Birds, spiders, and other insects all like to eat caterpillars. But some kinds of caterpillars face a scarier threat: predators that take control of them! Readers learn all about parasites, specifically those that make zombies out of their caterpillar prey. Full-color photographs show these parasites in action, from the gross emergence of wasp larvae to the disgusting liquefaction of dead caterpillars by a nasty virus. Fascinating fact boxes engage readers with a host of details fit for a horror movie—even though they could happen right in your backyard!

Birds, spiders, and other insects all like to eat caterpillars. But some kinds of caterpillars face a scarier threat: predators that take control of them! Readers learn all about parasites, specifically those that make zombies out of their caterpillar prey. Full-color photographs show these parasites in action, from the gross emergence of wasp larvae to the disgusting liquefaction of dead caterpillars by a nasty virus. Fascinating fact boxes engage readers with a host of details fit for a horror movie—even though they could happen right in your backyard!

Audisee® eBooks with Audio combine professional narration and sentence highlighting to engage reluctant readers! Are zombies real? As far as we know, dead people do not come back to life and start walking around, looking for trouble. But there are things that can take over the bodies and brains of innocent creatures, turning them into senseless slaves. Meet nature's zombie makers—including a fly-enslaving fungus, a suicide worm, and a cockroach-taming wasp—and their victims.

A brain-bending exploration of real-life zombies and mind controllers, and what they reveal to us about nature—and ourselves Zombieism isn’t just the stuff of movies and TV shows like The Walking Dead. It’s real, and it’s happening in the world around us, from wasps and worms to dogs and moose—and even humans. In Plight of the Living Dead, science journalist Matt Simon documents his journey through the bizarre evolutionary history of mind control. Along the way, he visits a lab where scientists infect ants with zombifying fungi, joins the search for kamikaze crickets in the hills of New Mexico, and travels to Israel to meet the wasp that stings cockroaches in the brain before leading them to their doom. Nothing Hollywood dreams up can match the brilliant, horrific zombies that natural selection has produced time and time again. Plight of the Living Dead is a surreal dive into a world that would be totally unbelievable if very smart scientists didn’t happen to be proving it’s real, and most troublingly—or maybe intriguingly—of all: how even we humans are affected. “Fantastic . . . You'll be thinking about this book long after you're done reading it.” —Kelly Weinersmith, New York Times bestselling coauthor of Soonish

Funky, fascinating...and freaky! These are just some of the words that describe the captivating and sometimes strange world of scientific discovery. Worms with two heads, fruit that conducts electricity, and miniature brains that grow in petri dishes are a few of the totally weird topics in this volume, which demonstrates to readers just how bizarre science can be. While examining scientific peculiarities, readers will come to understand more about the theories and principles behind them. Engaging images, fact boxes, and sidebars reinforce the concepts, which are closely connected to the elementary science curriculum.

RSPB The Nature Tracker's Handbook is a complete guide to how to interpret the signs that animals leave behind. The art of nature tracking is very much like learning to read, but instead of reading words the tracker reads traces. Every animal leaves different traces as it goes about its everyday business. If you learn to read the signs left by footprints, leftover food, droppings and scrapes in the earth, you will soon be able to tell the story of an animal's life, packed with fascinating details and hidden meanings. The RSPB Nature Tracker's Handbook explains with extensive photography and detailed diagrams how to find and interpret the evidence that animals leave behind – from a pile of mangled feathers to a delicately nibbled mushroom. Nick Baker also demonstrates useful tracker activities, such as how to mount a discarded nymph skin and how to dissect an owl's pellet to reveal its last meal. There's a nature detective in all of us, so get out there and get tracking.

Calling gross-out artists everywhere: Learn how to draw believable boogers…in 3-D! This creative kit takes gross-out art to the next dimension! Readers will learn to create a variety of disgusting 3-D doodles with the help of the included handbook and necessary supplies: two colored pencils in blue and red, a pair of 3-D glasses for viewing, and a special compass that makes doodles pop and jump right off the page. The book gives a history of doodling, explains how to use the tools in the kit, and even features interactive gross-out pictures. Line drawings add extra depth to the doodles, and the background grids create a really amazing floating effect—even when a regular black pen is used! Learn to draw vomit, boogers (dry and wet), farts, dog poop, skin lesions, exploding zits, eyeballs, severed limbs, zombies devouring brains, and so much more!

Philosophy of mind is one of the core disciplines in philosophy. The questions that it deals with are profound, vexed and intriguing. This volume of 15 new cutting-edge essays gives young researchers a chance to stir up new ideas. The topics covered include the nature of consciousness, cognition, and action.

Join science expert Dr Ben Martynoga and illustrator extraordinaire Moose Allain on a fascinating, sometimes funny, and occasionally scary journey through the world of viruses.Explore the science behind viruses and the COVID-19 pandemic in a fascinating story of hijacked human cells and our own internal emergency services.Along the way, you'll learn what viruses are, how they work, and how we can overcome - or at least learn to live alongside - those that do us harm.