Draw your own adventure! These books take great subjects for boys and combine them into short, bonkers, and funny stories that are incredibly easy to read. The illustrations are bold and crazy, and there's plenty of space left on each page -- together with suggestions for how to fill it -- so kids can add their own drawings. The books read as hilarious, zippy stories that look a lot like novels but are terrific doodle books as well. The earth is in peril! Aliens are trying to stop it from spinning so that everyone will fall off and they can take over. Mwa-ha-ha-ha! But fear not! The Mad Scientists are building a genius underwater machine to save the day. If only the Aliens would stop zapping them with their Frazzelizers. . . .

"Dr. Cosmic's class of clever monsters at the Mad Scientist Academy solve[s] the greatest challenges in science, [the first of which involves dinosaurs]"--

Inside the epic quest to find life on the water-rich moons at the outer reaches of the solar system Where is the best place to find life beyond Earth? We often look to Mars as the most promising site in our solar system, but recent scientific missions have revealed that some of the most habitable real estate may actually lie farther away. Beneath the frozen crusts of several of the small, ice-covered moons of Jupiter and Saturn lurk vast oceans that may have existed for as long as Earth, and together may contain more than fifty times its total volume of liquid water. Could there be organisms living in their depths? Alien Oceans reveals the science behind the thrilling quest to find out. Kevin Peter Hand is one of today's leading NASA scientists, and his pioneering research has taken him on expeditions around the world. In this captivating account of scientific discovery, he brings together insights from planetary science, biology, and the adventures of scientists like himself to explain how we know that oceans exist within moons of the outer solar system, like Europa, Titan, and Enceladus. He shows how the exploration of Earth's oceans is informing our understanding of the potential habitability of these icy moons, and draws lessons from what we have learned about the origins of life on our own planet to consider how life could arise on these distant worlds. Alien Oceans describes what lies ahead in our search for life in our solar system and beyond, setting the stage for the transformative discoveries that may await us.

Fans of Ada Twist, Scientist will want to join Dr. Cosmic's class of clever monsters as they explore the dark depths of the ocean in the fourth book of the Mad Scientist Academy series. The students in Dr. Cosmic's class take their lessons underwater when they're introduced to his latest invention, the SKWID--a special submarine that explores the ocean and looks like a real giant squid! With the guidance of oceanographer Professor Fathom, the class embarks on an exploration of the deep sea. Their next assignment? Identify the smallest producers and consumers of the ocean. But when a giant whale approaches the SKWID, mistaking it for an actual squid, the students must use their trusted scientific handbooks to find a way to escape the submarine and return to the undersea lab--before they become the whale's lunch! Don't miss more from the Mad Scientist Academy series!--The Dinosaur Disaster, The Weather Disaster, and The Space Disaster. "Dr. Cosmic is plainly a colleague of Ms. Frizzle [of The Magic School Bus], and the mix of pithy banter, tumultuous field-trip mishaps, and science fact is as familiar as it is winning. Fans of the Frizz will be dino-delighted. Mad fun." --Kirkus Reviews, starred review of Mad Scientist Academy: The Dinosaur Disaster

The six members of the Mad Scientists' Club experiment with new projects which include investigating a strange sea monster and the theft of a valuable dinosaur egg.

A whimsical collection of popular science fiction subjects done with a few new twists. In Bad Behavior a citizen of a very strict society gets three years at a prison colony for a bad haircut. In Outlaw in Time a fast gun from the future goes back in time to see how he measures up against the real gunfighters of the Old West. In Colony Ship the fate of Earths last remaining survivors falls into the hands of a group of hippie scientists from the past. Other stories are driven by time traveling con artists, portals into alternate dimensions and some good old fashioned space opera. The stories are short, to the point and fun to read. Fifty zonets for your approval.

Discover the true genius behind history's greatest "madmen". From Dr. Frankenstein to Dr. Jekyll, the image of the mad scientist surrounded by glass vials, copper coils, and electrical apparatus remains a popular fixture. In films and fiction, he's comically misguided, tragically misunderstood, or pathologically evil. But the origins of this stereotype can be found in the sometimes-eccentric real life men and women who challenged our view of the world and broke new scientific frontiers. They Called Me Mad recounts the amazing true stories of such historical luminaries as Archimedes, the calculator of pi and creator of the world's first death ray; Isaac Newton, the world's first great scientist and the last great alchemist; Nikola Tesla, who built the precursors of robots, fluorescent lighting, and particle beam weapons before the turn of the twentieth century-and more.