from his tumultuous upbringing in South Africa and flight to the United States to his dramatic technical innovations and entrepreneurial pursuits. Vance uses Musk's story to explore one of the pressing questions of our age: can the...

American inventor George Ferris defied gravity and seemingly impossible odds to invent the world’s most iconic amusement park attraction, the Ferris wheel.

Bix is 40, with four kids, restless, desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or "externalizing" memory. It's 2010. Within a decade, Bix's new technology, "Own Your Unconscious" -- that allows you access to every memory you've ever had, and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others -- has seduced multitudes. But not everyone....

This immensely engaging tale relates how an enterprising teenager in Malawi builds a windmill from scraps he finds around his village and brings electricity, and a future, to his family.

Explains bioluminescence and profiles some of the bioluminescent animals and living things around the world, from the firefly and anglerfish to foxfire mushrooms and the vampire squid.

"The revered New York Times bestselling author traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement--precision--in a superb history that is both an homage and a warning for our future. The rise of manufacturing could not have happened without an attention to precision. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England, standards of measurement were...

Ada Twist is a very curious girl who shows perseverance by asking questions and performing experiments to find things out and understand the world.

"This is a book about how materials and technology have evolved us as we have evolved them but it is also much, much more. It is a book written to inspire and the last paragraphs of the book sum it up beautifully. "Discussions about technology must be inclusive, because technology is neither just for the few who are learned, nor is it just for men who are of European descent. Everyone makes something, from a sandwich to a solar cell, so examinations...