Daily Planet

Daily Planet: The Ultimate Book of Everyday Science captures everything that has made the enormously popular TV show Daily Planet great for the past 15 years: unusual, innovative people; technologies and inventions that you couldn't have imagined before you saw them; the extravagance of nature; the incomprehensibility of the universe; and even glimpses of the future.

Full-colour throughout, the book combines vivid images with the actual thoughts and words of scientists, adventurers, and inventors. The diversity of subjects is striking, but while some stories stand alone, most have subplots and spinoffs, and the reader is carried along from one to the other, sometimes in totally unpredictable ways. For instance, Jay Ingram seamlessly connects the dots between climate change, revealed mummies, ancient Egypt, and homebuilt pyramids, both stationary and mobile!

The book moves from the serious to the satirical, from planetary crises to Mars missions, from bartending robots to dolphins with prosthetic tails. In what other single volume could you read about robot female bower birds driving (real) males crazy or a one-man reconstruction of Stonehenge?

Daily Planet: The Ultimate Book of Everyday Science is all about ingenuity and the desire to know.