This is the only book completely devoted to the popular BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), and one that every biologist with an interest in sequence analysis should learn from.

What happens when you spin 360 times on a chair in under two minutes? Can you safely insert ping-pong balls up your nose? Brain Blast hilariously answers these crazy questions and more! This book of action-packed, silly short stories combines the gross factor with fun facts and engaging stories. Kids will love reading this hilarious collection of brain-twisting stories, combined with totally disgusting illustrations, which is sure to make adults cringe and make kids shriek with laughter!

The little-known world of industrial shows is reconstructed through the record collection of author Steve Young, who has spent twenty years finding the extremely rare souvenir albums as well as tracking down and interviewing the writers and performers.

If you throw up, will it land on your head? Where does your nose go when it runs? This seriously gross, action-packed collection of short stories asks all the icky questions—and gives disgustingly accurate answers! Witty language and wacky illustrations will hook even the most reluctant readers, and have kids gagging for more. Silly situations and fun facts make this book on barf a perfect choice for readers who can’t wait to be grossed out!

San Francisco, 1916. The streets roiling: pitched battles between radical workers and the henchmen of industrial barons, and between a vibrant, largely Italian immigrant anarchist milieu and the forces of state and church. All in the looming shadow of Europe’s raging war, and of a fierce struggle over whether the U.S. should commit its might, and human fodder, to the slaughter in the trenches. Into this maelstrom arrives Kate Jameson, a novice envoy from Washington tasked to secretly investigate the tenor of support for war entry among San Francisco’s business elite. She’s also hoping to glimpse her wayward daughter, Maggie, whose last message to Kate had come from there. And, too, she’s seeking the ghost of her husband Jamey, who fifteen years earlier had landed there upon his return, shattered, from his part in the U.S. occupation of the Philippines. Arriving back in the city at the same moment is Baldo Cavanaugh, a Sicilian-Irish son of San Francisco whose militant beliefs and special skills have led him time and again to the violent extremes of the city’s turbulent history. And who now must confront the doubts and demons of his own character, which he’d sought to escape by fleeing the city three years before. This stunning tale explores how these two seemingly disparate characters become engaged with the city’s and nation’s turmoil, and with the complexities of their related pasts in Boston, Dublin, London, Cuba, and the Philippines. A vivid picture of a city and a moment, the novel brilliantly reveals the explosive admixture of the deeply personal and the deeply political.

On May 18, 1980, people all over the world watched with awe and horror as Mount St. Helens erupted. Fifty-seven people were killed and hundreds of square miles of what had been lush forests and wild rivers were to all appearances destroyed. Ecologists thought they would have to wait years, or even decades, for life to return to the mountain, but when forest scientist Jerry Franklin helicoptered into the blast area a couple of weeks after the eruption, he found small plants bursting through the ash and animals skittering over the ground. Stunned, he realized he and his colleagues had been thinking of the volcano in completely the wrong way. Rather than being a dead zone, the mountain was very much alive. Mount St. Helens has been surprising ecologists ever since, and in After the Blast Eric Wagner takes readers on a fascinating journey through the blast area and beyond. From fireweed to elk, the plants and animals Franklin saw would not just change how ecologists approached the eruption and its landscape, but also prompt them to think in new ways about how life responds in the face of seemingly total devastation.

As an editor of the international scienti?c journal Shock Waves, I was asked whether I might document some of my experience and knowledge in the ?eld of blast waves. I began an outline for a book on the basis of a short course that I had been teaching for several years. I added to the outline, ?lling in details and including recent devel- ments, especially in the subjects of height of burst curves and nonideal explosives. At a recent meeting of the International Symposium on the Interaction of Shock Waves, I was asked to write the book I had said I was working on. As a senior advisor to a group working on computational ?uid dynamics, I found that I was repeating many useful rules and conservation laws as new people came into the group. The transfer of knowledge was hit and miss as questions arose during the normal work day. Although I had developed a short course on blast waves, it was not practical to teach the full course every time a new member was added to the group. This was suf?cient incentive for me to undertake the writing of this book. I cut my work schedule to part time for two years while writing the book. This allowed me to remain heavily involved in ongoing and leading edge work in hydrodynamics while documenting this somewhat historical perspective on blast waves.