Anna Ploszajski – författare

Join charismatic scientist Anna Ploszajski (expert consultant for DK title What's it Made Of?) as she weaves 100 stories that reveal the essence of human achievement. From organizing ourselves into societies, with justice, education, and governments of many types, to creating art and music that can move us to tears, humans never stop experimenting. We have storytelling and humour; we have learned to build rockets and iPhones, bridges and skyscrapers. Amazing Us is a joyous celebration of everything that makes us amazing.This ambitious book transcends traditional encyclopedias to celebrate our obvious achievements as well as the everyday miracles kids may well take for granted.

Experience the greatest breakthroughs in science, with the DK Science Stories series.Meet Orville and Wilbur Wright: two ordinary brothers with an extraordinary dream. In a world of horse-drawn carriages, the Wrights want to take to the skies. This is the true story of how their creativity, scientific thinking, and sheer determination turned their dream into reality and changed the world.Growing up, the Wrights are captivated by the idea of flight – studying birds and toy helicopters to try to unlock their secrets. When a terrible accident sees Wilbur drop out of school, the brothers set up shop building bicycles. Using their mechanical know-how and inspired by aviation pioneers of the past, the self-taught brothers set out on a seemingly impossible task: to design, build, and fly the world's first aeroplane.

A fresh and entertaining perspective on materials science involving the craftspeople who have built their careers around working with materials such as clay, stone, steel and wool.From atomic structures to theories about magnetic forces, scientific progress has given us a good grasp on the properties of many different materials. However, most scientists cannot measure the temperature of steel just by looking at it, or sculpt stone into all kinds of shapes, or know how it feels to blow up a balloon of glass. Handmade is the story of materials through making and doing. Author and material scientist Anna Ploszajski journeys into the domain of makers and craftspeople to comprehend how the most popular materials really work. Anna has the fresh perspective of someone at the forefront of the field. Each chapter features her accounts of learning from masters of their respective crafts. Along the way, Anna builds a fuller picture of materials and their place in society, as well as how they have intersected with her own life experiences – from land racing on American salt flats to swimming the English Channel. She visits a blacksmith, explores how working with the primal material, clay, has brought about some of the most advanced technologies, and delves down to the atomic scale of glass to find out what makes it ‘glassy’. Handmade affords us a new understanding of the materials we encounter every day and an appreciation for the skills needed to fashion them into objects that are perfectly formed for the jobs they do.