Beaky still can't tell a lie and life isn't getting any easier. When he somehow manages to land a lead part in the school play, Romeo and Juliet ... but with Aliens, Beaky is put in the spotlight. Playing Romeo to Evie's Juliet makes his crush on her even harder to disguise. And now Beaky's old lying ways are coming back to haunt him - his dog Destructo has been chosen to appear on TV's Most Talented Petsbecause he can ride a bike. Only problem is ... he can't. As everything starts to unravel and Madame Shirley, the culprit for Beaky's truth-telling condition, is nowhere to be found, Beaky is faced with some difficult decisions. Maybe just telling the truth about a few things wouldn't be so bad... Cue chaos, calamity and dogs that can't ride bikes in this hilarious series for fans of WIMPY KID and TOM GATES.

“A breath of intellectual fresh air . . . [an] amusing look at how to dispel endemic pseudoscience and conspiracy theories through rational thinking.” —Publishers Weekly Aliens. Ley lines. Water dowsing. Conspiracies and myths captivate imaginations and promise mystery and magic. Whether it’s arguing about the moon landing hoax or a Frisbee-like Earth drifting through space, when held up to science and critical thinking, these ideas fall flat. In Weird Earth: Debunking Strange Ideas About Our Planet, Donald R. Prothero demystifies these conspiracies and offers answers to some of humanity’s most outlandish questions. Applying his extensive scientific knowledge, Prothero corrects misinformation that con artists and quacks use to hoodwink others about geology—hollow earth, expanding earth, and bizarre earthquakes—and mystical and paranormal happenings—healing crystals, alien landings, and the gates of hell. By deconstructing wild claims such as prophesies of imminent natural disasters, Prothero provides a way for everyone to recognize dubious assertions. Prothero answers these claims with facts, offering historical and scientific context in a light-hearted manner that is accessible to everyone, no matter their background. With a careful layering of evidence in geology, archaeology, and biblical and historical records, Prothero’s Weird Earth examines each conspiracy and myth and leaves no question unanswered. Weird Earth is about the facts and the people who don’t believe them. Don Prothero describes the process of science—and the process of not accepting it. If you’re wondering if humans walked on the Moon, if you’ve wondered where the lost City of Atlantis went, or if you’re wondering what your cat will do before an earthquake, check out Weird Earth.” —Bill Nye

Fact-hungry kids will love poring over these warped world maps full of unique and weird data. See how many lightning strikes hit parts of our planet, the wind patterns of the whole world, and even how the world map would look if global warming melted the ice caps! Covering everything from Pangea to the world's weirdest natural wonders, this is Earth in all its strange glory. What's Weird on Earth is an entirely new atlas adventure, with maps of UFO sightings, popular foods, every country resized according to population density, and their popularity as holiday destinations. Kids can spot the strangest features on every corner of Earth; from ancient patterns carved in the desert sand to the 29,000 bath toys that sailed the world's ocean currents after a shipwreck. Travel back in time to discover maps from previous centuries or turn the globe upside down - literally. Planet Earth will never seem the same again!

A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 A Bloomberg Best Non-Fiction Book of 2020 A Behavioral Scientist Notable Book of 2020 A Human Behavior & Evolution Society Must-Read Popular Evolution Book of 2020 A bold, epic account of how the co-evolution of psychology and culture created the peculiar Western mind that has profoundly shaped the modern world. Perhaps you are WEIRD: raised in a society that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. If so, you’re rather psychologically peculiar. Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. They focus on themselves—their attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations—over their relationships and social roles. How did WEIRD populations become so psychologically distinct? What role did these psychological differences play in the industrial revolution and the global expansion of Europe during the last few centuries? In The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich draws on cutting-edge research in anthropology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology to explore these questions and more. He illuminates the origins and evolution of family structures, marriage, and religion, and the profound impact these cultural transformations had on human psychology. Mapping these shifts through ancient history and late antiquity, Henrich reveals that the most fundamental institutions of kinship and marriage changed dramatically under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church. It was these changes that gave rise to the WEIRD psychology that would coevolve with impersonal markets, occupational specialization, and free competition—laying the foundation for the modern world. Provocative and engaging in both its broad scope and its surprising details, The WEIRDest People in the World explores how culture, institutions, and psychology shape one another, and explains what this means for both our most personal sense of who we are as individuals and also the large-scale social, political, and economic forces that drive human history. Includes black-and-white illustrations.

