Books by Daniel Kirk

Daniel Kirk introduced kids to writing in his bestselling Library Mouse series—now he tackles STEAM!ScienceTechnologyEngineeringArtMath When an apple falls on his head, Newton the squirrel begins to wonder how the world works. Listening in on a lesson about the force of gravity, he decides to try his own experiments with the help of his sister, Curie. Learning to make simple machines, they discover that science is for everyone—even squirrels. And when a birds’ nest falls out of a nearby tree, only Newton and Curie, using their inventions and quick scientific thinking, can save the day! This always inquisitive and resourceful pair solves real-life problems and has fun along the way. This latest from bestselling author Daniel Kirk is a light introduction to the principles of STEAM, which is taught in schools.

This book introduces BlastSim - a physics-based simulation platform to model and simulate suicide bombing events. The BlastSim software is designed to test, analyze, and validate the results of different explosive and injury model combinations under various conditions with different sets of parameters, such as explosive and crowd formation characteristics, blockage and human shielding effects, fragmentation and shrapnel, and the bomber's position in 2- and 3-dimensional environments. The suicide bombing event can also be re-created for forensic analysis. The number of fatalities and injured after a suicide bombing event can be predicted using this software with 91% accuracy. The assessment of an explosion's effect on a crowd can lead to better management of disasters, triage of patients, locating blast victims under the debris, development of protective gear, and safe distance recommendations to reduce casualties.