Rebecca Stefoff

Skyscrapers stretch high into a city's skyline, providing places to work and live for millions of people. Discover the engineering behind skyscrapers.

Roads allow people and goods to travel across land quickly and safely. Discover the engineering behind roads.

Animals communicate through a myriad of ways including body language and pheromones. This thoughtful book surrounding ethology and how animals communicate through smell, taste, sight, sound, and feel reveals the secrets and science behind animals. Elephants will show affection with each other by entwining their trunks. Kangaroos and rabbits thump their hind legs to warn others of impending danger. Explanative text by award-winning author Rebecca Stefoff...

Ethology is the scientific study of animal behavior. It was widely thought that animal play, mostly in mammals, was part of Darwinian natural selection and somehow fit into survival of the fittest. However, animal researchers believe that animals play out of pure joy, rather than aiding in their survival. This jovial book about animal play, tells the secrets of, and the science behind, clever baboons that know which cars to break into for snacks,...

The Erie Canal was mocked as a big ditch when it was started, but by the time it was completed in 1825, it was called an engineering marvel. Readers learn how engineers overcame a rise in elevation of 568 feet between the Hudson River and Lake Erie with locks and aqueducts to create a waterway that changed America.

Can animals feel empathy or have a consciousness? Through the extensive work from ethologists like Charles Darwin and Jane Goodall, it is widely thought that some animals do feel empathy. Research is ongoing, however, dogs, birds, elephants, rodents, and dolphins are thought to all have a moral compass. In what ways do these animal species show empathy or feeling? Through explanative based text by award-winning author Rebecca Stefoff, your readers...

It can be hard to imagine a time when it was generally believed that the shape of our earth was a flat plane or disk. This book exposes the bizarre and sometimes-hilarious history of science, explores pseudo-scientific theories from the past, and the scientific progress made since then through use of the scientific method. Through the scientific method, anecdotes, historic facts, and the scientific theories themselves, it tells the story of why people...

We say that the sun "rises" in the morning and "sets" at night, but is it really moving? Readers will learn about the long, sometimes dangerous struggle to discover whether the sun revolves around Earth, or Earth around the sun, and find out what scientists now know about our planet's place in the universe.

This book on the four elements and the periodic table shows the scientific method at work, proves, and disproves the subjects at hand. It explores a branch of modern science or a major scientific milestone, comparing and contrasting it with an older idea that has been proved wrong or fails to meet the strict and studied standards of science. A robust index, glossary, science content, and bibliography accompanies the descriptive and concise text while...

Alchemy is an idea based on superstition and philosophical global traditions spanning hundreds of years. Alchemists made medicines and pharmaceuticals from the earth's materials and purified objects through philosophy, magic, and spirituality. Chemistry is based on the material principles of mixed bodies, and spans all natural or physical sciences in its practices. This book on alchemy and chemistry shows the scientific method at work, proves, and...