Captain Maxwell Davis and his entire unit scrambled to engage alien ships over Iowa. The aliens snatched him out of his destroyed jet before they continued on their interplanetary hot pursuit. Then they informed Max that Earth was too far outside regular shipping lanes to return him to his planet. So Max ends up in an alien spaceport looking for work. To afford a ticket home he can either spend three hundred years working with linguists to improve the computer's questionable ability to translate English or he can take a job as a nanny for an unpopular alien. That way he can afford the ticket in four years. The problem is that the computer may have mistranslated the word "nanny" and there might be a reason an alien is willing to pay such a high fee.

WATCH THE ANIMATED SERIES AUGUST 9 ON APPLE TV+ Straight from the mind of New York Times bestselling author Nathan W. Pyle, Strange Planet is an adorable and profound universe in pink, blue, green, and purple, based on the phenomenally popular Instagram of the same name! Strange Planet covers a full life cycle of the planet’s inhabitants, including milestones such as: The Emergence Day Being Gains a Sibling The Being Family Attains a Beast The Formal Education of a Being Celebration of Special Days Being Begins a Vocation The Beings at Home Health Status of a Being The Hobbies of a Being The Extended Family of the Being The Being Reflects on Life While Watching the Planet Rotate With dozens of never-before-seen illustrations in addition to old favorites, this fixed-format e-book offers a sweet and hilarious look at a distant world not all that unlike our own. I feel more attractive. Honestly, you are. It’s the star damage. I CRAVE STAR DAMAGE.

This English translation of Gebser’s major work, Ursprung und Gegenwart (Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlag, 1966), offers certain fundamental insights which should be beneficial to any sensitive scientist and makes it available to the English-speaking world for the recognition it deserves. “The path which led Gebser to his new and universal perception of the world is, briefly, as follows. In the wake of materialism and social change, man had been described in the early years of our century as the “dead end” of nature. Freud had redefined culture as illness—a result of drive sublimation; Klages had called the spirit (and he was surely speaking of the hypertrophied intellect) the “adversary of the soul,” propounding a return to a life like that of the Pelasgi, the aboriginal inhabitants of Greece; and Spengler had declared the “Demise of the West” during the years following World War I. The consequences of such pessimism continued to proliferate long after its foundations had been superseded. It was with these foundations—the natural sciences—that Gebser began. As early as Planck it was known that matter was not at all what materialists had believed it to be, and since 1943 Gebser has repeatedly emphasized that the so-called crisis of Western culture was in fact an essential restructuration.… Gebser has noted two results that are of particular significance: first, the abandonment of materialistic determinism, of a one-sided mechanistic-causal mode of thought; and second, a manifest “urgency of attempts to discover a universal way of observing things, and to overcome the inner division of contemporary man who, as a result of his one-sided rational orientation, thinks only in dualisms.” Against this background of recent discoveries and conclusions in the natural sciences Gebser discerned the outlines of a potential human universality. He also sensed the necessity to go beyond the confines of this first treatise so as to include the humanities (such as political economics and sociology) as well as the arts in a discussion along similar lines. This was the point of departure of The Ever-Present Origin. From In memoriam Jean Gebser by Jean Keckeis

How did Dana Scully become a skeptic? The X-Files Origins has the answers in this young adult, science-fiction origin story by New York Times-bestselling author Jonathan Maberry. In the spring of 1979, fifteen-year-old Dana Scully has bigger problems than being the new girl in school. Dana has always had dreams. Sometimes they’ve even come true. Until now, she tried to write this off as coincidence. But ever since her father’s military career moved the family across the country to Craiger, Maryland, the dreams have been more like visions. Vivid, disturbing, and haunted by a shadowy figure who may be an angel . . . or the devil. When a classmate who recently died in a car accident appears before Dana, her wounds look anything but accidental. Compelled by a force she can’t name, Dana uncovers even more suspicious deaths—and must face the dangerous knowledge that evil is real. But when a betrayal of faith makes her question everything, she begins to put her faith in being a skeptic. An Imprint Book

Mike Weatherford resurrects the mystique of Vegas's Golden Age--the '60s of history and legend--bringing the hipster legacy to new Vegasphiles. Meet '50s and '60s lounge greats the Treniers, the Mary Kaye Trio, and Louis Prima and Keely Smith; comedy legends Joe E. Lewis, Shecky Greene, and Don Rickles; and Vegas babes Vampira, Lili St. Cyr, Ann-Margret, and Tempest Storm. Weatherford also covers nearly every offbeat movie ever made about Las Vegas, as well as Elvis and Frank's impact on the town. This gorgeous entertainment retrospective is packed with showroom esoterica, descriptions of near-forgotten corners of Vegas cult musicology, odd trivia, and unsung heroes of a bygone era. Cult Vegas chronicles the major moments--the camp, the extreme, the awful--in short, the magic of Las Vegas' half-century run as an entertainment mecca.