Beginning with a "boot camp" for wannabe pickup artists.where men pay thousands of dollars for three days of classroom seminars on how to get women into bed.Flam's quest for a deeper understanding of men takes her back through the evolutionary history of the human male. By placing the human male in the context of the natural world, Flam highlights some intriguing resemblances among males of all species, but also the unique challenges that men face when courting women.whether for a lifelong partnership or a onenight stand.

Pretty much everyone feels like an idiot when confronted with string theory — and that includes physicists. Author George Musser writes: "String theory is the leading, if controversial, candidate for a fully unified theory of physics. Despite what the title says, this book surveys not only this one theory but a broad range of ideas for a unified theory, picks a way through the minefield of claims and counterclaims for them, describes what such a theory would mean not just for physics but for the wider world, and explains how it might be tested experimentally."

Are there rules that all living things must obey? Is death inevitable? If we rewound the tape of life and let evolution run a second time, would it end up like the original? To explore these questions, Zimmer says he wrote "an (un)natural history of E. coli." Scientists have been earning Nobel Prizes for decades by poking and prodding this microbe, and their work is coalescing into an extraordinary portrait of a living thing. Today, with engineered E. coli spewing out everything from insulin to jet fuel, the microbe is redefining the boundaries of life itself.

NASA astrobiologist Christopher McKay has searched the earth's most extreme environments in his quest to understand what factors are necessary to sustain life. Author Pamela Turner offers readers an inside look at McKay's research, explaining his findings and his hopes for future exploration both on Earth and beyond. Behind-the-scenes photos capture McKay, his expeditions, and the amazing microbes that survive against all odds.