Animal Science

From beloved, award-winning poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil comes a debut work of nonfiction - a collection of essays about the natural world, and the way its inhabitants can teach, support, and inspire us.

They have always lived by the code—but only change can keep the peace. A new age is dawning on the warrior Clans. Now a new generation of warriors rises—one wrestling with the legacy of his great ancestor Firestar, one seeking to protect her troubled Clan, and one yearning to prove herself as a medicine cat—as leaders from all five Clans agree that the Warrior Code must be reformed.

Nearly a moon has passed since Alderpaw returned from his journey to SkyClan’s gorge, where he found the territory taken over by rogues. Now the same vicious cats that drove out SkyClan have traced Alderpaw’s path back to the lake… and ShadowClan may be the next to fall.

More than half a century ago, the naturalist Farley Mowat accepted an assignment to investigate why wolves were killing Arctic caribou. Mowat’s account of the summer he lived in the frozen tundra alone – studying the wolf population and developing a deep affection for these wild creatures (who were no threat to caribou or man) – is today celebrated as a classic of nature writing, at once a tale of remarkable adventure and an indelible record of the myths and magic of wolves.

His career as a naturalist and broadcaster has spanned nearly five decades and there are very few places on the globe that he has not visited. In this volume of memoirs David tells stories of the people and animals he has met and the places that he has visited. Over the last 25 years he has established himself as the world's leading Natural History programme maker with several landmark BBC series.

When Winter learns she can cast magic and only suffer a hangover, she squanders her power at her part-time gig, using it for illusions at children’s parties. She's the only one in the world with this gift, and she’s keeping it a secret. Or so she thought. She’s visited by a strange band of witches with an ultimatum: join with them and leave or suffer a worse fate at the hands of the government, who use those with gifts like Winter’s to crash jets and topple regimes across the globe. They’re forcing young witches into service. And Winter might be conscripted into a battle she wants...

To better understand the inner workings of our bodies and to trace the origins of many of today's most common diseases, we have to turn to unexpected sources: worms, flies, and even fish.

Abandoned in a library book-drop slot in the dead of winter, the small kitten who came to be known as Dewey Readmore Books miraculously endured the coldest night of the year. When librarian Vicki Myron found him in the morning, she wrapped him in her arms, gave him his first bath, and then introduced him to his new home: the library. Dewey charmed Spencer, Iowa’s library-goers, young and old, with his ability to know just which visitors needed a friend.

Barking Up the Right Tree offers proof that aversive punishment seldom works to eliminate undesirable behavior or to get the dog back on track. Dunbar presents numerous nonaversive yet highly effective solutions for misbehavior and noncompliance—simply by using the words you teach, and without even raising your voice.

Bearded dragons don’t breathe fire, but they do have spikes to scare away predators! Listeners will learn all about this real-life dragon that lives only in Australia.

Hannah Shaw, better known as Kitten Lady, has dedicated her life to saving the tiniest felines, but one doesn't have to be a professional kitten rescuer to change - and save - lives. In Tiny but Mighty, Hannah not only outlines the dangers newborn kittens face and how she combats them, but how you can help every step of the way, from fighting feline overpopulation on the streets to fostering unweaned kittens, from combating illness to combating compassion fatigue, from finding a vet to finding the purrfect forever home.

Dip below the ocean’s surface and you are soon confronted by forms of life that could not seem more foreign to our own: sea sponges, soft corals, and serpulid worms, whose rooted bodies, intricate geometry, and flower-like appendages are more reminiscent of plant life or even architecture than anything recognizably animal. Yet these creatures are our cousins. As fellow members of the animal kingdom — the Metazoa— they can teach us much about the evolutionary origins of not only our bodies, but also our minds.

Learn how fossils teach us about dinosaurs.

“How we interact with animals has preoccupied philosophers, poets, and naturalists for ages,” writes Susan Orlean. Since the age of six, when Orlean wrote and illustrated a book called Herbert the Near-Sighted Pigeon, she’s been drawn to stories about how we live with animals, and how they abide by us. Now, in On Animals, she examines animal-human relationships through the compelling tales she has written over the course of her celebrated career.

For the first time, all five warrior Clans have settled into their true homes in the territory around the lake. But when a shockingly harsh leaf-bare season descends on the forest, a new darkness begins to spread - a shadow that threatens a beloved Clan leader, the cats’ connection with their ancestors in StarClan, and the very warrior code by which they live.

The warrior code now allows a cat to formally change Clans, but ShadowClan’s newest arrival feels increasingly unwelcome—and though ShadowClan warrior Sunbeam thinks every cat deserves a chance, one of the loudest voices of opposition is her own mother. Meanwhile medicine cat apprentice Frostpaw scrambles to help RiverClan stay afloat under the watchful eye of a second Tigerstar, and the shadow of growing conflict looms over them all…

Learn about the science and history of volcanoes with iMindsJNR audio-learning series for younger minds. A volcano is an opening in the earth's surface through which molten rock, gases and debris can escape. The mound commonly associated with volcanoes is what remains after eruptions have collected and hardened around this opening.Volcanoes exist in the mythology of numerous countries, such as Iceland and Japan. Many past cultures, such as the Greeks and the Romans, also had volcano mythology.

Old Natalia, during the declining years of Whitson Mariner and the rise of tyrannical dragons and their master, Namoz Dragonking. Rabbitkind faces extinction, and Prince Lander must follow his aging father to the last desperate edge of hope. A possible future is glimpsed dimly through a veil of darkness and death. This will not be a safe ending. Blood calls. Oathbreakers attack. Allies fracture. Legends end.

In Higher Animals, New Yorker science writer Michael Specter explores how MRNA vaccines have transformed the scientific landscape and helped spark a biotechnology revolution. Biology is information, and increasingly, that means digital information. We need to think of biology the way we think about computer code, only instead of bits and bytes, we use the genetic letters: ACGT. The widely-used mRNA COVID vaccines offer the most immediate example of this groundbreaking moment in medical and scientific history.

New territory brings new troubles for the fierce cats of the warrior Clans, and former allies are acting strangely hostile. As divisions between the Clans grow deeper, Firestar’s daughters face troubling decisions. The choices they make now could affect ThunderClan for generations to come...and with an unexpected enemy preparing to attack, their courage and strength will be needed more than ever if the Clan is to survive.