Matt Turner

Some of the most powerful creatures are also the smallest! The world is full of tiny creepy crawlers, including the indestructible tardigrade, ticks that taste with their toes, and many more tiny-but-tough customers.

With their unique abilities, spiders make cunning traps as well as beautiful webs. This book brings you up close to these brilliant engineers and super-successful predators. Discover some fascinating secrets about the world's most interesting-and deadly-spiders.

Printing words in books originated in China with the invention of movable type. But books aren't the only way we've communicated throughout history. Find out who invented the first radio, which complicated code took 267 years to crack, and how cloth weaving inspired computer programs. Fact-packed text and fun illustrations reveal wacky inventions (a machine that translates your dog's barks!) and wayward predictions (the Internet was supposed to collapse...

Tin cans were first produced in London in 1813. But they had to be opened with a hammer and chisel, because the can opener wasn't invented until 1855! Check out other amazing engineering innovations, such as a popular soft drink originally sold as a "brain tonic," an 18th-century battery called a voltaic pile, and a design from 1596 for the first flushing toilet. Fact-packed text and fun illustrations reveal clever discoveries that changed the world...