"Science journalist David Whitehouse presents a mind-expanding tour of humanity's future in space over the next 50 years, up to the 100th anniversary of the moon landing"--

"Rickards [believes that] global financial markets are being artificially inflated and [suggests] what ... investors can do to protect their assets"--Publisher marketing.

Examines the emergence and causes of new diseases all over the world, describing a process called "spillover" where illness originates in wild animals before being passed to humans and discusses the potential for the next huge pandemic. The author illuminates the dynamics of Ebola, SARS, bird flu, Lyme disease, and other emerging threats and tells the story of AIDS and its origins as it has never before been told.

"A brilliantly written, deeply thoughtful, and even humorous book about a very dark topic. I hope civilization will last long enough for it to be published for all to enjoy and contemplate."-Paul R. Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb. Written with clarity, tenacity, humor, and warmth, A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World attempts to find tolerable ethical positions in the face of barely tolerable events-and the real possibility of an...

It is the business of science to predict. An exact science like astronomy can usually make very accurate predictions indeed. A chemist makes a precise prediction every time he writes a formula. The nuclear physicist advertised to the world, in the atomic bomb, how man can deal with entities so small that they are completely beyond the realm of sense perception, yet make predictions astonishing in their accuracy and significance. Economics is now reaching...