Combining history and science, a sweeping look at the smallest substance and the biggest challenges facing people and the planet Four and a half billion years ago, planet Earth was formed from a vast spinning nebula of cosmic dust, the detritus left over from the birth of the sun. Within the next one hundred years, life on Earth would be profoundly changed by heat, drought, fire, and, again, dust. Dust is a legacy of twentieth-century progress and...

Documents the efforts of three scientists to observe the rare total solar eclipse of 1878, citing how the ambitions of James Craig Watson, Maria Mitchell, and Thomas Edison helped America's early pursuits as a scientific superpower.